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 [node:4399,title="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 [node:4415] and [node:4425] 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 [node:4425] 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. :)

General information about the Flash Fiction Fishbowl

This Fishbowl is closed for new prompts. Results will be tracked at [node:4399]

What's a Fishbowl? The very short version: You give me prompts, I'll use these as inspiration to write flash fiction.

A prompt can for example be a keyword, a phrase, a question, an image, a random real-world fact, or a what-if question. If you're familiar with my writing, you can ask for a continuation of an existing story, or more about a setting or character. Topics I won't write to are fanfiction and erotica.

I do accept general prompts, but this time I'm particularly looking for prompts to the theme "Law and Order" - making laws, breaking laws, old laws not coping with new situations, police work, morality, bureaucracy, contracts, wise laws, silly laws, natural laws, cosmic principles Order And Chaos, or whatever else comes to mind.

You can leave as many prompts as you like, you can come back and leave more in a second comment if you think of more later. Please also don't think that because I accept tips, you should not prompt without tipping - the more prompts, the merrier.

I decided on the "Law and Order" Topic for this round after Lyn Thorne-Alder requested "more of this!" after reading the following drabble from the last Fishbowl.

Lawyer Lunch

“You don’t look happy.”

“And you know why. This is big. And messy. But mostly big.”

“Your first serial killer, eh?”

“That is the question, isn’t it?”

“She killed people and ate them. No wonder you’re losing your appetite.”

“Tch. Be serious, will you? Laws on murder predate the emergence of supernaturals. My client targeted vampires exclusively. They were already dead. That meets the definition of corpse mutilation.”

“Oh. Yes. Very messy… You might end up with being a vampire being a case of interfering with one’s own funeral...”

“The hell with it. It must be cleared up some time.”

It's in the same setting as [node:4267]. For more samples, you could have a look at the Fiction section of my website, or the [node:4361].

The Stories

I try to write each story self-contained in 100-300 words, but they often turn out longer, occasionally shorter, and sometimes more open-ended than other times.

The result won't neccessarily be one story per person, since several prompts may combine to form one story idea, but I will do my best to use at least one prompt from each participant.

If a prompt you left plays into the creation of a story, you will get to read it right away. I'll share it with you privately, either via email, or via internal message if you leave your prompt at the Livejournal or Dreamwidth mirror.

Two stories from this Fishbowl are guaranteed to be posted publicly soon, one this Friday, and one the next. Remaining works will go into a pool from which I publish one random story each Friday. Tips will sponsor additional stories that get posted right away.

Perks

For each Link back to the prompt call I'll post about 50 words of setting notes or other background material. I may substitute drawn character sketches or the like.

Fishbowl #1 had 10 commenters, #2 had 12 - if we get at least 14 this time, I'll write an additional 1000+ words story to the Fishbowl theme.

Tips

I accept tips via Paypal.

If you tip,

• I'll send you a link to a google doc with all not-yet-published stories from this Fishbowl. You also may decide which story or stories to sponsor for public posting with your tip (but if you don't want to decide, you don't have to).
• You can pick at least one story based on a prompt you left that goes public, regardless of wordcount. (So if you tip $3, but a story I write for you is so long I'd ask for $8 to sponsor it, you can still have it go public.)
• I will write two stories based on your prompts (or one that's at least 600 words, if it works better with the prompt(s) you left). If I find myself absolutely out of ideas, I may ask for new prompts.

If you tip at least $10, I'll send you links to older not-yet-published stories, too. (At the moment 4 from the previous Fishbowl.)

In addition there are perks based on the tip total.

• $20 - I'll make a basic ebook (with a text-only cover) in epub and mobi format, and anybody who prompted or donated will receive a copy.
• $50 - The ebook gets a cover illustration.
• $80 - I'll write an additional story for everyone who left enough prompts. That's 3 stories for tippers, 2 for others.

I'll also make sure that at the end at least 400 words per $10 donated are posted publicly. (Rough timeframe by the end of the month.)

Progress of tips (and stories and linkbacks) is tracked at [node:4399]

What I'd like to know

If you prompt it would be nice if you could also include the following information:
Do you have any preference how you're credited? (which name and link)
Did you spread the link? Where? (On Twitter I can tell if you include @Anke)
If you found this through someone else spreading the link, who was it? (I'm curious, and could use some data to help with considerations about future perks)

A smallish update of newish drawings, all of other people's characters. The middle three are from the small art call in January. I've been a bit stressed out that month and not drawing as much as I'd planned, but nearly all images from that one are inked, and I'm pecking away at the colouring.