rthstewart: (Default)
rthstewart ([personal profile] rthstewart) wrote2021-02-10 03:57 pm

Three Sentence Ficathon Part 2


THE 2021 3 SENTENCE FICATHON IS NOW CLOSED TO NEW PROMPTS!

THIS IS THE NEW POST FOR PART 2 OF THE 3 SENTENCE FICATHON -- ALL NEW PROMPTS SHOULD BE POSTED HERE
You may continue to fill prompts (but not leave new ones) at the original Post 1 here.

[personal profile] conuly 's unclaimed prompt list here

Thank you all for participating! We had a rush of prompts at the end so be sure to check it out and if you want someone to fill something in particular, and assuming they don't mind being contacted (I know I  don't!), be sure to let them know!






Welcome to the Three Sentence Ficathon!
2 Feb. 2021 See important edit below regarding where to find unfilled prompts.


What is the 3 Sentence Ficathon?
This is an open exchange where you answer a prompt with a fic consisting of only three sentences. It's open to all fandoms and you can post and fill as many prompts as you like, as many times as you want.

What do I do first?
You can start 3SF by posting prompts! When posting a prompt please format it this way:

fandom, character(s), prompt word/sentence.

Only one prompt per comment please. So, for example,

Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi, I don't like sand."

Open ended and anthropomorphic fills are popular too, such as:

Any, Any, "I don't like sand."

or

Earth geography, sand, "I don't like humans very much, either."

What happens after that?
You answer other posters' prompts in three sentences (or more if you can't stop yourself) and fill as many prompts as you want, as many times as you wish. If you see that a prompt you loved has already been filled, go ahead and fill it again! Multiple fills of the same prompt are allowed and even encouraged! (We get really fun stories going this way).

Can I still post if I need more than 3 sentences? Or should I just abuse grammar in ways the English language never contemplated?
Yes. Yes.

But I'm not a member of Dreamwidth
No problem. You can comment anonymously or through open ID

I'm really overwhelmed by all the prompts and how much there is and how fast it goes. I can't read 1,000 prompts and fills. It's too much.
I hear this a lot and it keeps a lot of people from participating. The 3SF is big and it moves fast, especially at first.
I get overwhelmed, too, and I'm hosting the thing. With 2020 and 2021 sucking so badly you don't want something that's supposed to be fun cause you anxiety. I have a couple of suggestions for managing the 3SF volume.
  • First, really, you don't have to read every prompt and fill on every page. You can start at the last page of this and just go forward, or back a page or two. It's fine.
  • You can come and go as time and energy allow, you don't have to participate the whole time, and it drops off quite a bit by mid-February.
  • Even after the 3SF and new prompting end, people fill prompts all year long.
  • You can fill an already filled prompt and you can can leave a prompt that's already been prompted before. People do it all the time.
Always make sure you're looking at top-level comments only, not threaded. That helps a lot. Your screen should look like this.




But shouldn't I read everything to see if someone already prompted the same prompt I want to leave if someone already filled it?

No. Prompt as many times as you want, as much as you want. It doesn't matter if someone prompted the exact same prompt. Go ahead and prompt again!

I left a prompt and no one filled it. Can I prompt it again?
Absolutely!

Can I spread the word?
Yes, please. I generally fail at creating banners and embed codes but if you create one and make it really idiot-proof, I might be able to post and share it. Feel free to cross-post this entry. If you create your own banners or icons, let me know and I'll share!
Please share the 3SF with your followers, friends, and any channels and comms you are active on. I'll post on fandom calendar, Tumblr, and Twitter, but I don't have many connections in other spaces such as Discord.


How long will it go?

The 3SF closes to new prompts on February 28, 2021. The entry stays open permanently and people post fills all year long.

Are there any rules about cross-posting?
Nope, you can post wherever you want, whenever you want. A lot of folks collected their responses together and posted them on AO3 under the 3 sentence fiction tag. 3SFs are a terrific prompt for remixes and could be helpful for Yuletide bears, too.

What about spoilers, content and archive warnings, triggers, pairings, ratings, tags, and squick?
I thought a lot about this. It boils down to reader beware. In my experience, this typically gets too big, moves too fast, and the stories are too short for content warnings and ratings to even apply. It is too big for me to moderate in this way. You should assume spoilers are fair game and that the initial poster and the responder have opted to use no content warnings or tags. This means AO3 content warnings for dubcon, violence, canon character death, underage, etc. COULD be present. I've found personally that I can skim and scroll by stuff that, from the prompt, I can tell isn't my favorite flavor of delicious cake. Use your best judgment and be prepared to skip over things that aren't your thing. In this format, the obligation is on you, the reader, to protect yourself from triggering content.
Some posters do include warnings and spoiler tags in subject lines or include spoiler space, but they don't have to do so.

