Shining Moon Episode 26: When the Fic is Quick II

Amanda Helms (she/her) is a biracial Black/white fantasy, science fiction, and sometimes horror writer whose stories have appeared in FIYAH, Lightspeed, Nature: Futures, and other fine venues. She lives with her family in Colorado. Though all of them are natives, none ski or snowboard, proving that such creatures indeed exist. Find her at amandahelms.com, on Instagram @amandaghelms, or Bluesky @amandaghelms.bsky.social.

 Vylar Kaftan has published over fifty short stories in magazines such as Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and Clarkesworld. Her alternate history novella “The Weight of the Sunrise” won the Nebula and Sidewise awards. Her queer psychic thriller “Her Silhouette Drawn in Water” is available through Tor.com. 

 Aimee Picchi is a journalist by day and Nebula-nominated science fiction and fantasy writer by night. Her short fiction has been published in Nightmare Magazine, The Deadlands, Apex and Podcastle, among other fine publications. She’s a former classical musician (viola) who graduated from University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music. She lives in Burlington, Vermont with her family. You can find her online at aimeepicchi.com or on Twitter at @aimeepicchi.

 
Stories in this episode:


Amanda Helms

“Shopping at the Soul Patch Consignment Store” Worlds of Possibility, August 2023. https://www.juliarios.com/introducing-the-august-2023-issue-of-worlds-of-possibility/

 “Sunnyside Daycare Employees’ Chat Log, Post Alien Takeover,” Small Wonders Magazine, 2022  https://smallwondersmag.com/piece/sunnyside-daycare-employees-chat-log-post-alien-takeover/ 

 Vylar Kaftan

“Scar Stories,” Bandersnatch  anthology, 2007. https://vylarkaftan.com/bibliography/2007-2/scar-stories/ 

“What President Polk Said,” Phantom, https://vylarkaftan.com/bibliography/2009-2/what-president-polk-said/ 

Aimee Picchi

“9 Lies You Tell Yourself about Ghost Hunting” https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/9-lies-you-tell-yourself-about-ghost-hunting/ 

“Advanced Problems in Word Math,” Daily Science Fiction, January 3rd, 2020 https://dailysciencefiction.com/fantasy/other-worlds-fantasy/aimee-picchi/advanced-word-problems-in-portal-math

 “Four Years Minus Twelve Days” by Samantha Murray , Lightspeed Mar. 2023 (Issue 154).

 “The Third Martian Dick Temple” by Sheila Marie Borideux, Daily Science Fiction, May 23rd, 2018

"Don't tell me that the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." -- Anton Chekov

Piano music for closure

Thank you for listening to Shining Moon! You can reach the host, Deborah L. Davitt, at the following social media platforms:

www.facebook.com/deborah.davitt.3

Bluesky: @deborahldavitt.bsky.social

www.deborahldavitt.com

Transcript

Deborah L. Davitt (00:01)
Hello and welcome to Shining Moon, episode 26, flash fiction, When the Fic is Quick 2. I'm your host, Deborah L. Davitt. With me today are Amanda Helms, Vylar Kaftan and Amy Picchi, as we discuss the art of writing flash fiction, stories that are around or under 1,000 words in length. 

Let's get started with some introductions. Amanda Helms, she, her, is a biracial black, white fantasy, science fiction and sometimes horror writer whose stories have appeared in Faya,

Lightspeed, Nature Futures, and other fine venues. She lives with her family in Colorado, though all of them are natives, none ski or snowboard, proving that such creatures do indeed exist. Find her at AmandaHelms.com, on Instagram at Amandaghelms, or bluesky at AmandagHelms

Amanda Helms (00:52)
Hello! I unfortunately don't have anything scintillating to say, so I'll just let it go.

Deborah L. Davitt (00:59)
Okay, I don't demand something scintillating, but if you just wanna say hello back, that works perfectly fine.

Amanda Helms (01:07)
All right.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:09)
Vylar Kaftan has published over 50 short stories and magazines such as Asimov's Lightspeed in Clarkesworld. I'm so envious of the Clarkesworld credit. Her alternate history novella, The Weight of the Sunrise, won the Nebula and Sidewise awards. Her queer psychic thriller, Her Silhouette Drawn in Water, which is a killer title, is available through tor.com. Hi, Vylar, how are you today?

Vylar Kaftan (01:32)
Hi, I'm doing good. How are you doing?

Deborah L. Davitt (01:35)
Uh, still sick, but we'll not touch on that right now. Uh, it's a thing. So Aimee Picchi is a journalist by day and a Nebula-nominated science fiction and fantasy writer by night. Her short fiction has been published in nightmare magazine, the dead lens, apex and podcast, among other fine publications. She's a former classical musician on the viola, who graduated from the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music. She lives in Burlington, Vermont with her family. You can find her online at Aimeepichchi.com or on Twitter at AimeePicchi. Hi Aimee, how are you today?

Aimee Picchi (02:16)
Hey, good. Thanks for having me. And I'm really happy to be here talking about flash fiction because it is one of my loves. So really happy to be here to delve into this with all of you guys.

Deborah L. Davitt (02:26)
Yeah, like we touched on in the last episode, Codex, which is a organization for Neo pro and pro writers, has every year for many years now, had a competition slash writing workshop called Weekend Warrior, which is dedicated to Flash. And I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Vylar is the inception point for Weekend Warrior. She is the person who gave us all the prompts for many years in his...

gracefully and gratefully retired from running it, but it has passed it on to other people who are continuing the fine tradition at this point in time. So thank you, Vylar, for many years of prompts and the love that you have given to the community by doing

this.

Vylar Kaftan (03:10)
You're welcome. I'm glad to be able to give back to the community because that is one of my favorite things to do. 15 years, by the way. So 15. Writing all the prompts and managing it. And sure got better when I deputized some people to help. That really was a new journey.

Deborah L. Davitt (03:12)
Hehehehe

15 years is a long time to do something.

Amanda Helms (03:20)
15. Wow.

Deborah L. Davitt (03:25)
That's one, that's one, yeah.

It does take a moment to realize that you probably should do that. I personally run a victory in verse on codex, which is a much smaller contest. And people have been volunteering to be deputies. I'm like, you don't understand. It's so small that I can really do this on my own. It's so tiny.

Vylar Kaftan (03:50)
Recon Warrior originally was small enough that I could do on my own, but yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (03:54)
Yeah, yeah, it has grown. There are literally hundreds of authors trying to be coordinated at this point in time because they're doing it right now. This is this is the season of Weekend Warrior right now as we speak. So for anybody. Yeah, that's a lot of that's a lot of writers, that's a lot of stories, and it's a lot to deal with. So but if anybody is out there and listening who isn't on Codex, all you have to do to join.

Vylar Kaftan (04:08)
about 120 people a year. Sorry, I didn't mean to.

Deborah L. Davitt (04:23)
is have one pro writing credit or have done a workshop like Clarion or something like that. Just go ahead, sign up. It's a wonderful experience in a very outgoing and warm community. So I love it. So let's go ahead and dive into our questions. My first question for you is how do you know or decide that you've really got flash on your hands as opposed to a story that ought to be revised to be longer, which is a corollary question is.

Do you start out deliberately trying to commit flash or do you generally just write the story that you have in your head and then say, oh, well, this is actually flash length. And I'm gonna start with Amanda. Do you deliberately go out to commit flash or is this something that just sort of happens along the way? How does this work for you?

Amanda Helms (05:10)
As we were talking a little bit before we started recording, I started out as a novelist, and so I had to learn how to write short. And so I am now at the point where if I want to write a flash piece, I recognize more easily if my idea is in fact flash sized. And so that is what I try to do now if I'm really saying, okay, it's time for me to write a flash because it is very difficult for me to edit down.

Deborah L. Davitt (05:15)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Amanda Helms (05:40)
I am not at all an underwriter. I kind of wish I were because I feel like it might save me some time, but I am not. And so, if I truly can't recognize when I start that an idea is flash size or not flash size, I recognize that it is not flash because I keep going and going and going. And so, yeah, yes, and I can cut some of it down, but usually not to the point where it's a cohesive.

Deborah L. Davitt (05:59)
Yeah!

Amanda Helms (06:07)
satisfying flash piece if it's really not going to fit. So, yeah, I actually in college in one of my college writing classes, one of our assignments was to write a little 100 word snippet, and I had to edit mine down, and our professor wanted to see the before and after versions, and he was like, your before version was actually better, so you may have a more verbose style.

Deborah L. Davitt (06:11)
like you, I'm set to maximum verbosity by default. So.

Yeah.

Amanda Helms (06:36)
But in any case, some clues that I have now figured out to tell me when an idea is flash sized or not, if there's a lot of backstory required to understand the character motivations because the character is acting in an unusual way, probably not flash. If you need a lot of description to understand the world building, also not flash. And me being an epic fantasy writer to begin with.

Deborah L. Davitt (07:02)
Hahaha!

Amanda Helms (07:04)
That was probably leading to a lot of issues I had early on. Your planned character arc is too big to accomplish in a flash piece. Like a whole ideology change is going to be really, really hard to pull off in Flash because you can't fit in all the events that would need to occur to justify...yeah, all the story beats. For me, personally, if I start getting to three or four characters, that's a warning sign that...

Deborah L. Davitt (07:23)
story beats.

Yeah

Amanda Helms (07:32)
maybe my story is getting beyond flash size, I can do three or four characters, but that's going to be a longer piece of flash and is probably at the point where I might be able to develop it more as well. Same for settings. And I would also say don't underestimate the power of flash.

