If you're interested in legal, free music downloads, for listening or to use as background for videos or other projects, here are three possible sources for you.

Musopen is a nonprofit organisation dedicated to making compositions that are in the public domain actually available. They produce recordings of classic music, which they then place in the public domain. You can also find sheet music at their website.

Jamendo is a platform for indie musicians. All music there can be downloaded for free and is available under a creative commons licence. Most seem to be limited to non-commercial use with derivative works distributed under the same conditions, but there is a section of their site where you can look for more open licences.

At Incompetech, Kevin MacLeod offers music, mostly "soundtrack" kind of things, under a creative commons Attribution licence, with an option to license pieces for a one-time fee if credit is not possible or not wanted.

If you like supporting creative projects directly, whether by donations or giving people ideas, see if there's something of interest here. It's a collection of projects that caught my eye, particularly fiction Fishbowls where you leave prompts for someone to use as basis for writing. At the end you'll find links to stories written to my prompts in February, as well as my activity last month.

Networking on Twitter

If you run a project - writing, drawing, anything else - which involves asking people for prompts, and you plug it on twitter, consider including the hashtag #promptcall

Updates of last month's projects

With a bit over two days to go, Plunge, the ezine for queer women in genre literature, is fully funded.

The Pueblo of Acoma Storytelling Studio on the other hand isn't close to its goal yet, though there are two weeks to go still.

Planned Prompt Calls

• 6th - Elizabeth Barette's Poetry Fishbowl, theme "commoner heroes and second fiddles" (general information about the Poetry Fishbowl)
• 7th-14th - Eliza Gebow's Character Art Jam - you can request images of your characters, or of animals, etc. (results of a test-run)
• 8th - Ariestess has a Microfic Fishbowl, theme to be announced
• 17th - Lyn Thorne-Alder has another Giraffe Call - theme to be announced. (general information about the Giraffe Call)
• 18th-19th - Crowdfunding Creative Jam (open to anyone as both prompter and creator) to the theme "Respect"

Most dates were drawn from start-of-the-month posts in the crowdfunding communities on Dreamwidth and Livejournal

Based on my prompts

• Eliza Gebow drew an owl for me.
• Rix_Scaedu wrote the unrelated flashs Custom Made and Mirrorwall based on my prompts.
• Shurhaian wrote Wild Growth, Restoration and Frostfire
• Tango wrote On a Mountain's Summit
• Lyn Thorne-Alder wrote
  • Cleaning House (a follow-up to What To Do About Auntie X)
  • Productive (a follow-up to The Grey Line which is a follow-up to Preconceptions)
  • Exterminator
• Clare K.R. Miller wrote Dream House

I don't think any of those stories need content warnings, though I can't vouch for other content you might find looking around.
Hopefully I didn't forget anything; I need to get more systematic about the bookmarking.

My Activity

Fishbowl stories posted publicly in February:

• Phantom Pains from a prompt by Eliza Gebow.
• Fairy Godparents from a prompt by Rix_Scaedu
• Half a Life Taken from a prompt by Clare K. R. Miller
• Falling Behind the Changing Times from a prompt by Elizabeth Wordsmith
• Cravings from prompts by Tango and Ellen Million
• Bearing Witness from a prompt by Tango

The Law & Order Fishbowl I ran in February will probably end up with relatively few stories; there is a pattern of someone's general prompt working together with someone else's more concrete one to create one story idea. I'm not as far along as I wanted to be by now, partly because I spent the last three days getting my computer to work again. While I did not lose any actual writing, I'm not sure I'll be able to recover my organised notes with the prompts and ideas based on them. (More frequent and thorough backups in future for me.)

The file with the stories from the Horror Fishbowl is at the editor's.

And lastly, five of the requests from the last Small Art Call are finished now.

That project is going more slowly than I'd like, too, but I'm picking up the pace and hope to get most of it done before March is over.

Paypal has drawn the ire of a lot of self-published erotica authors by requiring Smashwords to remove books with certain subjects from their platform. Those subjects include rape for titilation, incest, pseudo-incest (that's sex between someone and their step-parent), and bestiality.

