Thank You! (Patreon)

A hundred stories. I can hardly believe we really did it. When we started, we kept thinking we could stop at any time. We had no idea how long this was going to go on for. Two weeks. A month. Everything will be back to normal by the end of April, the end of May. Maya Chhabra had the idea right at the beginning, and we got everything set up the first weekend, so day 1 of the Decameron pretty much was day 1 of lockdown, of social isolation, of all this, whatever we are calling it. Most of us are not sick, but we're cut off from family, from friends, from our normal support networks, for many of us from work, and everything about our everyday lives has changed, Through all this, we've been soliciting stories from writers, writing the frame story, and putting a story up every day for people to read, even when it was hard, even when we were exhausted and scrabbling, even when we ran out and didn't know what to do.

We've done it. A hundred stories, one every day for a hundred days, and a frame that comes together, and has an interestingly metatextual relationship to Or What You Will (due out July 7th from Tor Books) itself a metatextual novel. We hope you've enjoyed reading them. First we'd like to thank you, our patrons, for making it all worthwhile, for putting your hand in your pocket to help, for paying for what we're giving away for free, thus proving the generosity of human nature, for wanting and reading our stories. We hope you enjoyed them, and we hope that as well as being excited by stories from favourite authors you discovered some new favourites as well. Thank you. 

The initial idea for this project was Maya Chhabra's. Jo Walton did much of the reaching out to writers, and wrote the frame story. Lauren Schiller did all the heavy lifting of formatting and scheduling the stories every day, as well as dealing with Patreon and money. We've had additional help from many people, but we especially want to thank Maya Chhabra, Ellen Kushner, Jack Larsen, Marissa Lingen, Usman Malik, Cameron McClure, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Ada Palmer and Alter S. Reiss for helping us find more writers to reach out to.

We're immensely grateful to all our writers. In the first email we sent out we said "we're going to pay you something at some point" and later on we said "we're going to pay you $50, you could certainly get more for your story elsewhere" and yet they sent us not just obscure reprints but first chapters of forthcoming novels and, most excitingly, many new stories written especially for this project. Many people have found it hard to write, to be creative, in the face of all this. But even so, some people wrote us wonderful new stories -- and it is those stories especially that made us feel this was worth doing. We're very grateful to all our writers. Buy their work!

Over the course of the project we have donated over $6000 to Cittadini del Mondo, and we'll be giving them more when we have your donations for June. They run a library, a clinic, a homeless shelter, and classes for refugees in Rome -- Italy has a fairly good policy on letting in refugees, but doesn't do much to help them once they're there. Cittadini del Mondo are a tiny organization, with very few full time staff and a lot of volunteers, and they've been having a really rough time throughout this crisis. For them a donation of this size makes a real difference, letting them buy disinfectants and masks and other much needed front line supplies. We've been able to donate much of what we raised, because many of our writers -- the majority of them -- offered to donate their share too. As Robert Silverberg put it early on, and many others echoed: "What could I possibly do with $50 that was better? This immense generosity has been overwhelming, in addition to letting us have the stories so many of our writers donated what we would have paid them for them. If you'd like to keep helping Cittadini del Mondo with their ongoing and neverending work, they have a Patreon of their own: https://www.patreon.com/cittadinidelmondo 

What now? We're going to institute a new tier "This is where I came in" for which we're going to repost all the stories one per day for people who didn't join until part way through and would like to have emailed copies of the earlier stories. We're just going to do this once, and all money raised will go to Cittadini del Mondo. The stories will remain visible and free online just as they are now, at least for now. Long term we're not sure, but for the time being the stories will all stay open and free to read as they have been all along. This new tier is for people who didn't discover us until part way through and want to keep supporting us and have all the stories in email. You'll also see any new posts.

If you don't switch to the new tier, what we're planning to do is keep posting one or two things a month -- we have a long poem from Roz Kaveney, and we'll have some first chapters and stories. You can expect to see something probably every couple of weeks.

You might also want to consider supporting Jo Walton's poetry Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bluejo) if you like poetry.

Week 1

Jo Walton    1

Leah Bobet 2

Rosemary Kirstein 3

Max Gladstone 4

Heather Rose Jones 5

Robert Silverberg 6

Maya Chhabra 7

Week 2

Pamela Dean 8

William Alexander 9

Alison Sinclair 10

Sam Mellins 11

Rebecca Kuang 12

Alter Reiss 13

Sherwood Smith 14

Week 3

Caroline Stevermer 15

Jim Cambias 16

Elizabeth Wein 17

Anna Tambour 18

Amber Lough 19

Usman Malik 20

Mary Robinette Kowal 21

Week 4

Marissa Lingen 22

Jane Yolen 23

Effie Seiberg 24

Candas Jane Dorsey 25

Walter Jon Williams 26

Sonya Taafe 27

Ysabeau Wilce 28

Week 5

Laurie Marks 29

Lila Garrott 30

Daniel Abraham 31

A.E. Prevost 32

Ken Gerber 33

Ruthanna Emrys 34

John Chu 35

Week 6

Yves Meynard 36

Arkady Martine 37

Shiv Ramdas 38

Ellen Kushner 39

Harry Turtledove 40

Nalo Hopkinson 41

Catherine Asaro 42

Week 7

Naomi Novik 43

Cory Doctorow 44

Kate Elliott 45

Derryl Murphy 46

Lauren Schiller 47

Nisi Shawli 48

C.S.E. Cooney 49

Week 8

Kate Heartfield 50

Vivian Shaw 51

Lois Bujold 52

Naomi Kritzer 53

Marie Brennan 54

E. Lily Yu 55

Naomi Libicki 56

Week 9

Malka Older 57

Karen Osborne 58

L.E. Modessitt 59

Laura Mixon 60

Mike Allen 61

Mary Anne Mohanraj 62

Jenn Lyons 63

Week 10

Peter Watts 64

Sue Burke 65

Marie Brennan 66

Caitlin Starling 67

Lisa Goldstein 68

Katherine Kerr 69

Robert Reed 70

Week 11

Daryl Gregory 71

Brian Slattery 72

Jeanette Ng 73

Grace Seybold 74

Karl Schroeder 75

Reese Hogan 76

Alexandra Rowland 77

Week 12

Ada Palmer 78

Voltaire 79

Emmet O'Brien 80

Jon Evans 81

Madeleine Robins 82

Marissa Lingen 83

Molly Tanzer 84

Week 13

Premee Mohammed 85

Tina Conolly 86

A.H. Hammer 87

Leah Cypress 88

S.B. Divya 89

Ada Palmer 90

Alter Reiss 91

Week 14

Jo Walton 92

Pamela Sargent 93

Megan O'Keefe 94

Kari Maaren  95

Caroline M. Yoachim 96

Judith Tarr 97

John Wiswell 98 

Week 15

Tamara Vardomskaya 99 

Jo Walton 100