Deborah L. Davitt (07:47)
Mm-hmm.

Amanda Helms (07:52)
of a non-traditional format, if you're writing flash. There's a reason why a lot of flash might be, you know, list format or journal entry, or I had one a while back that was a, presented as an essay written by a high school student. So, and I actually really enjoy those as well, but I'm getting a little off topic, so I'll stop.

Deborah L. Davitt (08:17)
Okay, I think that's a very comprehensive answer of what's not flash. Aimee, how about you? How do you How do you start with flash? Do you decide to commit flash upfront? Or do you have any way to recognize that your idea is flash shaped or not?

Aimee Picchi (08:35)
Yeah, I mean, I would say actually most of my stories do start as flash. Um, my, you mentioned in the intro that I'm a journalist and I think maybe it comes out of being a journalist that usually my articles aren't more than a thousand words. So I think I naturally write into a flash size length. Like it's just kind of the way I think about stories. And, um, I have to say that the, the competitions at Codex, uh, weekend warrior and flash over the universe.

Deborah L. Davitt (08:51)
Mm-hmm.

Aimee Picchi (09:01)
I love doing them, so I often am just writing, writing every week. And I get a lot of stories out that way. So I just love Flash. I think in Flash length, I think. But that being said, I have done a lot of stories. Flash stories have started, you know, a thousand words or less. And then I realized, oh, this really does need to be longer. And sometimes you get those comments, we were talking about this earlier, like, you know, this is intriguing, but it really needs to be longer. That's like a very typical comment you might get.

Deborah L. Davitt (09:30)
Mm-hmm.

Aimee Picchi (09:31)
and warrior from the other readers in your group. And I think sometimes kind of what Amanda was saying, like you realize, OK, role building, it's too complicated. I need more space for this. The character, this is a character piece that really needs more, more space and more breathing time. Sometimes it's just like a line in a story, a flash story that you you. And when you read the story, you realize, oh, this is a scene. Like this one line actually needs to be its own scene. And I need to.

Deborah L. Davitt (09:58)
Yeah.

Aimee Picchi (09:59)
was out and go with those, you know, explore that scene and the implications of it. Sometimes the characters just have more to say. But, you know, one thing I really love about Flash is that it gives you that idea, that nugget that you can expand into a longer story. And I've had, I don't, I'm not sure how many stories of mine ended up as like four or five thousand word stories from Flash, but I have several that started out that way.

Deborah L. Davitt (10:26)
Yeah.

Aimee Picchi (10:29)
So I think flash is great when it works as flash, but it's also great just to write flash and realize, okay, I can make this into something bigger. I definitely have never had a flash become a novel. I don't know if anyone's ever done that, maybe, but. But, and I think.

Deborah L. Davitt (10:38)
Mm-hmm

Hahaha

a poem become an novella if that counts. Yes.

Aimee Picchi (10:49)
Really? That's great. I love that. But so, you know, I think it's just really when you reread a flash piece and realize, okay, is this working on its own merits as flash? Or does this really need to be something longer and, you know, more weight given to certain themes, characters, developments, worldbuilding? I think that's kind of how you figure it out. I also want to say what works for flash, I think, because it is so short, often like,

tipping your hat to tropes, tipping your hat to certain ideas that as a science fiction fantasy writer we're all really familiar with, that you don't have to go into a lot of world building. I think that can help you. It goes a long way with a flash piece and keeping it short, but yet getting across the point because as science fiction fantasy readers we're familiar with a lot of tropes and different ideas. The Princess and the Dragon or whatever, you know that type of thing. You don't have to spend a lot of time exploring the backstory.

Deborah L. Davitt (11:21)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Aimee Picchi (11:48)
But I'll leave it at that.

Deborah L. Davitt (11:50)
Okay, thank you. Again, a nice comprehensive answer. Vylar, how do you know that you've got Flash on your hands or are you deliberately writing Flash on purpose? Do you ever, and I'm gonna start you with a different question which will link us into the next segment, which is what is the point in which you start the story and how far from the ending can you reasonably start in Flash?

Vylar Kaftan (12:18)
Well, let's see. I'm not sure I'm the right person to answer the question simply because my superpower is, I just know how long something is when I write it. Within 10%, whether it's flash, short story or novel, I can predict the word count pretty well. What, yeah, I don't know, I can't tell you. What that implies to me is that I actually shape the story to the word count I'm looking for.

Deborah L. Davitt (12:29)
Mm-hmm.

Wow.

Mm-hmm.

Vylar Kaftan (12:44)
to some degree. I mean, I obviously can tell the difference between flash and novel. That's pretty easy. So it's very rare for me to start a story and discover it's not what I... it's longer, shorter than I thought it would be. That just doesn't happen to me. So the way I know I have a flash idea generally is it is a story with one turn in it. That's it.

Deborah L. Davitt (12:50)
Mm-hmm.

Okay, that makes sense. I like to personally think of it as maybe having two to three story beats

at most. And when I sit down and I do outline a lot more for Flash than I do for other stories, because I'm sort of this weird mixer, a mix of pancer and plotter. But when I write Flash, I basically do write down, you have a hundred words for the intro, Deborah.

Vylar Kaftan (13:15)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (13:36)
That's all you get. That's what all you're allowed. Then that's where that idea goes. Then you have 200 words for rising action. That's where those ideas go. And then I find that helps a little bit.

Vylar Kaftan (13:52)
Who would have liked one prompt we did back in like 2009? There was a prompt about this. It actually structured, it gave you a structure saying, right, you know, you get this much for the intro, then yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (13:57)
Yeah, it is.

Yeah, some of my flash has just come organically as a pantsing sort of thing. It was just, I started writing and it was a perfect flow and I got exactly to the end at a thousand words and it was a beautiful thing. It doesn't always happen that way though. So if you're having trouble writing to that length, I really do recommend trying to change out how you write it and actually try to do a structure on paper first.

it'll give you a better idea of how much room you have to do things. And I'm going to bop back to Amanda with, where is the point where you start your story and where's the point at which you end the story? Because how far from the ending can you reason, because I like to start at the beginning of history or the beginning of your time. And I generally want to end up at the end of the universe and the heat death of it. And I want to go into detail at every point in between, because I am a novelist in my heart.

With Flash, you have to kind of condense that a little bit. And since you're in the same boat as me, how do you know where to start and how do you know where to end?

Amanda Helms (15:13)
Well, it's an answer where I would say it depends. Excuse me. In Lay Out Early is the old saw, I think I first heard on writing excuses, but it definitely applies all the more so to Flash. I think one time, me again, being an epic fantasy writer, I attempted one piece where I was like, I'm gonna try to do like the climax of this story. And so I got as close to the climax as I could, and I was like, look at this.

it's its own little arc and everybody was saying this is the start of like a YA fantasy novel this is not this nice self-insane little arc and I was like damn it um sorry I don't know if we can swear on this um okay uh so it really depends I mean what happened was I started trying to think about smaller changes so no you really can't get into the

Deborah L. Davitt (15:51)
Hahaha!

Oh absolutely, yes.

Amanda Helms (16:12)
world-changing situations. And so I started trying to think about smaller moments, like in my shopping story, okay, I was like, okay, I have space for a little setup to try to explain my concept. But that was another one that wound up being a little bit longer. So I crammed myself as close to the end as I could, but I was cramming in all the character moments, all the characterization I could. So...

Deborah L. Davitt (16:38)
Mm-hmm. That is a very nice full story, and when we get to that, I will really enjoy discussing it with you, because I want to see how... No, by all means. I don't mind a little foreshadowing.

Amanda Helms (16:41)
Yeah. Okay, yeah, sorry, I was getting...

Okay. But yeah, that's, like I said, it depends. I try to go with in late, out early. In terms of when I decide to end a piece, it kind of depends on, and this is going to the next question as well, for me, it depends upon the goal of the flash piece. Am I going more for emotional resonance? Am I trying to let the reader draw their own conclusions? And you know, then maybe I want to withhold

Deborah L. Davitt (17:05)
Mm-hmm.

Amanda Helms (17:16)
more and end it a little earlier.

Vylar Kaftan (17:16)
a little earlier.

Amanda Helms (17:18)
If I'm trying to make sure that there's a full arc for the character, I have to try to figure out, well, what's that one moment where the character has their epiphany, even if I don't explicitly state it? So it really, really depends upon my goals with the individual piece.

Deborah L. Davitt (17:34)
Okay, that is perfectly valid as an answer, thank you. Aimee, how far from the ending can you reasonably start in Flash, or should you begin in Flash, and how do you know when you've reached the end? Because sometimes I just, I find myself still writing and going, no, this isn't the end yet.

Aimee Picchi (17:50)
Yeah, so.

Deborah L. Davitt (17:56)
I'm still writing. This isn't the end yet. I'm 1500 words in. I still haven't found an end. I need to back out completely and completely re-examine this piece.

Aimee Picchi (18:07)
Yeah, well, I tend to start my flash stories really in the middle of the action. And partially this is because a lot of my flash pieces are kind of what Amanda was talking about, like in experimental formats or non-traditional formats. I think it's kind of interesting because, you know, flash is so short, but I think it allows you a lot more room for experimentation. Like a story that uses unusual format works in flash, but if you...

