Commissions
Hey there! I’m looking to take on the occasional short story commission.
I am currently open for one or two 1,000–5,000 word commissions.
Terms of service
Credentials
- I work as a technical writer by day and an author of various things by night.
- I’m currently working on my MFA in creative writing from Cornell College.
- I’ve published eight books (three short story collections, three novels, a memoir, and a poetry collection with another novel on the way), edited a short story anthology for Thurston Howl Publications/Bound Tails Press, and helped organize a collaborative anthology. My list of publications is here.
- I was editor-in-chief of [adjective][species] for 7 years and of Hybrid Ink, LLC for 2 years.
What you get and how
- You send me the form below, which contains requests for character descriptions, events and story ideas, and moods. If I like it, I’ll choose it and get in touch with you.
- I come back to you with a short outline that we can workshop. Once we agree, you pay 50% (refundable).
- You’ll then get a draft for approval, at which point you can make small changes — rewrites will be 2.5¢ per word. At final approval, you pay the second 50% (non-refundable).
- You get a final version of the story as a fully-typeset PDF, plus whatever formats you want for posting (ODT, Markdown, FA’s BBCode, Google Docs, etc).
Licensing
- You are licensing me the use of your characters. They remain yours. I am licensing you the use of my writing. It remains mine.
- You can use, post, excerpt, whatever you want with the text. If you’re going to use/post more than 50% of it in one place, you must credit me and link back to https://makyo.ink (obviously, I prefer if you credit me no matter what, but hey, I get why it might be impossible!)
- I get to post it at least on my Patreon, but if you’d like me to keep it off public gallery sites, let me know.
Content
I reserve the right to turn down a commission request, but here’s some ideas for what I will and won’t do.
Things I’m good at
These are what you came to me for:
- Furry (natch)
- Character studies
- Introspection about oneself
- Interpersonal communication (good or bad)
- Relationships starting or ending
- Dreams, hallucinations, ungrounded interpretations of individuals and situations
- Providing a sense or sensation of why a character acts or feels the way they do
- Queer lives and relationships
- Intimacy and sensuality
- Off-screen/fade-to-black sex
- Light kink (BDSM, degradation, etc)
- Flowery prose
- Overly-flowery prose
Things I’m bad at
Please consider carefully if I’m a good fit before asking me to do these, but feel free to ask:
- Fast-paced action sequences
- Most anything to do with the military or police
- On-screen sex
- Hard sci-fi/fantasy (mostly due to space constraints)
- Fantasy kinks (mpreg, vore, unbirthing, etc)
Things I won’t do at all
- On-screen non-consensual sex (if you want characters talking about it, ask)
- On-screen sex with minors (ditto, if you want characters to talk about it having happened, ask)
- Homophobia, transphobia, etc (ditto above)
- On-screen gore
- Copyrighted characters or settings, characters that aren’t your own, or settings from media franchises (if it’s a shared setting, ask)
- Anonymous commissions
Pricing
Still interested? My pricing is pretty simple! I ask for $20 USD base price, plus 5¢ per word. E.g: a 3,000 word commission is 20+(3000×0.05) = $170 USD.1
Sound pricey? Here’s the breakdown:
- I write about 3,000–5,000 words an hour
- I edit about 1,000 words an hour
- Typesetting a project takes me about an hour
This works out to about $60 USD an hour before taxes. Groceries for two weeks for two people is about $250–300 USD. A semester of tuition costs $7000. My share of the mortgage and utilities is $3000. The SFWA word rate is 8¢ per word.
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