Behind the Scenes of “Road Tripping”

As you may have already seen, I had another story published in Splickety this month! This month’s theme is senioritis, so I wrote a story about a graduating senior whose plan to go road tripping with his friends nearly derails … before an unexpected ally steps in to save the day. If you haven’t read it yet, make sure you do before reading the rest of this post!

I should begin by saying this story was not inspired by any personal experience of either making or missing a road trip after graduation.The theme’s prompt specifically mentioned pranks, proms, and college applications, but I wanted to try to come up with a concept different than those situations. I can’t trace the road trip idea to anything in particular, but I think High School Musical 3—and specifically Troy Bolton’s car troubles—were a subconscious but significant influence.

And therein lay my first challenge: Coming up with a car problem that would genuinely jeopardize road trip plans, but could also be solved relatively quickly. This issue would also need to cost a significant amount of money that a teenager could realistically have saved up. (I have no idea how much teenagers make/save these days.) This is a very specific problem.

So I found myself trying to identify a specific car problem that I didn’t have. Usually, people know what the issue is and they want to find out how much it cost and how easy it is. I was doing the reverse. After many google searches about common car issues and estimates, I eventually landed on having a tire blow out. Even though replacing one tire would average about $150, I figured the parents insisting on replacing all of them would be a good way to drive that up.

In terms of plot, I knew from the beginning that I wanted the main character’s younger brother to save the day. My relationship with my own younger brother was a very loose influence. The element that I wanted to highlight how even emotions like annoyance have an undercurrent of familial love. I think I achieved this better with the younger brother, particularly in his reactions to the older brother’s cluelessness. The line “Just trying to be nice, you moron” is probably my best sentence to date. Classic.

But seriously. Even while I was writing the story, I knew the main character had a couple things working against him. He wasn’t very sympathetic, and he wasn’t proactive at all. In any other situation, I would have modified the story to focus on the younger brother. He has those in spades. But since the theme was senior year, I felt a need to tell the story from the older brother’s perspective.

Part of this is because the first version of this story ended very differently. After the younger brother (Chad) offered to pay for the tires, the older brother (Daniel) said it was might be his best graduation present. They went down the stairs, with Chad calling out that he figured out Daniel’s graduation gift.

This was the story I submitted, though I knew it could still be stronger. I’m super grateful that editor Lauren Hildebrand enjoyed the story, but had the same sentiment. She reinforced my feelings that Daniel doesn’t have much of an arc, but also shared that she thought Chad would’ve liked to go on the trip. She made other solid comments about fleshing out the friends and how to treat dialogue, but her comments on the ending stuck with me the most.

I wrestled with it for a while. Maybe I was identifying way too closely with Daniel, but I didn’t think it would make sense for Chad to join the three boys on the trip they’d been planning for years. As I was thinking through this—trying to figure out how to get Daniel to offer but Chad not go—I eventually had another thought: Why not plan two road trips?

I’m a little embarrassed of how long it took me to come up with that, but I got there eventually. And I think the end result is appropriately sweet without negating the occasionally-tense brother-brother relationship. I made those changes as well as others, and that version is what you can read today.

One final note about the texting conversation. I’m not a big texter, but I’m pretty happy with how I feel I captured a text conversation between digital natives would go. When I submitted, I thought about keeping Alex’s and Ian’s texts lined up on the left, but lining up Daniel’s on the right to mirror how it would look on a phone screen, like so:

D: Bad news. Parents say all tires need to be replaced

A: Dang man. How much?

D: 600

A: Whoa

I: WAT

In the end, I stuck to the submission guidelines and kept everything aligned on the left. It may have worked with the initials like you see above. But with the nicknames (which … I did not know you could do in text conversations), I think they’re easier to track just left aligned. Maybe one day I’ll experiment with a text conversation that uses this format.

That concludes my behind the scenes look at “Road Tripping!” I hope you enjoyed both the story and learning how it came together. If you have any other questions about its creation, feel free to ask them below 🙂 Thanks for reading!

Behind the Scenes of “The Birthday Party”

In case you haven’t seen the latest news, I had another flash fiction piece published this month. It’s called “The Birthday Party,” is available in print/digital and on Kindle, and is my first published romance story. And this is a brief glimpse at how it came to be.