Deborah L. Davitt (18:21)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Aimee Picchi (18:34)
pushed it to 5,000 words, people might start to get a little irritated with a list story that's 5,000 words. No one's going to want to read that. But I think when you're using those non-traditional formats, I had one flash piece that was in my The Asshole post. I don't know if it was a Craigslist listing. You're really just starting right in the middle of what's happening, what problem this person's having. And then how do I know the ending?

Amanda Helms (18:37)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (18:38)
Yeah.

Vylar Kaftan (18:42)
using this.

Deborah L. Davitt (18:56)
Mm-hmm.

Aimee Picchi (19:04)
Like my often my flash pieces, I don't have like traditional endings or resolutions. It's more of like a They end maybe with a Multiple pathways interpretations. I pose a question. You don't have to tie everything up That's one. I mean you can do this in longer stories, too But I think it especially works in flash fiction that you have sort of like more open-ended Endings, you know, so I think partially it gets

Deborah L. Davitt (19:19)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah.

Aimee Picchi (19:34)
the twist, which I know is one of your questions, so we can talk about that later. But I think it speaks to that. Yeah, it speaks to the twist in the story.

Deborah L. Davitt (19:37)
Yeah, we absolutely can.

Yeah, and I'm gonna just move to Vylar with that, which is the

twist. Absolutely, yes.

Vylar Kaftan (19:49)
Can I add something to the previous discussion first? Okay. I just wanted to bring up, I think you can do epic flash fiction. I wrote something called the Orange Tree Sacrifice, which is one we're not doing today, but you can do epic flash fiction. It's really hard. I actually set out to myself, set myself, how would I do that if I were going to do it? And you have to rely on some tropes and a lot of implication and some really, really big imagery because it's that story.

Deborah L. Davitt (20:01)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Vylar Kaftan (20:20)
has to fill a huge thing. And the story actually could be the last chapter of a novel, you know, I've written. But it's not easy. I think it's the kind of thing that you do as a challenge once you've done short fiction. I would say that's not a thing you should try until you can really confidently do a small piece with the focus in closer. It's like learning photography, you know, you learn how to take landscapes, you learn how to...

Deborah L. Davitt (20:25)
Yes, absolutely.

Vylar Kaftan (20:47)
zero in on a flower or whatever. It's just different styles, but you want to start small with flash fiction.

Deborah L. Davitt (20:53)
I would like to recommend that people check out the Orange Tree Sacrifice. We decided not to do it because it also had large components of body horror and some other trigger warnings that I didn't want to handle right this moment because it would be much more appropriate to a horror episode. But it's a really excellent story with incredibly vivid language. And if you guys want to check it out, I believe Avialar has it on her website. So by all means, go there and read

it. It's good.

Vylar Kaftan (21:22)
All of my fiction is reprinted on Vylarcaftain.net, including my nebula winning story, The Weight of the Sunrise.

Deborah L. Davitt (21:30)
Nice.

Vylar Kaftan (21:30)
Yeah. The only thing not there is my novella, Her Silhouette Drawn in Water, which is available through tour.com or wherever you purchase your fine books.

Deborah L. Davitt (21:43)
We have used the term fine venue and fine books repeatedly on this podcast. It sounds like we're selling wine. It was at least two intros and now we've used it a third time. So now I feel like we're pushing the aroma and bouquet of a fine wine.

Vylar Kaftan (21:47)
Oh, all right, okay. Yeah.

This is a, yes, this has been aged a few years. You compare it with a nice bit of cheesy deliciousness and have a nice evening in. Queer Psychic Thriller plus cheese. Yeah. I don't know, what kind of cheese goes with the Queer Psychic Thriller? I'm thinking something sharp. Camembert? Okay. And.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:05)
Hehehehehehe

Yes, I think that would be a wonderful way to spend your time.

Camembert. Camembert would. All right, so we've been talking about endings and there's a convention in flash fiction that a lot of people wanna end on a twist. I personally think that subverting expectations works very well. I find sometimes that a twist ending sometimes feels almost too pat for me.

but a good twist done well is undeniably effective. So have you ever done a twist ending Amanda? Or do you not do that?

Amanda Helms (23:01)
I think I tend not to do it, or at least as I define twists, because yes, I agree that they are hard to pull off in Flash. When I feel like they're done well, I feel like twists re-conceptualize the story for me rather than kind of negating it. I've read some where...

Deborah L. Davitt (23:19)
Mm-hmm.

Amanda Helms (23:22)
What keeps occurring to me is Planet of the Apes, which that twist ending would not work in Flash because it'd be like, well, what was the point? And for me, I like them when they are hinted at a little bit where the story is still a step or two ahead of me. And so I don't want to see it immediately or else it's too obvious. And I'm like, well, thanks.

Deborah L. Davitt (23:31)
Hehehehehehehehehehe

Mm-hmm.

Hahaha

Amanda Helms (23:52)
But it's very tricky to do. I as a reader can feel cheated and like the whole piece I just read was a setup for a punchline. And then I wonder why I read it in first place. So but like I said once that reconceptualize the story and make me rethink it and go back and oh the clues were there all along but now I have a view on it. Those are what I enjoy the most.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:13)
Yeah.

We had a story last episode, which I'll just touch on briefly, which was My Summer of George by Sam Rubbleline. And it did very effectively set up clues throughout basically the repetition of the flies that were in the story. And then the not a twist, but foreshadowed ending is that the narrator is dead. But he also used everybody else is just

dead alive and waiting to be dead and filled with flies. So it was a horrific piece filled with dread and existentialism and everything like that. But you gradually got there by virtue of the fact that they were so carefully setting up everything every step along the way. So it wasn't a twist, but it did have a bit of a shock at the end, which was nice. Amanda, no, Aimee.

Do you tend to ever use the twist or do you tend to go for subversion of the tropes that you were talking about? Or what do you wind up doing to upset or not upset expectations at the ending of a flash piece?

Aimee Picchi (25:36)
Yeah, I

Deborah L. Davitt (25:43)
We could be.

Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Aimee Picchi (26:00)
And but maybe the way you're thinking of twists is more extreme than how I'm thinking of it. Like I was thinking about this and thinking about like the very famous six word story, which is attributed to Hemingway. I'm not sure if he actually wrote it, but for sale, baby shoes, never worn, right? I mean, it has a twist ending. It opens it up, that very short story, in ways that you understand it the first four words very differently. So I guess that's what I was thinking.

Deborah L. Davitt (26:15)
Who knows? Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Aimee Picchi (26:28)
as a twist. So I do, I mean, I do use them because I think that's what makes flash really effective is like the ending it packs can really pack a powerful punch in just illuminating the story in new ways. And I think that the ending like to be an effective like I would call a twist ending, it just has to be inevitable, but surprising. And I think that's true for any good ending of a story, like it needs to work like it needs to come to the ending where

Vylar Kaftan (26:29)
Thank you.

Aimee Picchi (26:54)
you are as a reader, you understand it differently, understand what's happened in the story differently when you get to the end, but you're not like, what the hell, like, what did they do here? Why I feel like the wolf can pull over my eyes. That's not gonna work. And I think maybe punch.

Deborah L. Davitt (26:59)
Mm-hmm.

And ending to me should feel inevitable. It should, yeah.

Aimee Picchi (27:14)
inevitable and surprising. Yeah. And I guess that's what I was thinking was a twist. So yes, I, according to my definition, I do like that. I do try to use it. But I don't like punchline endings. So yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (27:27)
Yes. Yeah. What I found when I was reading, when Escape Artists was doing their various 500 word flash fiction contests, is that you would go through 117 stories or so, and most of them were trying to end on that twist. And after you've read about 45 of them in a row, it just is, yeah, I know, I've seen this. No.

uh... i

and for it, but for it to again, have that feeling of inevitability about it. But that's me and Vylar, how about you? How do you feel about twists?

Vylar Kaftan (28:32)
I'm in Camp Aimee. It's a great place. We need to define what a twist is with this discussion, because there's a difference between when writers are always going around and going, stop doing twist endings, because most people think that they have to put a joke or something to give it oomph at the end, and they structure it like a joke, which you know, a decent joke that takes a few paragraphs and leads to a really funny punch line.

Deborah L. Davitt (28:40)
Yes. Yes, I think so.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Vylar Kaftan (29:02)
is a joke, it is not a flash fiction piece. It could be if it's done well, but it's usually just a joke. So if you can do a joke that is also a flash piece, great. For me, the key is the ending needs to be inevitable. It needs to be the ending that has to go on the story. It needs to be a story where the writer thinks, where the reader, excuse me, thinks that they know where it's going, and then it doesn't. And the reader says, but you know what?

Deborah L. Davitt (29:05)
Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yes.

Vylar Kaftan (29:29)
that ending it has is better than where I thought it was going and I love it. You should be able to at the end of a good flash fiction piece, because it's so short, you should get to the end and go, wow, really? That's what was happening? Oh, and then go back and read it with entirely new eyes and it should be able to be read like in a brand new story almost. You'll see in almost all of my short fiction, the first sentence of the story.

Deborah L. Davitt (29:33)
Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Vylar Kaftan (29:56)
It has an entirely different meaning when you read it after you've read the story. It means something very different than what you thought it would or has a different nuance to it. It just, there's something much deeper going on with that first sentence than you thought there was, and the ending should circle you back around to the first sentence where you go, Oh, now if I read it this way, Oh, that wasn't a friendly comment.

Deborah L. Davitt (29:59)
Mm-hmm.

I like that.

Yes.

