Add Magic to Taste Author Spotlight: Tris Lawrence
Tris Lawrence has been writing since she was a child, filling notebooks with the worlds, dreams, and voices from inside her head. She declared in sixth grade that she wanted to be a writer, promptly started drafting her first novel in seventh grade, and never looked back.
Tris has always been fascinated by the way people work: how their relationships fit together, how they interact socially, how they learn and discover. She has read avidly her entire life, devouring mysteries, romances, science fiction, and fantasy novels, and as an adult still loves all of these genres, as well as reading YA constantly. Her favorite stories center on people who are learning or discovering new things, and coming-of-age stories top that list, which is how the school of Pine Hills University came to be. She wants to share stories of people who are learning how to relate to each other, how to adult, how to college, and how to just be. She hopes to share stories about diverse characters with representation of everything she wishes she could have read growing up, and she hopes that these stories will touch the lives and hearts of those who read them.
When not writing, Tris is a wife, a mother (to two children, a cat, and a dog), a knitter, a system administrator, a black belt in taekwondo, an avid reader, and a music aficionado. Sleep, she claims, is optional.
Story Title: Dreaming of Pines
tags: bipoc character, bisexual character, creature character, dog shifter, first kiss, immortality, polyamorous relationship negotiation, polyamory
Teaser
Mel brought the large mug to where Britt had sunk into the couch, her knees spiked up and shoulders hunched. Josh had moved from the hearth to the couch beside her, his nose resting on her leg. Britt’s fingers tangled in the fur atop his head, clutching him like a favorite stuffed animal.
As soon as Mel set the mug on the oak coffee table, Britt shot upright, reaching for it. She hesitated with her fingertips just shy of touching.
“I really don’t have any money,” Britt said, her gaze dropping.
“And I meant it when I said you don’t have to pay.” Mel stood, half-tempted to sit when Josh whuffed at her. “Give me a minute, and I’ll fetch you something to eat, too.”
Britt lifted the mug, cradling it in both hands as she inhaled the steam. “God, this smells so good. When I was little, my grandmother would sneak me coffee because I wanted to be big, like her. She made it so sweet and chocolatey and I loved every bitter sip.” She inhaled again, then took a cautious taste. Her eyes widened. “How did you—?”
“That’s the magic of the café,” Mel said, pinned by the weight of Britt’s regard. Josh snorted. “Whatever you need,” Mel continued. “We have it for you.”
“Whatever I need.” Britt laughed sourly. “Right.”
Have we whet your appetite? This, and 19 other fantastic fluffy queer stories, can be yours by backing the Add Magic to Taste Kickstarter!
Duck Prints Press LLC is thrilled to announce that the Kickstarter for our first anthology, Add Magic to Taste, is now live!
For Add Magic to Taste, 20 authors have come together to produce new, original short stories uniting four of our absolute favorite themes: queer relationships, fluff, magic, and coffee shops! Our diverse writers have created an even more diverse collection of stories guaranteed to sweeten your coffee and warm your tart.
Love wlw? So do we!
Love mlm? We’ve got you covered!
Love genderqueer characters? Raise those trans, enby, agender, and other flags high!
Love aces? Same, and we don’t (only) mean playing cards!
Love poly relationships? Hey, we’re sharing a brain!
We won’t say this anthology has it all – there are too many identities in the world for us to fit all of them into one anthology of 20 stories – but if you want some queer fluff and happy feelings, you’ve come to the right place. Add Magic to Taste features characters of different races, ethnicities, sexualities, romanticisms, gender identities, religions, and home nations, united by the common theme of finding someone (or more than one someone) to enjoy a muffin and a cuppa with – for today or for a lifetime, romantically or otherwise!
Each story is never-before-published, approximately 5,000 words long, and features each author’s unique take on our theme. Our beautiful digest-size trade paperback book features cover art by Liz Lee Illustrations (@lizleeillustration on Tumblr – with the potential for more art – see our stretch goals!) and formatting by Hermit Prints (@hermitwrites on Tumblr).
Sign up for our mailing list to make sure you always know the latest!
