Notes on the Previous Six Stories

Sometimes stories come at you sideways. Working late one night, the image of a guy lying in bed in the dark seeing the visage of a lost love just as a new love has become a possibility came to me unbidden. So I put work aside and wrote “Night Voices” as an exploration of that image. Some things are just more important than work.

The latest round of the Three-Minute Fiction contest opened in March, and this time the challenge was to begin a story with the sentence “She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door.” As always, the story had to be 600 words at most.

I kept playing around with so many story possibilities that went nowhere that I decided to go meta and incorporate several story beginnings into one whimsical tale: “Round 8.” The story was too self-referential to be my entry; in fact, I hesitated even posting it here (a lot of the bits are inside jokes), but obviously I decided in the end what the hell.

“Canciónes de Amor” started off as a possible entry, with the contest line being the first line of the song stanza that starts the story. But the stanza kept bugging me; the story required lyrics that were mediocre, and what I had written was downright awful. So I chucked the original stanza and came up with a different one – and there went the first line mandated by the contest.

The story I ended up submitting for the contest was one that I co-wrote with my niece Emily (which I can’t post here until the results are announced – in a few weeks). After we had sent it off, I felt that I needed to write just one more story that wasn’t a lark, that actually had the required first line, that wasn’t co-authored; just a straight-up story of my very own in response to the contest challenge – just for my own satisfaction. “Stepping Through” was what I came up with.

A few months ago, I found a flash fiction website, Flash Fiction Friday, that offers weekly story prompts that anyone who cared to could use to write stories. The next two pieces arose from a couple of the prompts.

“Wild Heart” emerged from the cue: “Take your typical fairy tale villain or monster and make them the protagonist. Must use ‘something wicked this way comes’ as a line in the story. Word limit: 1,200 words.” Rather than write about a wolf or a witch or a wicked stepmother, I went with a creature from Philippine folklore instead – the tikbalang – and wove a fable around it.

“Driving Away” was in response to the cue: “Write a story where your protagonist is mistaken about something they ‘know’ to be true. Length: up to 1,200 words.” The obvious route was to create a character who was cocksure about some belief, comfortable in his certitude. Contrarian that I am, I decided to write instead about someone who was absolutely certain about his flaws. Someone, in other words, a lot like me.