Circular structure is something we brought up in the last episode. Circular structure is very satisfying to the reader, ending where you began, but then having gone just that little bit further, so it's a spiral, is really effective.

Amanda Helms (30:18)
Yeah.

Vylar Kaftan (30:31)
The problem is a lot of people do a twist that isn't earned. For example, you write your story about the mom and daughter fighting about school. And then in the end, the daughter goes to school and the mom takes off her human suit and she's an alien. Okay, but what in the story set us up for that? Now, it's possible to be done right. For example, that doesn't work if it's just like, mom, I hate school. Well, you gotta go anyway. But if the mom's saying some really weird stuff, like,

Deborah L. Davitt (30:35)
Yes.

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

Amanda Helms (30:46)
Uh-huh.

Deborah L. Davitt (30:51)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Vylar Kaftan (31:00)
you know, oh, but your flagella are not yet developed. And the daughter says, what did you say, mom? I can't hear you, I'm in the bathroom. And the mom corrects that too. Did you do your algebra homework? Then maybe you're going somewhere with that because now the question is, does the daughter know about the mom being something weird? Does the mom hide the, you see, you start getting some places. And then maybe you take it to some sort of thing where the mother, you know, maybe the daughter finds

Deborah L. Davitt (31:14)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Amanda Helms (31:22)
Mm-hmm.

Vylar Kaftan (31:30)
you know, a stray, a, you know, alien suit in the bedroom and start, and that's where you're starting to tap into selkie myth. And anybody who's familiar with selkie myth might be familiar with it and start to go, huh, there's like an alien suit caught here. And I think I'm just writing a flash fiction story on your podcast, if that's okay. I was just going there. I was just starting to write it.

Deborah L. Davitt (31:39)
Yes.

Aimee Picchi (31:47)
I'm going to go ahead and close the video.

Deborah L. Davitt (31:48)
That's fine, that's fine. By all means, I look forward to seeing it published because I know it will be. All right, so we're gonna...

Vylar Kaftan (31:53)
Sure.

Ideas are easy. Development of ideas is much harder.

Deborah L. Davitt (32:00)
Yeah. So to sort of combine my next two questions, when you're over word count, you can be way over word count or you can be a little over word count. What are some tips and tricks that you have to cut whole scenes when you're nowhere near word count? How do you, you know, go, yeah, it's for, it's, it's currently 2000 words and Weekend Warrior is 750 and that's a really tight corset to try and fit something into, but something's got to go.

Something's gotta go. How do you cut whole scenes? How do you refocus the entire piece down to being, this is a question more for Amanda and me than maybe for the people who know what they're writing when they're writing it. Um.

Vylar Kaftan (32:41)
I can get a short answer, which is this never happens to me. I'm sorry. It just doesn't. My answer to that is don't do that. And if you do write a 2,000-word story and you only have 750 words, you should probably just try again. If you're at 1,000 words, oh yeah. If you're at 1,000 words, you can probably figure out how to cut it down. I usually say more than about 1,200, just don't. But then again, other people write differently, so you do you, but that's all I have.

Deborah L. Davitt (32:55)
Yeah, I have often done that.

Amanda Helms (32:55)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:01)
Yes.

Yeah.

Amanda Helms (33:09)
Nah, yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:10)
I've actually gotten a 2,000 word story down to a Weekend Warrior

length, and then I've re-expanded it again. Re-inflated it. But how about some tips and tricks on how to cut words when you're close to word count but not quite there yet, which might be very useful to people who are doing Weekend Warrior right now as this contest goes on. Amanda, how do you cut just words and how do you cut scenes if you do?

Vylar Kaftan (33:13)
I believe it.

Amanda Helms (33:35)
I'm kind of with Vylar where if I have a 2k piece I just try again with a new concept because it actually makes me feel depressed to try to cut down the story. And then I have a young kid and it just feels like I'm wasting time because I already know that I'm going to grow the story again. So I usually just try over. But if I'm trying to go from 1000 to 750, I mean there's the standard.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:41)
Hehehehe

Hahaha!

Yes, exactly.

Amanda Helms (34:02)
cutting out your weasel words, your that's, your filtering language, like she thought it seemed, passive voice, so on. But I would also say that maybe the rule of three doesn't always have to apply in Flash. We were talking about how, you know, with the shorter piece, people are willing to hang with you a little longer. So I found, yes, I love callbacks, love them, love them.

But I have found that sometimes if I already have my rule of three in there, maybe I can cut out the middle one. So I only have the one thing, I just try to make sure that my first image of that theme or motif really, really pops. And then I'm very careful about my callback to it. And so but sometimes I don't need my middle one. So sometimes I'm like, yes, I get the I get to cut whole sentences by removing this little piece here.

Deborah L. Davitt (34:24)
Mm-hmm.

That's a good idea.

Aimee, how do you cut?

Aimee Picchi (34:52)
Um, well, I'm just going to make a comment too about Weekend Warrior that 750 words is really hard. And every year I do it at Vylar, I'm like, geez, this is like so sadistic for writers to try to have 750 words. It's a really good

Deborah L. Davitt (34:59)
Yeah.

But it's a good exercise. It is a very good exercise.

Amanda Helms (35:08)
It's, yeah, really good exercise.

Vylar Kaftan (35:09)
What about that surprises you that I would set up a sadistic goal like that?

Deborah L. Davitt (35:13)
Hehehehehehe

Aimee Picchi (35:15)
And I have to say, the back of my mind, I'm always like, all right, some of the words, but I can't expand it to a thousand words and it'll still be flash. So I sort of work that little margin of expansion when I'm writing. But anyway, to get it down, I would say I agree with totally what Weiler and Manda said. So I don't want to repeat what they said, but I just want to point out that I think, you know, an effective flash piece also does need some, it needs good texture. It can't be bare bones.

Deborah L. Davitt (35:25)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Aimee Picchi (35:43)
cutting so much to the point where you only have the bones left, like, maybe you need to rethink what kind of length of story this is. But that being said, like, maybe you need one really or two poetic phrases in the story. It doesn't have to be like every paragraph. So I would just say, like, you really just have to think about what's essential, what works, what will leave you with a good flash piece with some texture and beauty about it, but get that length down to what you're looking for.

Deborah L. Davitt (35:59)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Aimee Picchi (36:12)
Um, but I, I agree too, if it's like 2000 words, 1500 words, you might not be able to cut it down to 750 words. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (36:20)
Just put that one to the side, come back to it when you have time, let it expand out to its natural length of 6K, and go from there. Vylar.

Aimee Picchi (36:30)
Right.

Vylar Kaftan (36:32)
lucky I didn't set it to 500, which is what I originally was going to do.

Aimee Picchi (36:36)
Oh my god.

Deborah L. Davitt (36:36)
Oh, that is the... I have written those for Escape Pod. It is really, really hard.

Amanda Helms (36:36)
Oh wow.

Deborah L. Davitt (36:43)
It is really hard.

Vylar Kaftan (36:43)
Well, the reason I changed to 750 for Weekend Warrior, like I said, I was thinking that, and I eventually went to 750 because I thought 500 is terrific for literary flash fiction, it really is. But science fiction often requires just a little bit more setup, not a lot. You can use tropes, but you need just a little bit to kind of get your concept in there. And then over time,

Amanda Helms (36:43)
Mm-mm.

Deborah L. Davitt (36:55)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Vylar Kaftan (37:06)
I think a lot of people took their 750s and made them 1,000. And so 1,000 has become something of a standard for science fiction now over time. And I actually think codex influenced that. I think we can warrior in codex with an influence on that development. But the definition of flash fiction has always been a little bit fluid. I have seen it go up to 1,500. I refuse to accept any definition beyond that. I don't even think 1,500 is flash fiction at all.

Deborah L. Davitt (37:14)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Vylar Kaftan (37:31)
And the reason I come down to, I could accept a thousand, that's fine with me, 750 or a thousand is fine. The reason I can accept about a thousand is it just, the difference in the type of story. Once you get to 1500, there's actual scenes and maybe a little bit of development, it's a little bit different of a thing. It is possible that there are stories of different lengths just because of the way they're written that you could have a flash fiction that's 1400 and a.

Deborah L. Davitt (37:43)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Vylar Kaftan (37:58)
a full short story that's 1200. It's not likely, but you can do it.

Deborah L. Davitt (38:03)
Yeah, I will definitely say something that I said on the last episode, which is once you've finished your writing and you're looking at ways to revise, it's a good time to look at how you've organized your information, because sometimes I have found that I can just, oh, I've repeated that idea and it doesn't need to be repeated. The second time I said it, I said it better. Let's just grab that sentence and put it into the first slot and get rid of that entire sentence there.

and then I have removed an entire sentence, I've reduced my word count, and I've chosen the better way of expressing it. So don't do it while you're writing necessarily, but when you're doing the revision portion of the agenda, look at your organization, look at how you've structured your ideas, see if there's repetition, things like that. And with that, we're going to change topics, and we're going to talk about each person's individual works.

And we're going to start with Amanda with the story, Shopping at the Soul Patch Consignment Store, which appeared in Worlds of Possibility August 2023. This is a Julia Rios production, and it's a lovely story. In this surrealist piece, a mother is shopping for pieces of soul. I'm sorry, I just heard echoes, and

I will cut that. I will cut this out. Okay.

Vylar Kaftan (39:25)
Sorry, I think that was me. I apologize.

Is it better now?

