The Wordsmith's Forge

Here is my card for the Flower Fest Bingo over in allbingo. The fest runs from April 1-30. It includes a Flower Fest Meet and Greet. (See all my 2026 bingo cards.)

If you'd like to sponsor a particular square, especially if you have an idea for what character, series, or situation it would fit -- talk to me and we'll work something out. I've had a few requests for this and the results have been awesome so far. This is a good opportunity for those of you with favorites that don't always mesh well with the themes of my monthly projects. I may still post some of the fills for free, because I'm using this to attract new readers; but if it brings in money, that means I can do more of it. That's part of why I'm crossing some of the bingo prompts with other projects, such as the Poetry Fishbowl.

Underlined prompts have been filled.


FLOWER FEST BINGO CARD

Request	Riot	Big Smile	Edge of Enchantment	Flaming Flag
Landscape	Avalanche	Match	Black Hero	Freesia
Escape	Crocus	WILD CARD	Zinnia	Extravaganza
Teal	Moonlight Sensation	Weatherproof	Lilac	Changing Colors
Exception	Daydream	Oceanspray	Devil's Tongue	Decoy

Our theme for this session was "anything goes." I wrote from 12:45 PM to 2:30 AM, so about 11 hours 45 minutes, accounting for breaks. I wrote 4 poems on Tuesday plus 6 later in the week.

Participation was down a bit, with 10 comments on LiveJournal and another 23 on Dreamwidth. A total of 10 people sent prompts. There was one new prompter, roughentumble.


Read Some Poetry!
The following poems from the March 17, 2026 Poetry Fishbowl have been posted:
"Become for Us a Highway"
"The Bridge of Mist"
"A Darkness in the Sky"
"A Generous Impulse"
"Who Once Knew Better Words"


Buy some poetry!
If you plan to sponsor some poetry but haven't made up your mind yet, see the unsold poetry list from March 17. That includes the title, length, price, and the original thumbnail description for the poems still available.


This session's donors include: janetmiles and librarygeek. All sponsored poems from this fishbowl have been posted. There are 0 tallies toward a bonus fishbowl.


The Poetry Fishbowl has a landing page.

This is an advance announcement for the Tuesday, April 7, 2026 Poetry Fishbowl. This time the theme will be "I am SO done with this!" I'll be soliciting ideas for  activists, rebels, Women Who Run with the Saberteeth, explorers, traitors, exes, people who escape domestic violence, refugees, runaway youth, escaped slaves or other captives, housemates, siblings, parents, teachers, clergy, leaders, superheroes, supervillains, teammates, alien or fantasy species, failure analysts, ethicists, stray or feral animals, other people who get into untenable situations, protesting, planning, throwing in the towel, escaping, running like someone left the gate open, adventuring, hitchhiking, quitting school, divorcing, disowning, betraying, teaching, leaving your comfort zone, discovering things, conducting experiments, observation changing experiments, troubleshooting, improvising, adapting, cleaning up messes, cooperating, bartering, taking over in an emergency, saving the day, discovering yourself, studying others, testing boundaries, coming of age, learning what you can (and can't) do, sharing, preparing for the worst, expecting the unexpected, fixing what's broke, upsetting the status quo, changing the world, accomplishing the impossible, recovering from setbacks, returning home, trails, sailing ships, campervans or RVs, distant lands, the forest primeval, prehistory, liminal zones, schools, homeless shelters, hotels, churches, sharehouses, campfires, laboratories, supervillain lairs, makerspaces, nonhuman accommodations and adaptations, stores, farmer's markets, starships, alien planets, magical lands, foreign dimensions, other places where the intolerable happens, unhappy relationships, protest rallies, slavery or captivity, locks or chains, travel mishaps, sudden surprises, the buck stops here, trial and error, weird food, secret ingredients, supplements that turn out to be metagenic, intercultural entanglements, asking for help and getting it, enemies to friends/lovers, interdimensional travel, Get a Life Program, lab conditions are not field conditions, superpower manifestation, the end of where your framework actually applies, ethics, innovation, problems that can't be solved by hitting, teamwork, found family, complementary strengths and weaknesses, personal growth, and poetic forms in particular.

Among my more relevant series for the main theme:

An Army of One is developing its own neurovariant culture after rebelling against the Galactic Arms.

The Bear Tunnels introduces modern principles to people in the past.

A Conflagration of Dragons has the Six Races (plus the dragons) who all have different cultures and climates.  This often poses challenges for the refugees.

Coracle Shores is about leaving a distressed world for somewhere better.

The Daughters of the Apocalypse has people trying to find enough resources to survive, when former cities are unsafe.

The Moon Door explores a women's chronic pain group and lycanthropy.

Not Quite Kansas deals with demons and angels, also characters dumped out of their original worlds.

The Ocracies has a wide variety of countries crammed together, each with a totally different government.  Sometimes people leave their homeland to find something they like better.

One God's Story of Mid-Life Crisis follows Shaeth as he works on becoming the God of Drunks after quitting as the God of Evili.

Path of the Paladins includes a few characters who have walked away from unbearable situations, like Johan.

Peculiar Obligations combines Quakers and pirates, the latter of whom are well versed in weighing anchor.

Polychrome Heroics has ordinary humans, supernaries, blue-plate specials, superheroes, supervillains, primal and animal soups all trying to get along and figure out how to make a functional society.  The supervillains are the most likely to cut and run from a bad situation.

Schrodinger's Heroes has a lot of situations that people want to get away from including Chris avoiding some of his relatives, Morgan moving to a new dimension, and dimensions that just suck for everyone.

