This Saturday, May 23rd, backers of our Patreon at the $7/month and higher level can join authors D. A. Hernández, Dei Walker, Alex Bauer, MJ Kiwiana, and Vee Sloane for a conversation about “Ourselves in Our Stories.”

Most people are familiar with the standard “write what you know” writing advice. I suspect most are also familiar with the follow-up complaint (or variations thereof), that this is why we have a bajillion stories about white cis het male professors suffering from existential ennui. However, there is a place for a less literal take on “write what you know,” and that is the space we aim to explore with this panel. How do we, ourselves, appear in our writing? How does what we know, and don’t know, impact the writing choices we make? In what ways do our life experiences shape our characters and the stories we wish to tell? How literally or abstractly do we aim to integrate ourselves into our work? And, conversely, what steps do we take to make sure that certain aspects of ourselves do not end up in our stories? These and related questions will be those we approach in this panel, which is sure to be a very personal and informative one!

Time: Saturday, May 23rd at 9 p.m. (time zone converter)

If you’re already a backer, I hope you’ll join us, and if not, now’s a great time to become one and get access to this panel, recordings of past panels, and much more!

Our March creator panel, available to all our Patrons at the $7/month, $10/month, and $25/month levels, is coming up this Sunday, March 29th, at 4 p.m. Eastern time (converter)! Join Sebastian Marie, Puck Malamud, Rhosyn Goodfellow, Lucy K. R., and D. A. Hernández as we have a chat about collaborative creation: types that exist, methods we’ve used, great collaborations we’ve had, and what elements go into brewing the perfect group work of fiction!

Title: Approaches to Creating Collaboratively

Description: When we imagine writers, we often picture an individual toiling in solitude, leaning over a notebook and writing rapidly or with keys clattering away on a keyboard. However, this image neglects to consider the many ways there are for writers to collaborate with each other, and with artists, musicians, and other creators. Some writing activities, such as screenwriting, are routinely done by groups. There are many ways to collaborate on fiction writing, too – such as co-authors working together on a book or short story authors coming together on an anthology – and even more so when doing fanwriting. Storytelling approaches such as round-robins, bangs and reverse bangs, zines, collaboratively developed and written ‘verses, and other fandom activities are design with collaboration specifically in mind. In this panel, we’ll discuss types of collaborative writing, how we’ve found collaborators to work with, our own collaborative writing experiences and how they’ve gone, successes we’ve had and issues we’ve run into (and how we did, or didn’t, solve them), systems we’ve put in place to keep our collaborative writing projects “on the rails,” and other related topics.

Current backers, we hope you’ll join us, and new folks – become a Patreon backer now and get in on the conversation!

Every month, creators with Duck Prints Press come together to hold a literary convention-style panel on a topic chosen by our Patrons or selected by the panelists themselves. Our January panel? This Saturday, January 11 at 10 a.m. Eastern (converter) we’re having a get-together with five authors – Sebastian Marie, Puck Malamud, Alex Bauer, Tris Lawrence, and Lucy K. R. – about being a neurodiverse creator!

Description: As an umbrella term for a wide range of ways a brain can work, the word “neurodiverse” has become one way of grouping people with conditions ranging from autism and ADHD, to dyslexia and dysgraphia, to bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. For creators, having these conditions can have advantages – such as changing how we see and interact with the world, helping us to unique points of view and frameworks, and supporting our work process – and they can also have disadvantages – such as interfering with ability to focus, causing mood swings that can make creativity tough, and making developing and maintaining creative habits difficult. In this panel, we’ll talk about our own neurodivergence, the ways we find our neurodivergence strengthens us as creators, the challenges that our neurodivergence introduces and how we’ve navigated those challenges, and the value we’ve found in forming communities with other neurodiverse people, touching on the extent to which we find the “neurotypical” and “neurodiverse” frameworks useful and relevant.

If you’re already a Patron, I hope you’ll join us! And if you’re not, become one today at the $7/month level or higher and get access to this panel, recordings of our past panels, and lots of other awesome benefits!