Deborah L. Davitt (39:32)
Mmm, no. Let's try that one more time. That's better, yes. I don't hear myself now. That's good.

Vylar Kaftan (39:37)
Okay, sorry, that was me attempting to bring up the story to look at it, sorry about that.

Deborah L. Davitt (39:43)
It's okay. All right, we'll just cut out this piece. That's fine. In this surrealist piece, a mother is shopping for pieces of soul that might help fill in the blanks in her son's spirit, filling in the places where he'd given up hobbies and interests before, trying to ensure that he's filled out before he goes to college. But he doesn't wanna be filled out with other people's aims and lost yearnings. He wants to be accepted for himself, empty spaces and all, which he comes to realize in the end.

Vylar Kaftan (39:44)
I'll do it on my phone. I'm sorry.

Deborah L. Davitt (40:10)
This is a lovely and poignant piece. Where did the idea come from Amanda?

Amanda Helms (40:15)
Well, this is another Codex Week in Warrior story. I believe this was from the 2023, and my prompt here was, where is the weirdest place for a hole? And I went pretty immediately to Hole in the Soul, which, I mean, it's an awful rhyme, but that's what came to me. I forget exactly how I came to the consignment store, but...

you know, being a parent and my daughter was only three when I first wrote this, but I'm already seeing how she's becoming her own little person and already aware of, you know, I want to encourage her to, you know, like some of the things I like, but also trying to accept that she is her own person and, you know, I don't want to force her into my own vision. And so, of course, I was thinking this is all the more significant when

Deborah L. Davitt (40:59)
Mm-hmm.

Amanda Helms (41:10)
the when the child is a teenager, starting to think about going off to college and all of that. And, you know, thinking back to when I was a teenager and similar feelings. And so, and again, when I was trying to go for a small amount of change, I was like, okay, a mother can rethink how she's interacting with her child. And when she sees actual fear can, oh, I need to pull back. And so this was an arc I thought I could manage in a flash piece.

Deborah L. Davitt (41:12)
Oh yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Amanda Helms (41:40)
It just went from a weirdest place for a hole, hole in a soul, and then parenting fields. And that's it.

Deborah L. Davitt (41:50)
Well, I think it's a very dynamic piece and I loved it. So I think you accomplished exactly what you were setting out to do. And the fact that there is change in the way she views her son and the way she views herself interacting with him just gives it enormous texture and a lot of beauty. So thank you.

Amanda Helms (42:09)
Oh, no, thank you. I was very pleased that Julia picked this up for their project. Yeah, this was one of my favorite stories to come out of that year, Weekend Warrior.

Deborah L. Davitt (42:24)
Does anybody else want to say anything about this

story before we move on to Vylor?

Vylar Kaftan (42:26)
before you move on to what?

I just think the idea of a hole in the soul is very resonant because a lot of us know what that feels like, especially after the last couple of years. I think everyone's taken some psychic damage in the last few years and it's very resonant the idea of trying to fulfill or repair or do anything to try to close the hole or repair it or anything. And so I think that's why that works for a lot of people.

Deborah L. Davitt (42:38)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I would agree with that. Vylar, she has a story called Scar Stories, which appeared in the Bandersnatch Anthology in 2007. It's available on her website, so I totally encourage you to go read it. In this unconventionally told tale, which borders on the surreal, a stranger at a party asks people about their scars, leading to a chain of individual stories, each a little snippet out of time.

And this chain of stories begins with a mundane and steadily becomes stranger and stranger. I love the climactic moment when the punch bowl proudly states that it has no scars and the partygoers break it and use the shards to carve new scars upon one another. What does that climactic moment mean to you and what do you want people to take away from this story?

Vylar Kaftan (43:43)
Punch bowls or jerks? No, okay, that's not actually my point. The scar stories, my intent is for people to understand that we all have, everybody's got something and sometimes the stories are more interesting than others. It's true, I have some interesting ones and some kind of boring ones. And they all have some sort of, it's like something is written upon your body and it's gonna be there forever. And that scar is usually.

Aimee Picchi (43:45)
I'm gonna put...

Deborah L. Davitt (43:46)
Hahaha!

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Vylar Kaftan (44:11)
in a way non-consensual in the sense that you did not ask for it, but you're stuck with it. And life is like that, you know, there's a lot of things that happen to us that damage us that we can't do anything about. But at least that aspect is part of being human. It unifies all of us to be, it's part of being alive, it's part of being real. To have damage done to you, it's part of who you are at this point in your life. And those damages,

Deborah L. Davitt (44:16)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Vylar Kaftan (44:39)
You certainly can take steps to heal them, but even if there's a mark left for all time, you still have your potential to be yourself, to be human, to be shaped by it in healthy ways.

Deborah L. Davitt (44:53)
like that. Where did you get the notion for this story? Because this would have been during a weekend Warriors reign where you were 15 years running it, but I don't think that you wrote it

for it, did you?

Vylar Kaftan (45:05)
No, no, I never, I never entered Weak and Warrior, I just ran it. It didn't seem fair to me to generate the prompts and enter that. I sometimes wrote alongside, like I didn't enter, but I wrote some things. This one was just written separately.

I don't remember, it's been a long time, I don't remember exactly why I started this. I think I just started the story and wrote it at the length it would be and it turned out quite short, you know? I mean, I realized it wasn't very long, but I was like, okay, well, and then I just added it to the length I wanted. And my favorite rejection, I got it. Most stories get rejected multiple times before they're purchased. And my favorite rejection on this one was,

Deborah L. Davitt (45:24)
Yeah it has.

Mm-hmm.

Oh yes. Oh yes.

Vylar Kaftan (45:49)
A well-known editor wrote back to me a simple note that said I don't understand anything that happened after the cat started talking And I said I thought to myself I'm like that is that is a clear sign. You're the wrong person for the story. Okay That's where that's the turn. That's the first point where something non That's not a person is starting to talk and all of a sudden if the cat starts talking Yeah, it's suddenly a magical realism moment if the cat's talking you're suddenly like

Deborah L. Davitt (45:56)
Hahaha!

Yeah

Vylar Kaftan (46:15)
Okay, something's different here. This is this is not the story I thought I was in

Deborah L. Davitt (46:20)
Yeah, but it works. And it's...

Vylar Kaftan (46:23)
Some people, other people, if they're more literal and they're reading it like, if they're reading it very literally, that's very confusing when the cat starts talking. Like why is this cat talk? You know?

Deborah L. Davitt (46:27)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

The cat talking didn't get me, the party itself talking was when I was getting there going, this is a little more surreal than I was expecting, but I can roll

Vylar Kaftan (46:42)
We're gonna have to go.

Deborah L. Davitt (46:46)
with it. So.

Vylar Kaftan (46:46)
But you notice that the cat comes before the cat has to come before the party because it's less weird than the party Yeah

Deborah L. Davitt (46:50)
Yes, because it's a blinker signal. I'm making a left turn.

Amanda Helms (46:52)
It's, yep, graduation.

Deborah L. Davitt (46:57)
And it's very carefully and very deliberately done so that everything escalates over time because it wouldn't make much sense for them to all fall on each other and start carving scars in each other in this wild abandonment of the orgy of violence if the cat hadn't spoken first. So, yeah, so.

Vylar Kaftan (47:13)
Yeah, which is a sentence I've never heard before in my life, so I appreciate that.

Deborah L. Davitt (47:22)
Aimee, nine lies you tell yourself about ghost hunting, which I think I had the privilege of reading during Weekend Warrior the year that you wrote it. In this story, the narrator is the female sidekick of the gentleman ghost hunter whose past is littered with deceased former sidekicks, at least one of whom, as a ghost, is trying to reach out to the narrator to save her from a similar grisly fate.

I loved how this story removes from denial to acceptance to survival with the narrator and how it ends with a gentleman ghost hunter earning his well-deserved comeuppance because this is not a twist, but it's a dynamic story. And I love the fact that it's about survival as opposed to it could very easily have been she joined all the other ghosts in the house, but it didn't. And I'm very grateful for that. So how did you come up with this idea? And what is your favorite thing about this story?

Aimee Picchi (48:12)
Yeah.

Um, this was a weekend warrior story as well. And, um, you know, it really, it, well, the prompt was, um, it was a sentence. It was true love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen. And this is really my super now. Oh, I had such a good coat, but isn't like my supernatural reaction story. Like I watched almost every season of that show and I just hate the way women in that show are just dispatched. Like the sidekicks are just

Deborah L. Davitt (48:30)
I wrote one for that one too.

Mm-hmm.

Aimee Picchi (48:46)
and they die for stupid reasons because the main story in that show was about the two brothers. But I was thinking about it and thinking about love and I was thinking about toxic relationships as I think that quote kind of hints about sort of, that a lot of relationships aren't happy. And that how a lot of relationships men use in heterosexual relationships use women as...

Deborah L. Davitt (48:52)
Mm-hmm.

Aimee Picchi (49:12)
stop gaps or to kind of take the psychic damage from the relatives, from the everything that's going on in the world. You know, it's the woman in the relationship who have to deal with the trauma and the suffering and the man gets off, you know, scot-free. So it's kind of about that specific type of toxic relationship and heterosexual dynamics in relationships. So that's kind of where it came from. And the one thing I really love about it is, I mean, I would consider this a twist. It's like the use of the second...

Deborah L. Davitt (49:19)
Mm-hmm.

