Decameron Project
patreon
Thank You!
🕑 Added 2020-06-24 13:00:04 +0000 UTCA 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
Comments
Decameron Project
We'll be posting occasional new stories and poems starting July 1st that will trigger payment but they won't be every day. The re-posts of old content should only trigger payment if you switch to the new tier -- that should start in a couple of days because I want to make sure I'm setting it up properly. -LS
Steven desJardins
Will there be an e-book collection of the Decameron stories at some point? I'd love to have an epub I could download to an e-reader.
Pamela Adams
Jo- will continuing posts trigger Patreon payments?
Pamela Adams
I need to go back and read the series from the start.
Wendy Oakden
I haven't been keeping up with all the stories...because this project introduced me to new (to me) authors and I had to go digging up other things they'd written. At this rate I'm going to have reading material for years to come!