The Kickstarter for Add Magic to Taste will run through Saturday, August 14th at 11 AM EDT – so follow us here, check it out, and if you want to support an awesome group of writers creating an amazing collection of fluffy queer stories – back our project!
We’ve got a lot of amazing merchandise planned for the Kickstarter of our first anthology, Add Magic to Taste, which is an anthology of 20 stories about fluffy queer relationships growing and developing in magical coffee shops, tea shops, bakeries, and the like!
We’ll be posting teasers of our stories and reveals of our planned merchandise over these last few days before the Kickstarter launches on July 15th, with more to come after the campaign goes live, so stay tuned.
How can you get your very own key chain of this precious pixie and delicious donut?
Back our Kickstarter at the $35 level or higher (you can learn more about our backer levels in our FAQ, or wait until the campaign launches on July 15th)
Support our Patreon at the $25/month level (and while lower backer levels won’t get you the key chain, they WILL help support the Press, and some also include other Kickstarter-related extras!)
(you can also buy us a ko-fi or three if you want – it won’t yield key chain but we’ll appreciate it a lot. <3 )
Interested in Add Magic to Taste, Duck Prints Press, and our upcoming Kickstarter? We’d love to have you along for the ride – so give us a follow on social media and keep your eyes open, ‘cause there’s a lot more amazing things to come!
The Kickstarter for Add Magic to Taste launches on July 15th, 2021!
Duck Prints Press will be launching our first Kickstarter on July 15th, 2021, and we cannot possibly be more excited for it! We’ve got a LOT more info to come related to – previews of the merchandise, teasers for the stories, and more – but we wanted to get things started by sharing our amazing cover, which features art by LizLee Illustration (@lizleeillustration, Instagram, Twitter, Personal Site) and graphic design work by @pallasperilous (Twitter, Personal Website), @hermitwrites (Pillowfort, WordPress), and @alessariel.
For Add Magic to Taste, 20 authors have come together to produce all-new, original short stories uniting four of our absolute favorite themes: queer relationships, fluff, magic, and coffee shops! Our diverse writers have created an even more diverse collection of stories guaranteed to sweeten your coffee and warm your tart.
Love wlw? So do we!
Love mlm? We’ve got you covered!
Love genderqueer characters? Raise those trans, enby, agender and other flags high!
Love aces? Same, and we don’t (only) mean playing cards!
Love poly relationships? Oh hey, we’re sharing a brain!
We won’t say this anthology has it all – there are too many identities in the world for us to fit all of them into one anthology of 20 stories – but if you want some queer fluff and happy feelings, you’ve come to the right place. Add Magic to Taste features characters of different races, ethnicities, sexualities, romanticisms, gender identities, religions, and home nations, united by the common theme of finding someone (or more than one someone) to enjoy a muffin and a cuppa with – for today, or for a lifetime, romantically or otherwise!
So, mark your calendars! Follow our Tumblr! Read more about the project! Ask us any questions you have! And save your pennies so you, too, can buy this amazing collection of stories!
The Kickstarter for Add Magic to Taste launches on July 15th, 2021!
With the Kickstarter for “Add Magic to Taste” fast approaching, we’ve begun finalizing aspects of our budget and drafting the copy for the campaign! When we settled down to do this, we made a surprising discovery: Kickstarter counts shipping costs toward the campaign “goal” amount. As we hadn’t planned our budget and goals that way, this required a fairly extensive re-tooling of our budget – though, fortunately, we’d already done all the research on shipping prices, we just hadn’t included that amount when we projected that the funding goal for our Kickstarter would be $4,500 (all prices USD).
We’ve already updated our public projected budget, which you can view here. Note that our projects on sales and costs to produce haven’t changed – the only difference is, we’ve had to up our goal to accommodate the high price of shipping, especially internationally.
Changes we made:
Adding our projected shipping costs to the Kickstarter goal amount increased our goal by $2,200.
Funds were added to enable us to pay merchandise artists; we’re currently estimating the cost at $30 per piece, and we expect to have a more clear idea in the next two weeks.