Aimee Picchi (49:42)
second voice, second person, because usually in second person, it's the narrator talking to themselves. And this you realize at the end of the story that it's actually the ghost, a ghost of one of the sidekick trying, she's haunting the current sidekick, but for good, she's trying to save her from going down the same path that she went down. And it does have a happy ending. And I wanted to show that there can be happy endings that sometimes it's not the relationship itself. It's getting out of that relationship and getting out of a toxic situation.

Deborah L. Davitt (49:52)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Aimee Picchi (50:11)
happy ending. And so anyway, that's that was the twist for me. And that's what I really liked. And when Wendy bought this for nightmare, she so much you got to the ending, it made her dance because I think she also like that sort of reframing of like we're talking about earlier, reframed how you understand the story and who was actually taught and where this was coming from. Yeah, but it's also example of it's a

Deborah L. Davitt (50:13)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Yeah.

Aimee Picchi (50:37)
probably only works in a flash format. I think if this was longer, probably wouldn't work as well. And it's slightly longer, it's 12. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (50:40)
Mm-hmm.

It works perfectly in the space that it has. It works perfectly in the space that it has, so yeah.

Aimee Picchi (50:50)
It's been 1200 words, actually. I expanded it from 750 to 1200. So that's one of those. Got a little bit bigger.

Deborah L. Davitt (50:55)
But it works.

I loved it as it was when I read it because I remember giving this one a very high score. But I cannot tell you what you added. It just feels very full and exactly right for the length that it is. So yay, golf clap. Back to Amanda. The Sunnyside daycare employees chat log.

Aimee Picchi (51:16)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (51:25)
post alien takeover, which appeared in Small Wonders magazine in 2022. This is a story

Amanda Helms (51:30)
And sorry, it was originally published in Unidentified Funny Objects 9 in 2022. Yeah, yeah, it's at the very end of the story on, but the free-to-read version is Small Wonders.

Deborah L. Davitt (51:36)
Oh, it was? Okay, I'm so sorry.

Okay, well, by all means, let's give a credit where it's due to unidentified funny objects, which is an anthology that I have longed to get into, but I don't write funny enough, unfortunately. I tend to hit this bittersweet, elegiac note, and then I can't deviate from it, so... This is a story in an unusual format, that of literally a chat log between a former human employee of a nursery school and the alien who took her job.

It's a

delight seeing the aliens slowly coming to terms with and learning respect for the human they displaced and finally asking for her help and getting her a better living wage for doing the hard work of raising tiny humans. How did you come up with this idea and why did you decide to structure it in this dialogue centric manner?

Vylar Kaftan (52:09)
is fully coming.

Amanda Helms (52:27)
One of my secrets for a weekend warrior is that I will also come up with a list of things I think I might want to write about because that gives me something to work with the prompts. And so I think my notes for I reread my brainstorming notes here and I literally wanted to do something I haven't quote something funny with toddlers and aliens from the get-go. And so from there, I apparently use the word list. But I only wrote.

Deborah L. Davitt (52:43)
Ha!

Hahaha!

Amanda Helms (52:57)
I don't know where my mind was this week, but the only word I wrote that I picked from the word list was syllabus, and that gave me an idea for a daycare because, you know, with the young kids, if it's a Montessori thing or something, they do have like some little syllabus where they're doing certain things for the kids. And so that brought me to the daycare setting. And then...

Deborah L. Davitt (53:13)
Oh yeah.

Yeah.

Amanda Helms (53:21)
My frustration with the United States lack of support for parents was really coming through with this piece because I hear all the horror stories about large daycare chains that are run in a much too corporate manner and not focusing on the workers, not focusing on the kids. And then that brought me to Alien Takeover of a daycare. And the aliens don't know shit about children. Kind of like these large corporations don't know shit about them.

Deborah L. Davitt (53:26)
Yes!

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah!

Amanda Helms (53:50)
children. But I wanted it to be funny because sometimes you have to laugh, not to cry. So satire and trying to have a little bit of hope at the ending. And I just, well, I like to do a lot of writing with

Deborah L. Davitt (54:00)
Yeah.

Amanda Helms (54:13)
all of my writing, so I like to try humor sometimes, I like to do more poignant, and so this was when I wanted something funny because I think I was just tired of not having something to laugh at. In terms of why I decided to structure this in a non-traditional dialogue-centric manner, again, word count. That was another literal comment in my brainstorming. I was like...

Deborah L. Davitt (54:14)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Yes.

Amanda Helms (54:38)
I think this is going to go over 7 and 50, so what can I do to try to keep it shorter? But what I also like about these non-traditional formats is that it lets you more easily play with what you don't include. And so, and that I think sometimes can become just as much of the story as what is actually there. And like Aimee was saying, you usually get more buy-in with the reader for these non-standard formats. I would not want to read...

Deborah L. Davitt (54:45)
Yeah.

Yes.

Amanda Helms (55:04)
you know, two, three thousand words of a chat dialogue back and forth. It might be fun as a radio play or something, but so it's just kind of fun to play with. Can I get all the information to the reader quickly enough that they can understand this concept using this format and still keep it interesting? And so for me, it's just kind of fun to play with. And I also think that it's really fun to play with.

Deborah L. Davitt (55:08)
No.

I envy you guys for being able to do the non-traditional formats because I keep trying and most of the time it just completely fails for me. The only time I've gotten one that worked for me was basically doing the dictionary format a couple of years ago and that one sold. But yeah, the non-traditional formats is harder than it looks.

Amanda Helms (55:45)
It is, and I'm actually a first reader over at Dial-a-Ballacle Plots, and David tends to love these kind of non-seried formats. So it's fun being a first reader there, because I feel like a lot of people send that stuff over to us, so I can get a first peek of what I feel works and doesn't work. It was a fun thing for me to play with.

Deborah L. Davitt (55:58)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

All right, we're going to move back to Vylar with her story. What President Polk said, which appeared in Phantom, but is available again on her website, again, a fabulous story, which is set in the California gold rush, where the narrator fears that crazy man Dawson, who haunts the gold camp that not literally haunts, I would like to point out he's not a ghost yet. He haunts the gold, the gold camp that they live in using a bowie knife. He calls President

to intimidate and terrify into others and to feel into listening to his conspiracy theories. Someone makes an accusation that Dawson stole gold, a group of men including the narrator decide to get Dawson drunk and jump him. Getting him drunk was a narrator's job and he's very surprised when Dawson hands him the bowie knife claiming that President Polk wants a word with him. Then the group right way lays him, ties into a tree and leaves him to die slowly of exposure in the wilderness. Not long afterwards, the narrator strikes it rich and leaves the camp taking the bowie knife with them.

He could have gone back to the tree and freed the guy. It probably would have allowed him to survive, but he chooses not to do so. And for years afterwards, he takes the knife out and listens to hear if it finally speaks to him so that he'll at least have the excuse of madness to explain away what he did to Dawson. The story is an absolute tour de force of the darker side of human nature, the less explicable impulses, and the uncomfortable truths. What do you want the audience to take away from this one, and where did you get the idea?

Vylar Kaftan (57:31)
Well, I got the idea because this is what they really did during the Gold Rush. This is how they treated mental illness because there were no mental hospitals or anything like that. And I was writing another piece set in the Gold Rush and I read this bit in my research and went, wah, and this did not fit in my other piece anywhere. I tried. I was like, no, this doesn't go here. Well, I guess I'm writing another story about it. So I did. And so I wrote this basically as an incident that, uh,

Deborah L. Davitt (57:36)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Okay.

Vylar Kaftan (58:00)
doesn't appear in my other novellas, just some people out in the gold rush. I didn't use the same characters or anything. But it's the sad truth of what went on in that time when there wasn't really anything. And the narrator spends a lot of time convincing his audience as desperately as he can that this was what they had to do. There was no other way. And the question is, well, is it? Is that what you have to do?

Deborah L. Davitt (58:12)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Vylar Kaftan (58:27)
I mean, I'm not going to weigh in. I don't know what you can say about that, because that is what they did. It's inhuman, but there weren't really good alternatives. I mean, I think that the key point here is he really could have probably managed to get Dawson back and take him to civilization. I think he could have done so in this situation and chose not to, because he could not bear the thought of going back to see what had happened and what was going on there.

Deborah L. Davitt (58:51)
Yeah.

Vylar Kaftan (58:53)
And if he went back and saw it, he would know he was a murderer, which is, you know, a horrible sin. And if he leaves it ambiguous in his mind, at least he can kind of maybe pretend to himself that he didn't do that. So I think that's where it goes with that. And the fact that it's not a speculative story, at least, you know, but there's the implication that the knife might be about to speak, because you usually read if you're reading it in a science fiction context, you're thinking that knife is going to say something. And when it doesn't, that's when the horror strikes, because you just don't.

Deborah L. Davitt (59:05)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Vylar Kaftan (59:22)
You thought the knife was going to say something to change this? No. Probably just a knife.

Deborah L. Davitt (59:29)
No, it's probably just a knife and he's probably got to live with this. And it is, the horror hits really hard. And I think that it ends exactly where it needs to end. And it's an amazingly full piece for such a short piece. It does not feel like a short piece at all. It feels incredibly filled. So, yeah.

Vylar Kaftan (59:48)
One time I got to read it at a performance site where I had someone who was doing improv electronic of music behind me as I read. That was amazing. Yeah. He was doing it for everybody who was reading that night. He had read the pieces in advance. So he had some idea of where he was going. But he gave the kind of gave just some chords, nothing to take over, but just, and there was this kind of, as I was reading that tension part where they're starting to tie, there's just this tiny note going.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:03)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Vylar Kaftan (01:00:17)
kind of like a heartbeat during that part. And it was incredibly eerie. It had sort of a telltale heart vibe to it.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:20)
Oooo

That's amazing.