As with all of my stories submitted to Splickety, it started with their theme for the month. Specifically “The ‘Aww’ Factor” for their Spark (romance) imprint. This prompt asked writers to incorporate animals or kids into a romance story—and make it really sweet.

When I started brainstorming, I thought people would be more likely to use animals in their stories, so I decided to try to involve kids (if you check out the issue, you’ll see it turned out to be a 50/50 split). Trying to come up with scenarios that would put a kid and single adult in the same situation eluded me for a while. The college student attending a cousin’s birthday party angle eventually came to me, but my original story had a lot more setup explaining just how reluctantly she came to the party.

With the family relationship established between Julie and Emma, I still needed to come up with a reason for the love interest to attend. Obviously, he couldn’t also be family. Even if he was friend of the family, I thought it would be a stretch for a non-related college student to come to a eight-year-old’s birthday party. I wasn’t sure about going the teacher route because I thought a lot of submissions with kids would use that angle, so I think him technically just being an education major rather than a fully-fledged teacher helped him stand out.

As for the plot, I originally thought the story would be mostly conversation-driven. I expected to have them talk about college, flirt a little, and eventually decide to go out. But when I finally reached the point of them actually meeting, I looked at my word count and thought Um, I don’t have enough space for that.

So I introduced the water fight as a way for a lot to “happen” without having to describe it all. Even with this, it clocked in significantly over the 700 words I usually shoot for. I looked for places to cut, but figured that any cuts would just make the storytelling cut corners. The water fight went through a few iterations before landing on the idea that Julie really wasn’t that jazzed about it, but saw it as a chance to spend more time with Tim.

Writing a satisfying ending was rough, but I’m ultimately happy with how it turned out. Previous submissions to Spark had impressed on me the importance of feeling like the relationship would head somewhere after the story ended. But I also wasn’t sure if an hour hanging out at a kid’s birthday party would realistically feel like a good occasion to ask someone out. Both because of this uncertainty and word restraints, I decided to leave things with a brief, flirty exchange predicated on the time spent with the kids.

Of course, I couldn’t talk about behind the scenes of this story without mentioning editor Leslie McKee. Her comments helped me better understand what readers expect from flash fiction romance—for example, peppering hints of interest throughout the story, and not just toward the end. I was really thankful to have her direction in polishing the story up before publication.

And that’s how I wrote “The Birthday Party!” I hope you liked this glimpse behind the scenes of how it came together. Any other questions on this little romance story? Feel free to drop them in the comments.

Behind the Scenes of “Mr. Nilssen’s Kjempehytte”

Last week, The Norwegian American published my short story “Mr. Nilssen’s Kjempehytte.” If you haven’t read it yet, head on over to their website and take a look before reading on about how it came to be.

Unlike my previous stories, “Mr. Nilssen’s Kjempehytte” didn’t need to match a particular theme. That said, their submission guidelines do say they consider stories of any genre as long as they relate to Norway, or crime/mystery stories (even without Norwegian elements). I decided to hedge my bets with a mystery set in Norway.

For me, the biggest challenge of this was fitting a mystery into 1000 words. When I think of mysteries, I think of crime scenes, clues, witnesses, red herrings, and elaborate explanations revealed at the end. Which would not work as flash fiction. So I had to be very intentional about the story’s structure.

The final result essentially splices together key snippets of the “mystery”—surveying the evidence, collecting clues, piecing them together, etc. Because of this, the story is able to span a much longer timeframe than any of my previous stories. (Up until this one, my stories’ timelines have typically been a few minutes from beginning to end. “Mr. Nilssen’s Kjempehytte” spans a few hours.) Even re-reading it now, I’m pleased with how it turned out and kind of surprised at how it works as flash fiction even though it takes so long, timewise.

In terms of plot, I knew I wanted to include a troll even before finalizing the mystery itself. I’m a fantasy writer at heart, and Norwegian folklore is full of recognizable creatures and characters. Originally, I thought I might have the main character come into contact with the trolls (loosely foreshadowed by Berit’s remark about playing with their kids). Unfortunately, as the remaining word count grew slim, I realized I wouldn’t be able to do that scene justice. I’m not sure how many people will read the actual ending as an ambiguous one, but in my head, that troll is totally real.