Originally, packing material was priced from ULine, however we’ve since discovered that ULine donates to some causes we cannot support, and we will be using Valuemailer.com instead; this increased the price of purchasing packing materials by approximately $200. However, on the plus side, we confirmed we can save shipping on some domestic US shipping options by using Flat Rate boxes, and the boxes themselves are also provided by free by USPS, so we’ll be able to modestly reduce costs in that regard.
Including the cost of shipping in our goals means that Kickstarter will withdraw their fees from shipping costs (presumably why it’s set up this way, when it didn’t used to be), so also increased the fees we’ll owe them by around $100.
All in all, these changes increased our minimum goal on Kickstarter from $4,500 to $7,000, and increased all our projected stretch goals a commensurate amount.We’ve also updated our FAQ as we transition from the “writing” stage of anthology production to the “sales” stage of anthology production, and it includes the latest information on our projected backer levels and more! You can read all about it here.
Let us know if you have any suggestions, comments, or questions!
Duck Prints Press is thrilled to share more information about the 20 authors who have been selected to contribute to Add Magic to Taste! Read on…
Theresa Alef
I’m a pediatric occupational therapist in the Southwest USA, and my pronouns are she/her. Writing has been my first love since I was old enough to string words together, but this will be my very first fictional publication! I have a special place in my heart for a lot of fandoms, but Marvel is definitely my favorite—specifically, the Clint Barton/Bucky Barnes ship. I spend a lot of my free time writing, but when I’m not at the computer, I like to go hiking in the desert, spend time with friends and family, and read books.
I.A. Ashcroft
A writer and web development freelancer, I. A. Ashcroft lives in the mountains of Colorado alongside family and his constant feline companion, Potato. Ashcroft has published two original sci-fi/fantasy novels, is hard at work on the third in the series, and has been writing for fandoms for over a decade, loving stories that emphasize unlikely bonds, mythology, magic, and hope in the darkness. In between storytelling efforts, he enjoys cooking, fiddling with technology projects, and rolling dice with friends while wearing funny hats.
Jessie, pen name Jessica Black, fandom name alocalband, decided she wanted to be a writer at the age of seven and hasn’t looked back since. With a degree in screenwriting, she spent the majority of her career working on assorted projects in Hollywood, New York, and Puerto Rico. Lately, however, she’s settled down to a quieter life with her cat, her library, and a constantly filling notebook of new ideas. Hobbies include reading, hiking, gaming, knitting, and going to hockey games.
Marianne is a 25-year-old grad student, currently striving to earn their PhD in biology. In their copious spare time, they enjoy reading, writing, and narrating. Though publishing their works has been a persistent dream since early childhood, participating in this anthology is their first foray away from the relative anonymity and ease of fanfiction. Happiest outdoors, they take inspiration from nature and are always planning a next adventure in the wild places (with maybe an audiobook or two).
Willa Blythe
Willa Blythe (she/her) started talking late and telling stories early, and she hasn’t stopped doing either of those things since. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Playwriting and a Master’s in Literature, and she still learned most everything she knows about writing from reading someone else’s. She and her pre-teen son Jack are a dynamic duo when it comes to road trip karaoke and dinner table roleplay, but disagree about minor matters like homework and chores and whether or not you must do those things. When not working at her day job, teaching, parenting, trying to convince herself to write, or talking on the phone for hours to the three people in her life who are still into talking on the phone, Willa enjoys picking up new hobbies that she’ll pursue to excess for two and a half months; downloading 67 mods for a video game she’ll play 4 hours of before abandoning for three years; reading halves and thirds and quarters of books; and playing a lot of Dungeons & Dragons with friends online. She’s still waiting for the lady knight of her dreams to come pick her up from this really boring tower—but at least the view is pretty sweet. Her contribution to Add Magic to Taste will be Willa’s first publication, and she’s both grateful and excited for this opportunity to bring a bit of magic to the mundane.