Amanda Helms (01:00:25)
Thanks.

Vylar Kaftan (01:00:25)
It was really fun. It was a good experience.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:29)
Aimee! Advanced problems in word math which appeared in daily science fiction on January 3, 2020. This is an acutely, and I use the mathematical term advisedly, feminist story full of anger at the missed opportunities and lack of fairness in a woman's life from age 13 to age 30. The protagonist looks for portals whenever life seems least fair and finally finds one when she's 30. Calculate the probability that she'll take her daughters with her, leaving her husband alone with his 80-hour work weeks.

How did you come up with the idea for this story and how did you decide to structure the story around word problems?

Aimee Picchi (01:01:03)
Yeah, so this is another Weekend Warrior story. It was from the prompt, how do we decide what matters? And I kind of wanted to look at, you know, how, you know, traditional fantasy, it's very heroic. What we consider heroic people are, you know, people who fight, who, you know, battle dragons, whatever, but that, you know, the issues that a lot of...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:01:11)
Mm-hmm.

Aimee Picchi (01:01:30)
people have to deal with on a daily basis, like unsupportive parents, predatory, older men, unequal marriage, require a lot of emotional strength and resilience to cope with that. And so I really wanted to frame it about like, well, who's really the hero here and why isn't Penny being recognized as a hero? And as far as the format, I mean, I think I took two things that are really...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:01:41)
Yes.

Aimee Picchi (01:01:56)
Well, one thing I really love, which is portal fantasies, I love portal fantasies. And something I really, but have problems with portal fantasies for those reasons. And thinking of like CS Lewitt and how he treated Susan, but she wasn't allowed back to Narnia because she started wearing lipstick and nylons. So something I love, but I have problems with.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:02:01)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Oh yes.

She grew- she had the audacity to grow up. I mean, God forbid.

Aimee Picchi (01:02:19)
Yeah, and become a, you know, exhibit traits that are considered traditionally female, which, you know, isn't heroic, I guess, or heroic enough to, you know, be back in an area. Anyway, and then I took something that I really don't like, which are word problems. I'm not a math person. And something I always disliked about word problems is like, they always hint at a story, like, you know,

Deborah L. Davitt (01:02:35)
Hehehehe

Mm-hmm.

Aimee Picchi (01:02:44)
You know, Vylar and Amanda get on separate trains, but Vylar is going 30 miles an hour faster than Amanda. What hap, you know, who gets there first? I'm like, well, wait, why are they on separate trains? How does Amanda feel about being on a slower train than Vylar is like, what, you know, what's the use of this? And so I like that format. And I just kind of love fitting

Deborah L. Davitt (01:02:57)
Hahaha!

Aimee Picchi (01:03:04)
together this, this like ridiculous idea of a word problem that you can mathematically kind of figure out why certain people.

Vylar Kaftan (01:03:04)
fitting together.

Aimee Picchi (01:03:13)
are allowed to be considered heroes and others aren't. And it's really who decides, how do we decide what matters? Well, we're deciding what matters and it's a very unequal world. So...

Vylar Kaftan (01:03:20)
I'm out of thoughts. We're just like, I'm out of thoughts.

Aimee Picchi (01:03:26)
There's no rationality to it, perhaps, but we like to pretend that there is.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:32)
But she tries to bring rationality to it every time she tries to solve a problem, which is another little cut of the knife in the story, which is just lovely. We're going to change subjects here a little bit. We're gonna go from our mutual admiration society to other people's work, because on Shining Moon, we like to elevate people who we don't know necessarily. And I believe Samantha Murray is on Codex, but I don't think I know her.

Her story that we're going to be looking at appeared in Lightspeed in March of 2023. It is called Four Years Minus Twelve Days. It is a poignant story about living with loss before it even occurs. The protagonist, you, in the second person tale, is married to an alien of the Svar species whose life cycle is such that they only get four years precisely to be the person that they are right now.

and that after those four years are up, they will move to the next stage of their life cycle, unable to feel the same way as their previous selves did. This is a fabulous metaphor for

grief and loss without having the full punch of a story about death. It doesn't have to have any trigger warnings because it doesn't have death, death in it. It's a little bit removed from that, but it's still about loss and grief. I find it deliciously written, so thank you to whoever it was of the three of you who recommended this one.

Vylar Kaftan (01:04:34)
the creation loss.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:04:54)
What did you like about the story? What does it do effectively in such a short space? And since second person is a contentious topic, how does it do it well and how do you do second person well as a whole? And I'm going to start with Amanda. What did you like? What did it do effectively? And what did you think about the second person?

Amanda Helms (01:05:13)
Well, I definitely agree about this being such an effective metaphor for grief separation, whether, you know, thinking about reality, whether it's through death or a person becoming someone you feel you don't know anymore, or worse, they feel like they don't recognize you anymore, and that's why they go. And so, yeah, this is packing a huge amount of world building

Deborah L. Davitt (01:05:33)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Amanda Helms (01:05:42)
According to Lightspeed, anyway, it is under 750 words, which is just shocking to me. I don't know that I could manage that. And so, I mean, with a few deaf sentences, it establishes the SAVARS and their life cycle, so it's just enough detail to understand the premise. And even though that was presented as outright exposition, like it literally gives you what the SAVARS life cycle is, it's so short and the prose was so accomplished that I didn't mind.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:05:49)
Yeah.

Amanda Helms (01:06:12)
And so what, yeah, wonderful world building packed in a short space. I envy that because as I, I'll have to read that story of yours, Bylarz, that is epic fantasy in a short space because I have not been able to accomplish that myself yet. So I will have to learn from the masters. Well, because I, I.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:06:12)
Mm-hmm.

Vylar Kaftan (01:06:38)
Gosh, we'll have to find something.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:06:41)
Hahaha!

Amanda Helms (01:06:42)
But, and here, let's see if this is going into second person. I feel it works well because there's no resolution for the protagonist and that kind of is how it works in real life when we first lose someone, there's no resolution for us. And so because that is so familiar to me, it worked really well being second person because I was like.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:06:56)
Mm hmm. Yeah.

Nah.

Amanda Helms (01:07:09)
Yeah, if I'm in that situation, no, there's no resolution for me. And you know, I'm left with the grief that I have to figure out how to how to handle. So I felt that worked really well. I was kind of thinking I'd have to ponder this more. But I think if this were first or third person, it might actually need to be longer because at that point you have more of a specific character. And I don't know, I'd have to think about that more. But I was like, I think the second person works really well in this piece.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:07:33)
Yeah.

That's a really good point. Thank you. I hadn't even thought of that. Aimee, what did you like about the story? What does it do effectively? And what did you think about the second person use?

Aimee Picchi (01:07:48)
Yeah, well, I mean, personally, I like second person. I know a lot of people don't like it, or they say never write in second person, but I feel like, I don't know, I feel like that's just sort of something people say, and they don't really think that much about second person. They just write it off, but I think it can actually make a story more, like feel closer, and then people feel like it can be distancing, but I actually kind of disagree with that. I think in some cases, it can make you feel a lot closer to the character.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:08:17)
Mm-hmm.

Aimee Picchi (01:08:19)
I just love the emotional pack of the story. I felt like it tells such a universal story in such a small space, and that's what flash can be really good at. And it's something that everybody faces in every relationship. I mean, I know this is probably morbid, but every relationship will end at some point. And I...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:08:43)
Yes.

Aimee Picchi (01:08:46)
I think despite that, we keep going, right? I mean, we keep wanting to have relationships and wanting to love people because that's what makes you human. And I think that the story for me as the emotional heart of the story is what I really love. I think it, I just will agree with everything Amanda said. I don't wanna repeat what she said. I agree like the real buildings, great. It just sets things up with a little hint here and there. You can understand what's going on in the world. You don't need the huge exposition. So I think this is excellent.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:08:55)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

We don't need to start at the beginning of the universe and the evolution of the Svar and why they're like this. That's necessary.

Aimee Picchi (01:09:19)
is really not there. Great, exactly.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:09:23)
Vylar, what did you think about this story?

Vylar Kaftan (01:09:26)
I basically am right with Amanda and Aimee. I think that it is a terrific story about essentially unrequited love, the unrequited love that grief is because you're loving into a void and you know it's still there, what you love, but it doesn't recognize you or it isn't present in any way you've been responding or anything like that. And I think the story works because it's...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:09:39)
Yes.

isn't capable of responding, yes.

Vylar Kaftan (01:09:55)
it leaves at the end there is nothing that can be done. There is no resolution. There is just, it's just nothing. And we don't even need to know why exactly this person started things. You could sit here and argue a lot of stuff about, well, why'd you start dating this thing? You don't need to know, it doesn't matter. It just happened somehow and now it's happening. And there's a lot of world implied around the story.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:10:03)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Vylar Kaftan (01:10:23)
which is what you're really trying to do in flash fiction is it's as if you're showing one pixel, or one little square pixelated area of a larger piece of art. And you think people, and people could probably draw the entire picture based on the little spot they're seeing because you've chosen just the right spot. And not every picture, it's not possible to do that with every picture. If the picture is just a forest, you're gonna show some trees, you can't just imply the whole place is trees. But if you can get it so that you're showing where two roads intersect,

Deborah L. Davitt (01:10:24)
Yes.