The hard part was getting to it. While brainstorming ideas for evidence that could incite a mystery, I thought trolls might take issue with people mistreating land. Hence the destroyed backhoe. This ended up working both ways, as it also provided a reason for the absence of trash around the construction site. Just goes to show that when you don’t know how to move forward, sometimes you just need to look backward.

The names throughout the story are courtesy of a pre-reader with far more exposure to Norwegian culture than I have. Nilsson is a common Norwegian surname, and Berit is a common girl’s name. “Morfar,” if you caught it while reading, is the word for a maternal grandfather. On Google Maps, the region around Åmot looked like it had a good amount of forest and mountains, but I learned in the course of writing this that Norway is known considerably more for the latter than the former. The original title was “Trowhoyde” (a variation on the word “troll” and the Norwegian word for “hill,” but my editor suggested “Mr. Nilssen’s Kjempehytte” and I liked the sound of it. (As mentioned last week, “kjempehytte” loosely translates to cabin fight).

And that’s a little insight into how I wrote “Mr. Nilssen’s Kjempehytte!” I hope you enjoyed both the story and this little glimpse behind the scenes. Have any questions about it that I didn’t address here? Feel free to ask in the comments. Takk!

Behind the Scenes of “The Exomaton of Panner’s Bend”

My latest story, “The Exomaton of Panner’s Bend,” has been out for almost a week now (in print and on Kindle), so I thought this would be a good time to write a follow-up post about how it came together.

This was one of those rare prompts where I developed an idea pretty quickly. Especially because this was a contest issue, I knew I wanted to put a unique spin on the theme. The steampunk aesthetic jumped out to me, and I figured that would help the story stand out. After settling on the steampunk angle, a wild west setting seemed like a natural fit.

The theme also meant jumping into the action as quickly as possible. Readers don’t pick up a kaiju story looking for long soliloquies about where the monsters and robots came from—they want action! In my earlier beginnings, I tried introducing the exomaton through its inventor, or framing the story as a newspaper story. Ultimately, these (and a couple other starts) took too long to get to the actual fight between the exomaton and the monster. By shifting the perspective to one of the pilots, I felt more comfortable starting right as they’re all loading up to protect the town.

But even then, you’ll notice that describing the exomaton takes up a lengthy third paragraph. This description was one of the first things I wrote, and is largely similar to its original draft. Combined with the description of the ridgeshaker (which was also one of the first things I wrote), that’s about 120 words already accounted for.

After realizing this, I decided to not limit the story to <700 words. This is what I usually aim for since Splickety typically just acquires a couple stories longer than 700 words. But since this was a contest entry, I opted not to constrain myself if I thought it would make the story stronger.

The action of the story flowed naturally after getting to the battle. Rather than narrating the fight blow-by-blow, I focused on a few key moments to convey the idea of destruction without using too much word count. And even though the image of two giant beings fighting is really cool, I wanted the climax to be a more personal scene, which is why the main character is able to scare the ridgeshaker away with the steam. In another stroke of serendipity, the steampunk angle presented a great reason for the combatants to get stuck close together for a period of time.

In terms of names, “exomaton” is a riff on “automaton”—which has a loose steampunk connotation, but wouldn’t accurately describe something that needs to be piloted. “Exo” seemed like the perfect prefix to convey that people needed to be inside to run, but also provide a sense of scale. For a long time, the town had the placeholder name Golden Springs, but that felt way too tropey for a wild west town. After toying with the idea of the town being named after the panners who lived there rather than the gold they were finding, I settled on “Panner’s Bend.” Once both of these were settled, I put both in the title to clue readers into the fact that this wasn’t the usual kaiju setting.

And that’s how “The Exomaton of Panner’s Bend” came to be! I hope you enjoyed this little glimpse into how I wrote it—not to mention the story itself. If you have any other questions about the story (or the world it takes place in), feel free to ask in the comments!

Behind the Scenes of “Returning Home”

Last week, Splickety published my most recent flash fiction story “Returning Home” in their Heirs and Spares issue. If you haven’t read it yet, you can get a print or digital copy or check it out on Kindle. And as is my new tradition, this week I wanted to write a little behind-the-scenes post about writing it.

The moment I learned about this month’s theme (royal intrigue), I knew I wanted to put a unique spin on it. Also, based on feedback to my Splickety submission from a few months ago, I wanted to make sure I highlighted the main characters as teenagers (which seems to be a driving force of this year’s themes).