There is a lot of ranting about censorship and danger to free speech. "Moral guardians run amok" seems to be not the only possible explanation, however.

Selena Kitt includes some findings in her blog post Slippery Slope: Erotica Censorship. (That's the website of an erotica author. It didn't look terribly racy to me, but I'm not 100% certain it'd pass as "safe for work".)

What I discovered was that most merchant-services (i.e. companies that allow you to use Visa and MasterCard on their site) which allow adult products charge a $5000 up-front fee to use their service. Then, they take exorbitant percentages from each transaction. Some 5%, some 14%, some as high as 25%.

Now it was starting to make more sense. The credit card companies charge higher fees for these “high-risk” accounts because there is a higher rate of what they call “chargebacks.” You know that protection on your credit card, where if you dispute the charge, you don’t have to pay for it? Well they’ve determined that happens more with porn and gambling and other “high-risk” sites than others, so they’re justified in charging more money to process payment for those sites.

So worst case, and friendliest interpretation for Paypal: If Paypal allowed porn, the credit card companies would classify all of Paypal as a high risk account, with higher fees that would have to be passed down to the customers.

The scenario that suggests to me is lots of people buying porn, their spouses seeing it on their credit card bill, the buyers going, "No, I never bought that!" and getting chargebacks, until credit card companies took notice. It brings us back to morals, but as a more spread-out factor than a random crackdown from a small group of moral guardians: Porn being a "guilty pleasure" a lot of people won't admit to.

Reality is always more complicated (why are incest, rape and bestiality singled out if the issue is "adult" content?), but the business angle should not be ignored.

[P.S.: If you care about my opinion on the topic of "is it OK to make certain books hard to impossible to sell?"... well, I dislike the topics listed, but considering it logically, murder is pretty disturbing, too, and some of my favourite books feature a hired killer as a viewpoint character, so it would be right hypocritical to support banning other fiction.]

The prompt call is wrapped up, the writing isn't.

I received prompts from 15 people, including 3 new prompters.

Donations cracked the level required for a basic ebook, so once writing is done, I'll get that put together. I'm planning to get the initial flash-for-prompts finished in the next few days, and the extra short story some time in March.

So far I've finished 9 stories, 3 of which were published. They're all listed here. One or two more should go public; I'm waiting for an answer from one of the tippers if they'd like to sponsor a particular story, or leave the choice to chance or me.
One more story (based on prompts from 2 people) is drafted but needs some edits.
Three more people need to get stories, one of them two, but that might result in a total of two or three more stories rather than five - this Fishbowl has rather more stories grown from combining prompts than the last had.

Setting notes

I counted 16 linkbacks to the call, so that's at least 800 words of setting notes, with ~250 covered by the basic Emergent and Identity landing pages.
Does anybody have something they'd like to see addressed in setting notes? It may be a bit early for this question, but thought I'd ask. :)

Extra story

For getting prompts from 14+ people, I promised a short story, and would like to take a straw poll - which of the following ideas would you rather see me write?

One idea, an older one, is in the Identity setting, dealing with the legal and emotional fallout when it becomes known that someone led two separate lives and married two people, who had no idea.

The second one has at its core a twist on the "angel and devil on your shoulder"-idea: A superstition that each human has an angel, associated with order, and a demon, associated with chaos. A girl suddenly has problems concentrating on anything, and gets the idea in her head that something happened to her angel. (This is an expansion of the story "Scatterbrained" from this Fishbowl.)

Tip allocation

Lastly, I'd like to ask how should tips that went to partially sponsoring a story be treated?
It interacts a little oddly with my habit of posting one story, usually picked at random, from the ones that are not published yet. This week there was one that was 40% funded, and for that I gave it 4 extra "lots" in that drawing - and it ended up being posted.

The tip thus got the story chosen by the donor posted earlier than it might have been otherwise, but no additional words. Does that seem fair to you? (I did promise 400 words in addition to the two freebies per $10 donated this time, and I'll make sure that happens.)

Thanks to everyone who played!

If you have any questions, suggestions, or other comments, please speak up. :)