The Wandering is a series about fantasy time travel where people loop back within their own lifespan.

Or you can ask for something new.

Linkbacks reveal a verse of any open linkback poem.

If you're interested, mark the date on your calendar, and please hold actual prompts until the "Poetry Fishbowl Open" post next week. (If you're not available that day, or you live in a time zone that makes it hard to reach me, you can leave advance prompts. I am now.) Meanwhile, if you want to help with promotion, please feel free to link back here or repost this on your blog.

( New to the fishbowl? Read all about it! )

This is a prayer to Baba Yaga; this is a prayer of resistance.


This is a prayer for Baba Yaga. This is a prayer for Resistance.

This is a prayer for the magic of chicken feet, the heat of old hates, the way old bones hurt. This is a prayer for Resistance.

The following poems from the March 3, 2026 Poetry Fishbowl are currently available. Poems may be sponsored via PayPal -- there's a permanent donation button on my Dreamwidth profile page -- or you can write to me and discuss other methods. There are still verses left in the linkback poems "Delight in Another," "A Sense of Weather Changes," "Ouroboros Insects," "The Loving Embrace of Night," "Generations of Cooks Past," "Homefree and Clear, " "One Bite at a Time," "Stars and Diamonds," "Mishpocha," "Changing Your Nature," and "Besa."


"An Expression That Crosses Boundaries"
Story Date: Saturday, July 9, 2016
Summary: Shiv and Pain's Gray make treats to celebrate Rutledge setting up a teleport hub, and they visit Kardal at the Syrian Foods truck.
236 lines, Buy It Now = $118

Shiv had heard that Rutledge
was going to get a teleport hub.


"Foraging Forever"
Summary: Refugees of the Fall struggle to find enough food and cope with cultural differences.
195 lines, Buy It Now = $98

If there was one thing
they all had in common
after the Fall, it was hunger.


"Walnut Park"
Story Date: Monday, June 6, 2016
Summary: Boss Blaster looks at an empty lot and imagines a food truck park.
505 lines, Buy It Now = $253

Just after breakfast,
Boss Blaster's phone rang.

Checking the screen, he saw
that it was Farrah Van Andel,
his usual real estate agent.

This poem came out of the March 17, 2026 Bonus Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from chanter1944. It also fills the "Sewing" square in my 3-1-26 card for the National Crafting Month Bingo fest. This poem has been sponsored by janetmiles. It belongs to the Iron Horses thread of the Polychrome Heroics series.

( Read more... )

This poem came out of the March 17, 2026 Bonus Fishbowl. It was inspired by prompts from alatefeline and janetmiles. It also fills the "WILD CARD: Paint" square in my 3-1-26 card for the National Crafting Month Bingo fest. This poem has been sponsored by janetmiles. It belongs to the series Feathered Nests.

( Read more... )

dialecticdreamer  is hosting Feathering the Nest.  This one is always about fluff and comfort.  Leave prompts, get ficlets!

If you're still shopping the Bonus Fishbowl, now's the time to make your selections.  I've already finished 7 poems besides the freebie, and I've still got a couple left to do. 

The Poetry Fishbowl is now CLOSED. Thank you for your time and attention. Please keep an eye on this page as I am still writing.

Starting now, the Poetry Fishbowl is open! Today's theme is "anything goes." I will be checking this page periodically throughout the day. When people make suggestions, I'll pick some and weave them together into a poem ... and then another ... and so on. I'm hoping to get a lot of ideas and a lot of poems.

Stuck for ideas? You can find prompts by ...
* browsing planned poems for Aquariana and the Maldives, The Big One, Broken Angels, Calliope and Vagary, Officer Pink and Turq, Pips and Joshua, or Shiv. (Some of these I've already done, so they're not all up to date, but others I haven't done yet.)
* browsing my Serial Poetry page for favorite threads or characters.
* browsing series with recently created landing pages: Artists of Destruction, Coracle Shores, Crystal Wood, Strike of the Thunderbirds, The Wandering (on the Serial Poetry page), Iron Horses, Peculiar Obligations, Not Quite Kansas.
* browsing my QUILTBAG list, Romantic Orientations in My Characters, Sexual Orientations in My Characters, Gender Identities in My Characters, or My Characters with Disabilities for favorites.
* naming a poetic form you'd like to see written.
* picking a prompt from my current bingo cards: National Crafting Month Bingo 3-1-26
* picking some from the Bingo Generator prompt lists.
* looking up fun tropes on Fanlore.
* choosing an unusual word.
* plugging a favorite topic into your search engine and choosing a picture that looks interesting.
* anything short. I could especially use short poems today as other prompts are likely to run long.
* standalone ideas, if you're a fan of that rather than series.

What Is a Poetry Fishbowl?

Writing is usually considered a solitary pursuit. One exception to this is a fascinating exercise called a "fishbowl." This has various forms, but all of them basically involve some kind of writing in public, usually with interaction between author and audience. A famous example is Harlan Ellison's series of "stories under glass" in which he sits in a bookstore window and writes a new story based on an idea that someone gives him. Writing classes sometimes include a version where students watch each other write, often with students calling out suggestions which are chalked up on the blackboard for those writing to use as inspiration.

In this online version of a Poetry Fishbowl, I begin by setting a theme; today's theme is "anything goes." I invite people to suggest characters, settings, and other things of any type. Then I use those prompts as inspiration for writing poems.

( New to the fishbowl? Read all about it! )