Living the Fictional Dream

My latest flash piece is up at Every Day Fiction today, and you should definitely check it out. It’s called “The Care and Feeding of Your Sleeping Knight.” As always, you may wish to actually go read the story before you read the rest of this entry. It depends on how you feel about spoilers.

The best way to describe this story, I suppose, is a fairy tale with a twist. Last summer, Jamie, one of my writing group mates (as well as my sister!), brought a writing excercise to one of our lunch meetings. She brought a long list of titles that she’d created at this random title generator website, and the challenge was to write a story based on one of them. This story is the one that I wrote based on the title “The Care and Feeding of Your Sleeping Knight.”

The voice of the narrator came to me all in a flash. I was thinking about a sleeping knight and why he would need care and feeding — of course, a magic spell! And then I was picturing poor Gavin, stuck in an enchanted sleep with no true love to waken him, and he’d become a lot in some merchant’s stall, a conversation piece to be sold to the highest bidder.

I seldom write in the second person — in fact, this might be my only second person POV story — but for this particular tale, it just flowed out of my pen this way. I think it works. I enjoyed writing from the point of view of the merchant woman. It was also fun imagining all the things for sale in her shop. I see her as a opportunist — some of her merchendise is genuine, like dear Gavin, but she’s not above selling a few frogs and claiming that one might be a prince in disguise.

If you head over to EDF to read the story, I would appreciate it if you took the time to vote in the star ranking. That’s what spurs stories onto the Top 10 lists. And comments — either there or here — are always great. I love knowing what everyone thinks of my stories.

I hope you have as much fun reading this one as I did writing it!

And, while you’re clicking about reading fiction online, you should check out the new issue of The Rose and Thorn, which includes writing group mate Stephanie’s reprinted story, “Brimstone and Liars.”