Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Publication announcement: New short story available!

Today my flash fic story "The Bargain" was published in Impact: Queer Sci Fi's Fifth Annual Flash Fiction Anthology, edited by J. Scott Coatsworth!

I'd had the idea for this story for awhile -- the kernel was the phrase/feeling of "people looking right through you", that feeling where it's not that people ignore you, but that you simply don't impinge upon their lives at all. What if it's because you're already dead? -- but never had quite the right context to develop it in. When I saw the flash fic contest, and the theme "impact", I figured I'd give it a go. I generally find flash fic very difficult, and my first drafts of this story definitely showed this. There were, strangely enough, too many words.

Finally, a day or two before the deadline, I radically rewrote it, with a very different narrative voice, and it worked much better -- well enough that it got accepted. I'm looking forward very much to reading the rest of the stories in the anthology, to see how others handled the same topic in the same constraints. (And G is looking forward to me reading them aloud to her.)