While our main November activity has been running the crowdfunding Kickstarter to fund our anthology Monsterotica: Tales of Unusual Courtship and Coupling, that doesn’t mean we’ve neglected our regular short story and art releases direct to backers of our Patreon! Read on to learn about our five new short stories, one new art piece, and the Patreon panel taking place later today!

First – Patreon backers at the $10/month and $25/month levels who also back the crowdfunding campaign for Monsterotica will get a bonus piece of merchandise as our THANK YOU for their exceptional support. For this campaign, we’re offering BACKERS CHOICE! We’ve chosen the art – the monstery toothy dux sticker created by Alessa Riel for the Monsterotica campaign – and backers will get their pick of an acrylic pin with an iridescent holo effect, a key chain with a red rainbow holo effect, or a magnet with a hologram effect!

Back our Patreon at the $10/month or $25/month level AND support our campaign to fund Monsterotica and claim your monstery dux merch bonus!

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New Explicit Imprint Stories:

Can’t Let Go by Dei Walker

modern with magic, f/f, underwater sex, tentacles

Excerpt:
The thrill of risk slides through her, warming her from the inside out. She curls her toes inside her flippers and takes another deep breath of cool, dry canned air.

The soft corals along the wall are pretty enough; one has a porcelain crab tucked into its fronds, and another the tiny shape of a pygmy seahorse, orange-pink with bumps to match its hiding place. There are wonders aplenty; she allows herself to snap a picture of the seahorse, then a second from a slightly different angle, as insurance.

When she lifts her head to continue swimming, the faint glow has moved farther away.

A cloud of bioluminescence moving like that? Her heart rate kicks up, interest piqued. Hope spreads in her chest. Something this unusual might be just what she needs.

Available to $25/month Patreon backers

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We the Hunters by Lyonel Loy

fantasy, m/m, monster x monster, vers characters

Excerpt:

He sees the flash of fiery gold at the far end of the lake, where the water is dark with the shadows of kelp forests. Shimmering fins flicker amidst the swaying fronds, carefree and careless and bold.

What need has a merman for wariness?

King of the lake’s deep waters, sharp-toothed and sharp-clawed and strong. Even the gryphon, with his lion’s strength and eagle’s talons, ought to be wary, but the merman is far too enticing a prize.

Available to $7/month Patreon backers and higher

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New General Imprint Stories:

My (24M) Cousin (23M) Fell in Love with One of Those Forest Mimics (???M?) and I Don’t Know What to Do by Nicola Kapron

modern, m/m, outsider point of view, formatted like a reddit post

Excerpt: 

r/relationship_advice
u/ThrowawayOutOfTheWoods

You know those scary stories people tell around campfires and on dramatic horror vlogs about mysterious not-quite-human figures that slip into hiking groups and do all sorts of creepy stuff? Yeah. It’s one of those. He’s one of those? It’s hard to tell.

Available to all Patreon backers

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Memory Scars by Adele Gardner

sci fi, established f/f, androids and free will

Excerpt:

Construction. Repair. Rebuild. Each fills me with a creeping dread, something I can’t name because I’m not allowed any words for it.

Each time I wonder: Am I the same person I was before whatever disaster shut me down?

Available to $5/month Patreon backers and higher

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One Moon at a Time by R. L. Houck

modern supernatural setting, found family, lesbian main character, weres and creature shiftersExcerpt:
“Nice night, huh?” Lily leaned back on her palms and slanted her eyes to the side.

“I’ll call it a nice night if we make it to 6 a.m. without you turning wolf and trying to rip out my throat.”

Sagging in place, Lily scrubbed her palms down her thighs. At the end of the pass, she cupped her knees, staring at her abraded knuckles. “Do you think I’ll turn?”

Available to $10/month Patreon backers and higher

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Patreon Reward Art:

 

“Devour” by Aaron Kotze

This is a trim of a larger artwork. Aaron chose not to share the inspiration behind this piece.

Available to $5/month Patreon backers and higher

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and lastly, this month's Patreon panel is later today! The topic...