Scarlett Gale is the author of His Secret Illuminations. Long ago, under another name, she was the co-author of Needles and Artifice (Cooperative Press; 2012), featuring a rollicking romantic steampunk adventure novella and associated knitting patterns, of which she also designed several. She writes and produces fringe theatre plays based on B-movies, such as Bodacious Barbarian Babes vs. The Indigo Empress and Showgirls of Beast Island. She is a co-producer of the Alison-Bechdel-approved Bechdel Test Burlesque, which in 2017 was included in the Women and Gender Studies curriculum at the University of Oregon. She lives in Seattle with her wife where she gardens, knits, reads, and drinks warm beverages. Unsurprisingly, she also has cats.
When Lacey isn’t dreaming of the stars or magical worlds, she can be found stomping around in the wild areas of Northern Oregon with her wife and son, or sipping on a coffee with her trusty notebook and fountain pens. Her writing journey began in the Star Trek Voyager fandom and has continued for over two decades. At the moment, she’s plugging away at her first novel—a world that’s taken twenty years to come to life. Lacey is eager to continue sharing diverse stories set in dark, but hopeful worlds.
Ashley, pen name A.L. Heard, fandom name jhoom, is a 34 year old teacher, writer, and mother of two little boys. She’s been writing fanworks since she discovered ff.net back in her middle school days; the platform has changed and the writing’s improved, but Ashley ultimately still spends her free time writing about characters she adores in worlds she’d like to explore. Her first novel, Hockey Bois, was published in 2021. In between writing projects, she works as a language teacher in the Pittsburgh area, plays hockey, and plays trains with her sons.
Starry, pen name T.S. Knight, is a New England-based writer of original fiction, fanfiction, and plays. “Add Magic to Taste” will be her first published short story. When not writing or beta reading, she spends time diving into history, wandering through art museums, and cooking food for the people she loves. An avid kayaker and helicopter cat mom, she loves to create and read queer stories most of all.
Tris Lawrence has been writing since she was a child, filling notebooks with the worlds, dreams, and voices from inside her head. She declared in sixth grade that she wanted to be a writer, promptly started drafting her first novel in seventh grade, and never looked back.
Tris has always been fascinated by the way people work: how their relationships fit together, how they work socially, how they learn and discover. She has read avidly her entire life, devouring mysteries, romance, science fiction, and fantasy novels, and as an adult still loves all of these genres, as well as reading YA constantly. Her favorite stories center around people who are learning or discovering new things, and coming-of-age stories top that list, which is how the school of Pine Hills University came to be. She wants to share stories of people who are learning how to relate to each other, how to adult, how to college, and how to just be. She hopes to share stories about diverse characters with representation of everything she wishes she could have read growing up, and she hopes that these stories will touch the lives and hearts of those who read them.
When not writing, Tris is a wife, a mother (to two children, a cat, and a dog), a knitter, a system administrator, a black belt in taekwondo, an avid reader and obsessive writer, and a music aficionado. Sleep, she claims, is optional.
Lex T. Lindsay likes cats, tats, and cool hats. When she isn’t shaking words loose or yelling about Captain America, she can often be found lurking in the woods. More stories in CONSTRAINT 280 (Microverses) and CLOCKWORK, CURSES AND COAL (World Weaver Press). Forthcoming in UPON A TWICE TIME (Air and Nothingness Press). Occasional Tweets @LexTLindsay.
Beth Lumen (she/her/hers) has been writing both fan fiction and original fiction forever, and she is thrilled to have the opportunity to contribute to this anthology as her first published work. Her first big fandom was Harry Potter in the mid-2000s where she met many wonderful people who remain her friends to this day. She’s written in various book and TV fandoms since then, most recently for queer contemporary novels. In addition to writing and reading happy gay love stories, Beth loves volleyball, traveling, hiking, and making a mess in the kitchen. She lives in St. Paul, MN with her lovely partner and the two best dogs.
Kristi Mae
Kristi has been daydreaming on road trips and scrawling stories on napkins since she was very small. In 2020, she discovered the wonderfully queer and neurodivergent world of fandom and has never looked back. She currently enjoys writing darkfic for the Magnus Archives podcast and is very happy for her first publishing opportunity with Duck Prints Press.