Yes, exactly.

Vylar Kaftan (01:10:54)
And you see the corner of a wheelbarrowman plays, and you see the corner of a car coming the other way. You see the story. You could draw the rest of that picture if you had the space to do so. And that's what you're trying to do in flash fiction is give them just that little section of it, just the focal point, just enough that if they want, someone wanted to, they could write the whole thing out and it wouldn't be nearly as interesting.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:11:01)
Mm-hmm.

And I know that you've got a call coming at the half hour Vylar, so did you want to go ahead? Let's go ahead and give you the opportunity to say your goodbyes. And therefore, I'm gonna ask you to jump ahead a little bit and say, do you have something coming out soon or out recently that you'd like to focus people's eyeballs on?

Vylar Kaftan (01:11:23)
Ten more minutes approximately.

Okay.

I actually don't at this point. I had a hard time in the pandemic, but I am working on coming back out of that, the deep, deep darkness that many of us went into. And if anyone else is in the same boat, look, we all did what we had to do to get through it. And it's just, every generation, every part of humanity has had something happen in their lifetime as it

Deborah L. Davitt (01:11:49)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Vylar Kaftan (01:12:07)
were.

You know, some people got World War, some people got pandemics, you know, and maybe we'll get all of them. You know, there's still time. There's still time to have our World War, you know. Anyway, but seriously, you know, we were bound to have something awful happen, you know, or multiple awful things happen, depending on where you live. So, you know, you get through it the best you can. You use it to power the rest of your life and, you know, use it to improve yourself. And that's where I'm gonna do my very best to.

come out of kind of the funk I was left in. I was kind of left with a lot of cynicism about humanity that I'm working on. So I might be going back to some really dark stuff for a while here as I work through a lot of rage.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:12:48)
Yeah, understood. Well, thank you very much for having been on to speak with us. I've really enjoyed our conversation and I will let you go so that you can get ready for your next conversation that you have to go to. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

Vylar Kaftan (01:12:49)
Mm-hmm. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you.

Amanda Helms (01:13:01)
Bye.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:13:04)
All right, we have one more story to cover, and that's why I wanted to let her go because this is gonna take us a little while to talk about and I didn't wanna run into her time. So we have this story which is called The Third Martian Dick Temple by Sheila Marie Bordrio, Daily Science Fiction, May 23rd, 2018. In this story, the narrator has discovered an ancient temple on Mars uncovered by the movement of water and wind during terraforming on the red planet.

While she begins the story eager to discover something new, she's initially deeply disappointed to discover that this temple, just like the two discovered before it, is simply filled with mummified phalluses. From the surreal, almost absurdist premise, we move to a moving conclusion that the Martians must have been very like us after all, and their inability to focus on a message for the ages that said something more important than a bunch of mummified dicks. What did we like about this story? What does it do effectively in a short space?

Amanda, what did you think about this story?

Amanda Helms (01:14:07)
Well, yeah, the deafness with which it moves from absurdity to meaning, however kind of despairing, really well done. And I really appreciated the throughline of the protagonist's frustration over having to research more mummified Martian penises, because that kind of gives us something to glom onto to go from the absurdity to the pathos, because, you know...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:14:25)
Hehehehehehe

Amanda Helms (01:14:33)
And we were talking about tropes, so definitely this starts with a with a trope of, you know, on exploring Mars. How many times has Mars been explored in science fiction? And so it's a quick setup because we know what it's like, or we've read stories about people exploring Mars, except then we get there's this Martian temple and it's of dicks.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:14:35)
Mm-hmm.

Amanda Helms (01:14:59)
Mordics and not only is it that but this is the third one the third time this astronaut has You know Yeah Subject to this and now they're gonna base is gonna send her back and she has to collect Samples because what if these ones are different, you know We on earth have to know what's different about these particular mummified Martian penises and so

Deborah L. Davitt (01:15:03)
I'm going to go to bed.

subjectives to this.

Ha ha!

Hahaha

Amanda Helms (01:15:29)
And just going through to the talk show, we all know what a talk show is and how inane some of those interviews can be. And especially when it's, I'm thinking now of red carpet interviews with the women. And so I mean, and so yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:15:39)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. How did it feel to handle them? What sort of sizes were there? Were you impressed by the sizes? You know, things like that. The questions you expect to hear.

Amanda Helms (01:15:55)
Yep. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so it's, um, that I thought was very well done. And, um, I mean, this is the type of twist I like, where I didn't consider it a gotcha, but it reconceptualizes what went on before. So we go from saying, oh, ha ha, those funny Martians, you know, they were building temples to their dicks. What's with that? And then to step back and say, wait a minute, how is that actually different from us after all? And so that's...

Deborah L. Davitt (01:16:09)
Yes.

And when you consider if you have any sort of grounding in archeology at all, the number of statues of penises and everything and the winged penises that the Romans had and everything like that, it is very similar to us. Whether it's the graffiti that you see on the side of the road or what was carefully and lovingly crafted by...

Aimee Picchi (01:16:43)
Thank you.

Amanda Helms (01:16:43)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:16:52)
by ancient artisans, there is a certain similarity.

Amanda Helms (01:16:55)
Yeah, yeah, so I thought, yeah, I thought it was very, very well done. So it was new to me, it was not when I had suggested, but yeah, it's, I really admired the arc and the ability to go through that. And another case where it's the perfect ending for the story, I think.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:17:17)
Mm-hmm. Aimee, what did you think?

Aimee Picchi (01:17:22)
Yeah, I remember reading this when it came into my inbox and I enjoyed it then And I just want to say as an aside, I really do miss daily science fiction And it was lost for the flash fiction community that went on a hiatus. Hopefully it is just a hiatus I don't I don't know if it's gonna come back or not. But as an aside Yeah, I thought this was a great short flash piece I mean, it's funny. It's humorous, but like

Deborah L. Davitt (01:17:31)
Yeah.

Aimee Picchi (01:17:50)
Again, like you were saying Deborah, like it reminded me of like, yeah, you look at like old Roman ruins and like, there are always like phalluses being drawn on them and like the graffiti is there. But I just, you know, I think also given that, you know, we're dealing with things now, like while the pandemic, but also, you know, climate change and the sense that we might not be here forever, the human race, like, I think you read this.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:17:59)
Hehehehe

Aimee Picchi (01:18:19)
you know, a story like this and you think about humanity and like the line that, uh, that they, uh, they knew the end was coming and they met it with a raging, with raging heart on after raging heart on. Um, I just thought the lines makes me laugh, but I just think like, yeah, I kind of feel like humanity is sort of the same, maybe for better or worse. Like maybe we could use our energy in more constructive ways. I don't know. Maybe if the Martians had

Deborah L. Davitt (01:18:24)
Mm-hmm.

Ha ha

Aimee Picchi (01:18:47)
not been so focused on dick temples, they could have done something else with society. I don't know. But I think that the story packs a lot to think about in a short space. And it's funny, you know, it's funny. And I think the ending is good. It's not a punchline, but I think it's, like Amanda said, it does make you think about what came before in a different way. So that was very, it's a very good flash story.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:18:58)
Yeah.

Right? Going forward, do either you have something coming out soon or out recently that you'd like people to read? I'm going to start with Aimee this time. What do you have coming out soon or out recently?

Aimee Picchi (01:19:27)
I don't have anything coming out soon. Like, Vylar, I actually didn't write that much in the last year. Maybe it's a pandemic after effect and my job's gotten kind of crazy, I'm not sure. But I did just have a story that came out in the December issue of The Deadlands. It's not flash fiction, but it's a ghost story. And I hope that people might read it. It's called Image Not Found, Francesca's Bridge.

I believe Amanda's read this story. Amanda and I are actually in the same critique group. So this is a haunted ghost story told through a social media Scooby gang, kind of a group of people on social media and a haunted little social media group who are trying to track down the history and the truth behind a haunted covered bridge. So anyway, that just came out. It just went live January 4th. So check it out.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:20:00)
Thanks.

Nifty.

The Deadlands is really hard to get into, so congratulations. I have been trying to get something in with Elise since she was at Shimmer, and I have never managed it yet, so wow.

Aimee Picchi (01:20:26)
Yeah. I just thought it was cool.

This is my first one and I never got in a shimmer. Anyway, I was thrilled. I was thrilled that they picked it up. So.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:20:43)
Alright, and how about you Amanda? Anything out recently or coming out soon that you'd like to direct people's eyeballs towards?

Amanda Helms (01:20:50)
I still don't have a date for it, but I will have one more Weekend Warrior 2023 piece coming out in uncanny at some point. Yeah, it's I was very pleased that they picked it up. Yeah, it may never happen again. We'll see. But that the story is called The God Descendant, but I again don't have a date for it. So I mean, Icefield.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:20:59)
Mmm.

Speaking of places that is hard to get into.

Okay, well, we'll keep an eye out for that. All right, thank you both for having been here to speak with me this week. I've really enjoyed our conversation. We've gone a little long, but it has been a jam-packed episode and we covered a lot of ground and you had wonderful, insightful things to say. So thank you both. Next week on Shining Moon, we'll be deviating a little bit to Shared Visions, writing with a co-writer, which will feature Marie Brennan, Alice Helms, I'm sorry, Alice Helms,

and Kurt Penkow. As always, if you like my content, hit like and subscribe, and I will see you all next week, and we are out.