Description: Authoritarian regimes throughout history have sought to eliminate  dissent in part by eliminating non-conformist art, while subverting what  art they permit to be created to serve their dominant narratives. As  much of the world makes a turn toward hard-right fascistic  authoritarianism, many creators grapple with the stress, fear, and  danger of living and creating despite threats to their livelihoods and  very lives. In this panel, we’ll have a candid discussion of how others  have faced these threats in the past and how we are doing so in our  day-to-day lives. We will discuss both the risks and necessity of  continuing to make art by and about people – queer, POC, gender-diverse,  disabled, neurodiverse, etc. – whose voices authoritarian governments  seek to suppress.

Date: Sunday, November 30
Time: 2 p.m. Eastern time

Become a backer of the Duck Prints Press Patreon! Support indie publishing all year long and get lots of queer stories and art in return!

Hot on the heels of our September panel, which was during the last weekend of the month last month, our October Patreon panel Writing Tools and Techniques is during the first weekend of October!

Topic: Writing Tools and Techniques

Description: Let’s meet together on the first Sunday of October to have a chat about our favorite writing tools and how we use them! This month’s panelists will talk about different tools they’ve used for word processing, editing, researching, outlining, progress tracking, world building, and more. We’ll weigh the pros and cons of our experiences, what we’ve kept using and what we’ve ditched, what we’ve liked and what we haven’t liked, and how we’ve changed our techniques to maximize the utility of the different tools we’ve used. If you’ve got favorite tools, we hope you’ll attend as well and tell us about them!

Date: Sunday October 5th

Time: 9 a.m. Eastern (converter)

Panelists: Dei Walker, J. D. Rivers, Alex Bauer, and Max Jason Peterson

Moderator: Nina Waters

If you’re already a backer of our Patreon, I hope you’ll join us, and if not, there’s still time to become one!

Backers at the $7/month, $10/month, and $25/month levels get exclusive access to our panels, including recordings of all the past panels – supporters can access those any time!

Every month, we release five short stories, an art piece, and conduct a convention-style panel for our backers on Patreon. What backers have access to depends on their backer level, with $3/month backers only getting access to a single story and $25/month backers getting access to everything, with our intermediate levels – $5/month, $7/month, and $10/month – getting intermediate amounts. These releases are in addition to behind-the-scenes access, voting rights on anthology themes, exclusive coupons, extra merch, and the many other benefits we offer our supports on Patreon. Read on to learn about what we released on Patreon in August 2025!

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Aurora by æonswinter

Access to viewing the full artwork available to backers at the $5/month and $7/month levels; access to print-suitable download available to backers at the $10/month and $25/month levels.

æonswinter had this to say about the inspiration for this piece: “The figures in this painting are doing doubles hammock. For this trick, the two aerialists run in a circle on the ground before inverting into the air, reaching out towards each other. The painting captures the moment before their hands meet—the moment before contact, before connection. The base color of each figure and each hammock was sampled from the colors of the trans flag. The shadows and highlights on the blue figure and fabric were done in variations of that pink, and the shadows and highlights on the pink figure and fabric were done in variations of that blue.”

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Nycticorax by S. J. Ralston

Available to backers at the $7/month level and higher.
Genre: Tragic Science Fiction with Super Powers
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 28 pages/9,925 words

Excerpt: Nycticorax turned to the control panel at his right hand and punched in the coordinates: the southeastern shore of Lake Huron, July 23rd, 1834 CE. He checked his safety measures, pointed to each status light to confirm its greenness, and ensured the Third Law Allocation was set to DISTRIBUTED. With a deep breath, he put his thumb over the button labelled ACTIVATE.

He hesitated.

There was an extremely slight but also extremely real possibility that pressing that button would instantaneously kill 2.8 million people—Nycticorax among them.

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Like it Sharp by E. V. Dean

Available to all Patreon backers.
Genre: Modern
Rating: Explicit
Length: 25 pages/9,979 words

Excerpt: Green and purple lights dance on the stainless steel of her knife, her grip agile, motions swift, like she was born with it in her palm. The chop-chop-chop against the wooden board cuts through the muted thumping of Avicii from the living room. She’s not quite the Iron Chef, but the blade’s her best friend.

Kathy can’t take her eyes off it. The rest of the kitchen is spinning around her, and she’s found her anchor. The skilled arm is attached to the woman Kathy’s been swooning over the whole evening from afar, like a school girl with a crush.