When not writing, you can find her napping, playing video games, dabbling in bookbinding projects, or occasionally engaging in her actual responsibilities as a STEM doctoral student in Canada.
Puck Malamud
Puck Malamud (pronouns: ve/ver/vis/verself or they/them/theirs/themself) is a library worker, writer, and poet who has lived in a variety of large East Coast US cities since immigrating from Ukraine in the 1990s. Ve is a co-author of a chapter on being LGBTQ in the library profession, and author and co-author of multiple fics in various fandoms, though primarily The Untamed and Mo Dao Zu Shi. When not desperately trying to keep up with vis Libby holds, Puck can be found practicing dance, hanging out in various Slacks and Discords, and shitposting on Tumblr.
Maggie Page lives in Texas with family, including her incorrigibly clumsy mom with a green thumb, two silly dogs who are also mother and daughter, and a fierce feline hunter. Maggie has previously published several poems and a piece of flash fiction with collegiate and independent journals.
When not indulging the urge to write, Maggie enjoys music, traveling, camping, dabbling in various art forms, principally watercolor and graphic making, and torturing her loved ones with her ruthless board game victories.
Alex Ransom
Alex Ransom is a longtime fan writer and translator recently expanding into original fiction. Her favorite trope, as both reader and writer, is “Earn Your Happy Ending,” in which characters fight through perhaps inordinate amounts of difficulty to come out happier and more content on the other side. She is especially interested in the intersection between social circumstances, personal history, and the formation and maintenance of identity. Her favorite genres are space opera, fantasy, queer romance, and poetry.
As a child, Alex thought everything was better if it was more complicated and that the best answer to a yes or no question was usually “both”. Consequently, today she is bi/pansexual, trans/nonbinary, has worked a variety of jobs, and has three degrees in completely unrelated fields. When she isn’t writing or doomscrolling on the internet, she likes to travel, hike, and build marginally functional furniture. She lives outside Boston, Massachusetts, with her spouse and adult daughter.
Em Rowntree
Em Rowntree’s first foray into the world of writing was with a story called The Magic Land that featured a unicorn and a flying carpet the size of a country, and they’ve been chasing that high ever since. They’ve been sharing their writing online for almost seven years, and have had poems and short stories published in anthologies. They live in the UK.
Shea Sullivan is a life-long writer living in upstate New York. As a late-blooming queer person, she enjoys writing about complex characters coming into themselves and finding comfort in being exactly who they are.
Shea’s day jobs in computer programming and middle management have molded her into the patient, sarcastic, big-hearted, frustrated human she is today, but it’s what she does outside the 9-5 that really excites her. When she’s not writing, she can be found painting, napping, making quilts, watching documentaries, and trying not to adopt more animals, usually with a cup of tea in hand.
Florence Vale
Florence is a Norwegian picture book author and fanfic enthusiast. Her current obsessions include Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The Magnus Archives, and just about any actual play podcast she can get her hands on. In addition to Add Magic to Taste and her Archive of Our Own account, you can find her writing in the original zines Mansion of Fears and Carpe Noctem.
Claire Houck (she/they/he), pen name Nina Waters, fandom name unforth, is the founder and sole proprietor of Duck Prints Press LLC. She is queer, 38 years old, married to the lovely Lisa, and a mother of two. Claire has been writing fanfiction since the young age of seven, when she penned (well, two-finger typed and printed dot matrix) the timeless classic “the story of my littl ponies and the glob.” Since then, her spelling, grammar and prose have improved immensely. She has written over two hundred short stories, a number of novellas, and 16 novels—some original, some fanfiction—including “A Glimmer of Hope,” which was successfully Kickstarted and self-published in fall, 2016. She’s also had two short stories published. Before she became a full-time writer, Claire had a career as a professional grant writer and program evaluator, providing consultation services for the New York City Department of Education and other non-profit education organizations.
Oh, wow, is it already April 7th? Today – in just a few minutes after this is posted! – we’ll be sending out all our acceptance and rejection letters. We wanted to share a little bit of information publicly as part of this process, so that everyone understands what the possible applicant outcomes are – especially since this changed a bit from how we originally envisioned it.