Why is 3SF split among several posts? That seems confusing.
It is confusing and we always lose momentum once we have to move to a second post. The reason is because at 5,000 comments to a single post, DW installs a human test CAPTCHA, which is a pain for users. So, once this entry gets to the upper 4,000 comments, I open a new post. If you've been waiting until things slow down to participate, when we open a second post is often a good place to join.

If I have questions, what do I do?

I'm rthstewart everywhere, here, Twitter, Tumblr, gmail and AO3.

A special thank you to [personal profile] conuly .
Last year, Conuly started logging all unfilled prompts.
This year's (2021) unfilled prompts are here.
Last year's (2020) unfilled prompts are here.
Conuly does this just because she is an awesome person but should you want to write her fic in thanks, you can find a birthday wish list here.

Here is the 3SF 2021 Friending Meme to show of your new DW account.

Here, have some icons and banners and let me know if you've created your own!








text box you can try to cut and paste

















(Anonymous) 2021-02-12 08:19 am (UTC)(link)
Any, any, botanical garden
sholio: (Torchwood-Owen)

Torchwood, alien plants

[personal profile] sholio 2021-02-16 10:32 am (UTC)(link)
Owen can't remember exactly how the alien plant garden in the Hub got started. All he remembers is that it started out in one of the unused server closets, over Tosh's objection, and sort of spread out from there, until it occupies a significant portion of one of the balconies.

They keep getting alien plants through the Rift, is the thing, and they can't exactly plant them outside where they're going to either wreak havoc on the ecosystem, or die (best-case scenario). The worst-case scenario, obviously, is a plant turning out to have spores that send people into a murderous rage or producing fruits that explode and take out half of Cardiff.

They could just throw the plants in the trash, it's true, but it feels kind of weird, and anyway ... science! Alien plants! ALIEN PLANTS!

Owen can't quite understand why most of the others aren't also excited about it. Alien plants! The only person who ever halfway understood his interest in them was Suzie, who also used to have a tendency towards taking biological things apart to see how they worked (something that Owen tries hard not to think about, some nights). It's true that most of the plants don't seem particularly alien. Although every once in a while they get a really weird one, and in fact there are a few plants that are caged just in case they turn out to be capable of independent movement. Also, there have been a couple of times that Jack has taken one look at a new specimen and promptly ordered it incinerated. Mostly, though, they might be funny colors or have weird-looking blossoms, but otherwise they're just plants. Every now and then, one of them is clearly an Earth plant, like the perfectly ordinary potted daisy that they only know is of Rift origin — aside from the Rift energy signature — because it turned up potted in what Jack says is the phase coupling armature for a 47th-century photon drive. (Whatever that means.) Sometimes they even get extinct ones, like the weird little pasty-looking Cooksonia, one of the earliest known vascular plants, which Owen has given a particularly nice place on a well-protected shelf where it's unlikely to get knocked over, crushed, eaten, set on fire, have its personal chronology reversed, or any of the other usual hazards of the Hub.

He's not the only person who takes care of them. Actually, Ianto probably does more of the day-to-day watering, due to Owen's tendency to, well, forget. But Owen is the one who spends more actual time with the plants, measuring leaves and repotting them, exploring their response to different wavelengths of light, trying to figure out what soil pH is most agreeable to the weirder specimens (or if they need soil at all), whether they react to electrical fields and sound, if the vibrations of the leaves of the one Tosh calls Trembling Rose are actually reacting to the emotional states of the people around them (Owen has tried glaring at it and talking nicely to it on alternate days, trying to figure out if there's a difference, though he feels weirdly guilty about the glaring) ...

"I can't figure out if you're nurturing those things or torturing them," Jack says, watching him while leaning against the wall with arms crossed.

"Neither. I'm doing science. If you're going to stand there anyway, hand me that pH meter."

(After he dies, it takes him a while to feel entirely comfortable being in the greenhouse area. It's like he thinks the plants will sense something different. They don't, of course. Because they're fucking plants. Eventually he starts to find it comforting up there, surrounded by life that doesn't find him weird or wrong because he isn't alive.)
theseatheseatheopensea: Lyrics from the song Stolen property, by The Triffids, handwritten by David McComb. (Default)

Re: Torchwood, alien plants

[personal profile] theseatheseatheopensea 2021-02-16 01:06 pm (UTC)(link)
Ohh, this is excellent!
sholio: sun on winter trees (Default)

Re: Torchwood, alien plants

[personal profile] sholio 2021-02-17 07:08 am (UTC)(link)
Thank you!! :D
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)

Re: Torchwood, alien plants

[personal profile] edenfalling 2021-02-16 10:07 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh, lovely!
sholio: sun on winter trees (Default)

Re: Torchwood, alien plants

[personal profile] sholio 2021-02-17 07:08 am (UTC)(link)
Thank you!! :D