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Starstruck, Adrift by Cedar D. McCafferty-Svec

Available to backers at the $25/month level.
Genre: Science Fiction
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 19 pages/6,913 words

Excerpt: Penny had seen a lot of things in her time aboard the UNS Bridget. She’d seen her fair share of alien worlds and new ways to travel during her fourteen years of service. This, however, was not something she had previously encountered.

“This” being the large mechanical dragon hovering outside the windows at the bow of the ship. And when she said “mechanical,” she meant completely sentient, made of metal, stuff-she’d-seen-in-comics-and-movies mechanical. Not an animatronic. Not a puppet. Fully realized robotic life.

Flying outside the spaceship. In space.

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August Patreon Panel: How to Work Worldbuilding Into the Narrative

The recording of this panel is available to backers at the $7/month level and higher.

Description: No matter what genre you write, world building is essential for setting the scene, helping readers understand the when and where and why of the story, and framing the narrative. Some stories require a lot of worldbuilding, others very little, but no matter how much is necessary to help the readers navigate the characters’ surroundings, figuring out how to work that worldbuilding into the story is a perpetual concern. This panel, we discuss effective and ineffective ways of integrating the worldbuilding into stories, how approaches may vary depending on the length of the story and the genre, standard worldbuilding advice such as “show don’t tell” and “don’t infodump!”, and examples of stories we’ve read where we thought the worldbuilding was especially well or especially poorly integrated with the narrative.

Panelists: Nina Waters, Vee Sloane, Dei Walker, and Zel Howland

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Whispers Through the Leaves by Johnathan Stern

Available to backers at the $10/month level and higher.
Genre: Horror
Rating: General Audience
Length: 8 pages/2,394 words

Excerpt: The pressure had dropped.

Gray clouds were gathering in the sky to the west, and the faint breeze that whistled through the windows of your car was picking up speed.

A storm was coming, of that you were almost certain.

It never hurt to check, though, and so you reached over to the center console to turn on your radio. Far from home as you were, your presets would assuredly be useless, and sure enough, pressing the first one tuned into nothing but the scratch of static. Playing with the dial, you scrolled through perhaps a dozen stations and frequencies before you found the first live human voice. 

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Business is Blooming by Genevieve Maxwell

Available to backers at the $5/month level and higher.
Genre: Fluffy Modern Romance
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 12 pages/3,740 words

Excerpt: “What in the world?” Hester’s voice trailed off as she approached her doorstep, frowning at the potted plant sitting on the doormat. Hester wasn’t much of a plant person. Or a keeping-things-alive-besides-herself person. The plant had flowers, which at least were pretty. Did someone send her flowers? But why a living plant instead of a bouquet? Why leave it at all instead of giving it to her directly?

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Not a backer? Looking for even more stories, artwork, and more? We’re also thrilled to share that now, all Patreon-exclusive works now become available, six months after they were originally posted, in our Patreon shop. If there’s an author you love, a work you missed, a type of story you’re on the hunt for – come take a look. There are 65 works in the shop, and we add more every month!

Duck Prints Press is back with another of our convention-style panels. This month, we’ll be spending an hour talking about The Care and Feeding of Creators. Ask a creator why they create, and most will answer with some variation of “I can’t not create.” However, creating is labor intensive and mentally taxing, and often leaves us exhausted and drained. Creatives engaging in self-care behaviors is therefore essential, yet many of us struggle to be kind to ourselves, celebrate our successes, and forgive ourselves our failures. In this panel, we will discuss our own struggles with showing kindness to ourselves, how we motivate ourselves, how we nourish and encourage our creativity, how we celebrate our accomplishments, how we avoid burnout and deal with falling into creative slumps, and will perhaps touch on our views of “the tortured artist” as a persistent description of creators.

Panelists: Alex Bauer, Shea Sullivan, Rachael L. Young, and Dei Walker. Nina Waters will serve as moderator.

Date: Saturday, July 26th
Time: 5 p.m. Eastern (converter)

This panel is available live to all our Patreon backers at the $7/month level and higher. Backers can also view recordings of our past panels. Become a backer of the Duck Prints Press Patreon today!