Our original plan was that there’d be only two categories of applicants – the 20 authors accepted into Add Magic to Taste and however many other authors who weren’t accepted, end of story. However, that plan was made before we knew we’d get over 100 applicants. You may recall, there was a FAQ question in which we indicated that if we didn’t get 20 applicants, we’d keep applications open longer until we had that minimum. That FAQ item was there because we genuinely thought that was a possibility. Meanwhile, we were using 100 applications as our “long shot worst-but-best case scenario” number (worst because it would mean a lot of work for us, best because !zomg! so much interest is amazing).
Needless to say, all ya’ll’s enthusiasm blew us out of the water in the best possible way. As a result, we actually ended up with four categories of applicants. These categories map roughly to the ratings people received on their rubrics. These categories are:
1. The 20 highest-rated authors have been accepted to Add Magic to Taste! An announcement of who they are is pending all 20 accepting our invitation. And also: omg ya’ll. Their stories were so good. So so so good.
2. The authors rated 21 to 40 are invited to join our Discord, and we are in the process of planning a second anthology that we will encourage them to contribute to. There will not be an open call for applicants for this second anthology. It will only be available to our “close but no cigar” applicants to Add Magic to Taste, and the theme will be “transformative works” of a work in the public domain – there’s currently a survey open to our Patrons so that they can decide what the transformed work will be but, spoilers, the current leader is “something by Shakespeare” and the most likely candidates are Much Ado About Nothing of Midsummer Night’s Dream. Participation in this anthology is optional, and no one can contribute to both it and Add Magic to Taste. We will have more information about the details on this anthology (such as schedule, pay scale, finalized theme, and expected launch and merch) sometime next week. To be clear: all the transformations will be hella queer. We are actually considering titling the anthology either “Queering (name of work)” or “(name of work) (but Make it Queer)” just so there’s no doubt.
3. Among the remaining 62 applicants, there were some works that impressed us in one regard or another. These works tended to have issues in one or two rubric categories (such as the writing sample was a vignette instead of a story, or the ideas were fantastic but the grammar was lacking). There are 24 people in this category; they are being invited to our Discord so that they can get to know us and we can get to know them, and we can offer mentoring opportunities, betaing chances, and encouragement for their writing.
4. Finally, the remaining 38 individuals – we’re so glad you applied, but we don’t think you’re “there” yet. Your work isn’t quite close enough to “publication ready” for us to feel that a little extra mentoring/support will make the difference. This doesn’t mean we thought your work was bad. Every single applicant did something right. Truly. We were amazed by the hard work everyone did on these stories. For the people in this last category – we strongly encourage you to keep improving your writing, try to find a good editor and/or beta, learn to read your own work critically, study stories you found successful and try to emulate them, and take other approaches that will help improve your writing – and we hope you’ll apply again in the future. We’d love to see your progress!
Also, in the interest of full disclosure, we will say publicly: there were seven people involved in the process of anonymizing and rating these stories. (unforth, jhoom, alessariel, adaille, lasafara, Foop, and ramblingandpie). You can request your rubric by replying to the e-mail you receive, but the rubrics are anonymized and you will not know who rated you.
In addition, five of the seven people who participated in rating the stories were also applicants (unforth, jhoom, adaille, lasafara, and ramblingandpie). Two of us were accepted (unforth and jhoom will be contributors to Add Magic to Taste) and three of us were not. This matches the expected statistics for the entire applicant pool, where roughly 40% of applicants were either accepted to Add Magic to Taste or invited to the untitled-but-planned second anthology. Our 5 applications were also randomized, and in a couple instances had to be reassigned (for example, when I – unforth – opened a particular document, I recognized within the first paragraph that it was written by my wife, ramblingandpie, and so it was reassigned. It also turned out that Alessariel recognized my story, and Foop had beta-read jhoom’s). So – we treated our own group the exact same as we treated ya’ll’s, and we’re actually quite proud that we can say – look, the playing field was even, we did everything we could to keep this fair, just look at our own outcomes for proof.