One thing that tripped me up early in the process was wondering whether I was supposed to invent royalty or take inspiration from historical figures. I thought it might be easy to see through something totally made up, so I opted to base it on real royalty. Since I expected many submissions would take place in white European settings (or at least be inspired by them), I wanted to set my story apart from the majority by staying away from that setting.

I’ve held a mild interest in Maya history/culture since visiting Guatemala with my family in high school. We lived with a host family on two separate occasions, and visited Tikal during both trips. And since I received good feedback on a story set in Maya culture last year, I thought it would be a good fit for this prompt. But that meant research.

In that vein, one of the first tidbits I learned while researching is the fact that “Maya”—rather than “Mayan”—is the right adjective to use. “Maya” is used when describing elements of their culture (Maya people, Maya history, etc.), while “Mayan” specifically refers to the language family. The more you know!

I started researching by trolling through Wikipedia for names of Maya rulers. (Don’t worry—real research does come into play later.) I figured I could get a feel for the royal dynamic in different Maya city-states and develop a short story about brothers conniving for the throne, or perhaps a forbidden love between members of rival kingdoms. This is where serendipity comes in.

While reading through articles, I learned about Dos Pilas and its relationship with Tikal. It was … complicated. Dos Pilas was a smaller settlement than Tikal, which was one of the powerhouses of its time. Its king claimed to be part of Tikal’s royal line, but its allegiance bounced between them and Calakmul (another major power) over the years.

If that doesn’t set the stage for royal drama, I don’t know what does.

The relevant information was scattered through a few different articles, but I pieced together the gist of Dos Pilas and Tikal’s relationship, the main players, and an inkling of what a short story could look like. At this point, I used Wikipedia’s references to track down Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens by Simon Martin. It helped flesh out a few more details, gave more credibility to certain name translations, and generally bolstered my confidence that this story could work.

Not that “Returning Home” is 100% historically accurate. I definitely took liberties with Bajlaj Chan’s and Nuun Ujol’s ages to better fit with the teenage element, and there aren’t many details about why the two were at odds. Nevertheless, the broad strokes about the two of them being brothers and the contentious relationship between the sites do have a basis in history.

Speaking of the kingdoms, you’ll notice that neither Tikal, Dos Pilas, nor Calakmul get name-dropped in “Returning Home.” That’s because those are our modern names for the settlements. In the Mayan language, Tikal was likely called “Mutal” … at least until Dos Pilas was founded and began using the same name/emblem glyph. At this point, Tikal started being known as “Yax Mutal”—the first Mutal. Dos Pilas is a Spanish name meaning “Two Wells,” though it was probably known as Mutal in its heyday. To avoid the confusion of two locations named “Yax Mutal” and “Mutal,” I used this Maya Hieroglyph Dictionary website to create a name based on the Mayan words for two wells (“Kach’en”). Similarly, Ox Te’Tuun was the Mayan name for Calakmul. It was unfortunate that all these place names took twice the word count, so I tried to limit using them as much as possible! (That’s also why Nuun Ujol only calls his younger brother “Bajlaj” instead of his full name, Bajlaj Chan.)

The only other name in the story is Coyopa, which is taken from the Maya god of thunder. It seemed like an appropriate name for a loyal war general. Yajaw, which is mentioned a couple of times in the story, is the Mayan word for “vassal lord,” which I thought gave the story the right amount of additional flavor.

Once I had the setting and premise of the story, it came together quickly. Like “The Journal of Wonders,” I wanted dialogue to drive most of the story. I thought focusing on a time before the kingdoms officially turned on one another would allow the brothers to have the type of conversation that could reliably drive a story. Nuun Ujol needed to already be convinced that Bajlaj Chan wanted to usurp him, so I wanted this scene to focus on the younger brother’s realization that he was no longer welcome in Yax Mutal. I was pleasantly surprised with the way it came together allowing me to contrast Bajlaj’s definitions of “home” at the beginning and end of the story, giving the title a nice double-meaning.

There you have it! You can see from this post that a big chunk of this story was research and prep work, and it came together … comparatively quickly after those. You probably know more about Maya history now than you ever expected to learn, but I hope you still enjoyed reading about the process and maybe even had a few questions answered. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask them below!