Every month, we host a panel for our Patrons, featuring a group of Duck Prints Press creators joining together to discuss the topic of the month. The April panel will be this Saturday, April 26th, at 8 p.m. Eastern time (converter), and the topic is Why Do We Find Joy in Fandom and Fan Creations?

Description: That fandom is a source of community and comfort for fans is a given; if we didn’t enjoy being in fandom, why would we participate? But recognizing that we do find joy in fandom isn’t the same as considering why we find this joy. In this panel, several members of Duck Prints Press will discuss what brought them to fandom, what keeps them in fandom, and examine the whys and wherefores of being fandom members and fan creators. Topics will include: why did we join fandom in the first place; what drew us to begin creating fanworks; what sparks that certain “something” that makes one fandom “the one” rather than another; what we do when the passion wanes; and why we have stayed in fandom long-term.

Panelists: Dei Walker, Tris Lawrence, May Barros, Shea Sullivan, Alex Bauer, and callmesalticidae

Nina Waters will serve as a moderator.

All Patreon backers at the $7/month, $10/month, and $25/month level have access to the panels as they run and as recordings afterward. Become a backer TODAY to join us this Saturday!

Curious about the panels but don’t want to become a monthly backer? Six months after our panels broadcast, the recordings go up for sale in our Patreon store! There’s currently only one listing, but we encourage you to check it out: Queer Representation in Media Then and Now is available for purchase by non-backers and backers at the $3/month and $5/month levels!

Tomorrow, we’re hosting the February Zoom panel for our $7/month, $10/month, and $25/month backers on Patreon! Our topic is time management and project management. What’s that mean? Well…

In our busy lives, managing our time has become an essential skill. For writers, who frequently have a day job atop writing as well as other daily responsibilities, figuring out how to manage our time to write and how to pace our projects in a way that’ll give us a hope of success can be doubly difficult. For this panel, we’ve gathered a group of people who have figured out time management and project management techniques that work for them, and have experimented with techniques that didn’t work for them, to discuss their successes and failures. We’ll explore a range of options, while recognize that there’s no One Right Way nor one-size-fits-all solution to managing our writing projects. Who knows, maybe you’ll learn a technique that’ll work for you! Discussion topics will include: how we manage our time to create space to write; how we manage entire projects to ensure we are able to see things through to completion; strategies we’ve tried that haven’t worked for us; different approaches we’ve applied to different types of projects; and more!

The panelists for this month are Rhosyn Goodfellow, J. D. Rivers, Alex Bauer, Max Jason Peterson, boneturtle, and Shea Sullivan, and I (unforth/Nina Waters) will be acting as moderator.

Interested? Join us Saturday February 22nd at 2 p.m. Eastern time (converter). Become a Patron today!

Our November Duck Prints Press contributor’s panel for our Patreon backers is coming up this Saturday, November 16, at 4 p.m. Eastern (time zone convertor).

Title: Planning vs. Pantsing

Description: In writing circles, it’s common to discuss our personal approaches to preparing to write a long story along a spectrum from “planning,” in which the author plans extensively and in detail before beginning to write, to “pantsing,” where the author does no planning and just begins to write – “flying by the seat of their pants” as it were. However, in practice, individual authors rarely fall completely into one or the other of these categories (and so many authors feel themselves in the middle that the term “plantsing” has arisen for people who do some of each). In this panel, we’ve gathered Duck Prints Press authors from across the planning to pantsing spectrum to discuss how planning and pantsing are different and how they’re similar, when we as writers plan and when we pants, strategies for successfully planning a story and successfully pantsing a story, which methods we’ve tried and how they’ve worked for us, and more!

Panelists: Rhosyn Goodfellow, Zel Howland, Vee Sloane, Tris Lawrence, J. D. Rivers, and Alex Bauer

Moderator: Nina Waters

Date: Saturday, November 16th

Time: 4 p.m. Eastern (time zone converter)

Our panels are held via zoom and all people who back our Patreon at the $7/month, $10/month, and $25/month levels are invited to attend! For those not able to make the scheduled time, recordings are also available afterwards for those at the $10/month and $25/month level.

Join the conversation – back the Duck Prints Press Patreon today!