To all 102 applicants, we wanted to say: in the end, we want to work with people who want to work with us. That core desire trumps rubric ratings, grammar, writing quality, and everything. As long as you want to write, and want to be published, are open to constructive criticism, and are working to improve – we are confident that every single person who applied to Add Magic to Taste could, someday, find a home publishing with Duck Prints Press.
Thank you all so much for your interest, support, encouragement, and willingness to share your creativity. We truly had a blast reading everyone’s submissions (and we each gained at least one new fandom after reading your fic – mine was Red White and Royal Blue, which I bought and read right after I finished reviewing your stories). This process has been incredibly, inspiring, and we are so excited to see what’s to come and read the work that everyone creates as part of Add Magic to Taste and our other future projects.
We look forward to moving forward with all of you at our sides!
Hey everyone! We’ve been working very hard to get all the applications reviewed, and we’re getting close – we’re definitely on track to have e-mails go out on April 7th as planned, and may (no promises!) be able to get them out a couple days early (but April 5th is absolutely the earliest possible date). We’ve fully rated 89 out of 102 stories, and here’s what we can say so far:
1. Ya’ll did amazing
2. No like seriously holy crap we are blown away.
3. In fact, we are so blown away that, in addition to inviting the top 20 rated authors to contribute to Add Magic to Taste, we’ve decided we’ll invite the next 20 highest rated authors to our Discord and also ask if they’d like contribute to a different anthology (entirely optional!) that we’re currently frantically planning…we don’t know the details of length, payment, etc., yet, but it’ll be “Legal Fanfiction” – transformative works based on an existing work in the Public Domain (current leading candidates are something by Jane Austen, something by Shakespeare, or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – we’ll be inviting all our Patrons to vote, so if you’d like a say, maybe back us!). Participation will be optional to those who receive the invites, and people who accept will no longer be eligible to pinch hit for Add Magic to Taste. More details pending!
4. We also noticed that some of us were kinder graders and some of us were stricter, so we added a step to our review process – instead of just taking each person’s three scores, averaging them, and et voila, we’re done, we decided to statistically standardize each reviewer’s scores. This adjusts everyone to the same scale (which is from roughly -3 to roughly +3, with 0 as average) to ensure that people who got stricter reviewers weren’t unfairly penalized and people who got kinder reviewers weren’t unfairly advantaged. We’re sharing about this in the interest of continued transparency, and for people who request their rubrics after acceptances and rejections are sent out, we’ll indicate both your raw scores and your statistically standardized scores.
We’re really excited to be winding down this process, and we expect to have more information to share about the Legal Fanfiction Anthology and our preliminary list of authors accepted to Add Magic to Taste in about a week!
We are no longer accepting applications for our first Anthology Add Magic to Taste.
From March 1st through March 15th, while applications were open, we received an astonishing 102 applications. We will be reviewing applicant writing samples over the next few weeks, and will contact our selected authors and announce a preliminary list of writers we’ll be working with by April 7th, 2021.
Thank you to everyone for your interest! Please keep following us to learn more as we move forward with making Add Magic to Taste a reality!
CALLING: FANFICTION AUTHORS WHO DREAM OF PUBLISHING ORIGINAL FICTION!
Duck Prints Press LLC is thrilled to announce that the author application for our first anthology, Add Magic to Taste, are now open!
Times are tough and we thought that what the world really needed were some light-hearted stories to make everyone smile. So, we picked themes that never fail to make us smile! The stories for this anthology will incorporate these themes:
Setting: Modern worlds with magic
Relationships: Queer love stories
Locale: Coffee shops, bakeries, tea shops, or the like
Trope: FLUFF!
This post is not a call for story submissions! Like a fandom zine, we’re asking prospective authors to submit writing samples. We’ll select authors based on these samples, and the chosen authors will have creative license to create a story of their choice provided it includes the four required story elements. You must write and post fanfiction to apply to this anthology, but all stories in Add Magic to Taste must be original!
If you want to be one of our authors, this is your moment – read more about the anthology and, if you’re interested, send in an application!
