Anonymous
***
Anonymous,
It’s fine. Just throw a big banquet. Get ‘em so drunk they don’t know what’s what! Also, if any of these people gave you trouble last time around, this would totes be the time to bump them off. Live and learn, right? Well, learn anyway.
MacAbre
***
Dear “Miss MacAbre,”
I didn’t exactly study at Wittenberg, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a good idea to plan multiple murders in the “Help and Healing” section of a widely-read magazine. While I’d like nothing more than to see both of you get your comeuppance, I personally would prefer it if you didn’t arrive in the after-afterlife quite so soon.
Regards,
Banquo’s Ghost’s Ghost
***
Too late. He’s your problem now.
MacAbre
***
Not anymore.
Banquo’s Ghost’s Ghost
***
I think we should see other people. “Till death do us part” and all that. You can keep the cat.
Macbeth’s Ghost’s Ghost’s Ghost
30
The Samaritan of Fourth Street
Challenge #14: Write a 666 word urban fantasy story featuring a monk or holy person. It must begin with an argument, and the main character must be marginalised in some way.
“What did I tell you about coming here? Fourth Street’s ours!”
The voice carried all the way up to the window of Vittore’s fifth floor apartment. He glanced down at the street below, but couldn’t see anything out in the open. It was the alley with the bins again. It always was.
“And what did I tell you? This bit ain’t Fourth. You on our turf.”
“The hell I am! Get out of here, dog!”
“What did you just call me?”
“You heard...dog.”
There was a snarl, and a crash as something bashed into the dumpster around the side. Vittore grabbed his keys from the bowl, locking the door with a trembling hand. He knew that the fight would be over before he’d even hobbled to the elevator, but he had been a priest once, and despite—perhaps even due to—having been cast out of the church, he could not simply sit inside like the rest of the residents and pretend not to hear. The doors pinged open, and he stepped inside.
When the elevator reached the ground floor, Vittore was surprised to find that he did not need to go any farther. A girl in a battered grey hoodie was sitting on a bench by the main doors. Vittore’s neighbour Mrs. Rennolls was standing over her.
“You can’t just walk out of here.” She said it with force. “I’m calling an ambulance.”
Vittore stepped forward. “I’m sure that won’t be necessary.” He put on his most convincing voice, taking care to hold eye contact with his neighbour. “I’ll see to it that she gets home safely.”
“There’s gangs out there!” Mrs. Rennolls waved an arthritic hand towards the doors. “And they’re dangerous! All that fighting...”
Vittore had been momentarily taken aback—when he had a mind to persuade someone, they usually came around immediately—but he recovered quickly. Where polite persuasion failed, there were other methods. He stepped towards Mrs. Rennolls, baring his teeth. “You would do well not to interfere with what you don’t understand.”
Mrs. Rennolls shrunk back. “Alright, dear.” She started towards the elevator. “If you’re sure.”
Vittore waited until the doors closed and the floor number started counting up before speaking to the girl. “Are you hurt?”
“Just a little, Clanfather.” She unfolded her arms, revealing a sharpened length of dowel jutting out from just beneath her ribcage. When she tugged it out, the wound did not bleed.
“If that had been a little higher,” said Vittore, sternly, “you would be dust right now. Was that one trespasser really worth risking your life over?”
“It wasn’t about that one,” she replied. “Everywhere we go, they’re watching out for us. Everyone’s watching out for us. But they only stand out at the full moon.”
“I know, child.” Vittore placed a hand on her shoulder. “So choose your battles better. It will be a full moon tonight, but now you’re in no shape to defend the clan.”
She stared at her scruffy canvas sneakers. “I’m sorry.”
“You’ll do better next time.”
Vittore spent the evening quietly watching TV. He would have liked to read, but his eyes weren’t what they used to be and the large print section at the library had little to offer him. He considered that he wasn’t much help to the clan now either. Unfortunately, for him there was no next time. The most he could provide now was a stern word or some brief advice, and even then there weren’t many opportunities. That was why, when he heard a muffled thud from the apartment next door, he went to investigate.
“Mrs. Rennolls?” he shouted through the wood.
“In here!”
Vittore reached for the handle, then hesitated. “Are you inviting me in?” he asked to make sure.
“Yes. It’s open.”
Vittore stepped inside and found Mrs. Rennolls collapsed in front of the sofa, tufts of fur sprouting from her cardigan, claws sprouting from her fingertips.
Yellow eyes looked up. “I think I’ve thrown my back out...somehow. Little help?”
31
One Year One Day
Challenge #15: Write a story featuring summertime, and a multi-headed entity. It must include a word beginning with “f” in every sentence, become progressively more insane, and be written in the form of a 369er. A 369er is three different stories that are each exactly 69 words long, that are connected by a common theme, and meant to be read together.
Even without looking closely, you can tell that someone managed to survive here—alone and desperate—for quite some time. The festering animal bones in the corners of the room make you glad of your respirator. There are pages of writing scattered about the floor, but the hand is jagged, illegible. Your superiors refuse to tell you what happened here, and for the first time, you do not care.
***
We have watched a flaring match blaze into the sky. Oldself knows this is signalsymbol for canvasbirds flying overhead. We mastered such once, flicking switchsticksockets behind eyes glass. We once glad pilot training trusted mission special payload for gloryforce air. But newself has no formshapehandslimbsorder. Failure forced bailout made tankrupturerelease. No matter now, for someone is at the door. For we will greet. For we will make them new.
***
DOWNED PLANE HAS BEEN FOUND STOP
FERNIOT COUNTER CONFIRMS SEVERE CONTAMINATION OF CRASH SITE STOP
PASS UNNAVIGABLE EXCEPT IN SUMMER USING FULL TRACKED VEHICLE STOP
FIRST PILOT CONFIRMED DEAD BUT SECOND UNACCOUNTED FOR STOP
LOCAL WILDLIFE EXHIBITING FULL RANGE OF ALICE INDUCED ABERRATIONS STOP
SIGHTED FAUNA WITH MULTIPLE HEADS SPINY PROTRUSIONS WHIPLIKE APPENDAGES STOP
RECOMMEND FLAMETHROWERS TO CLEAR AFFECTED FOREST STOP
FORCES EXPENDABLE BUT PAYLOAD MUST BE RECOVERED STOP
Statistical Analysis
Well, here we are. You’ve (presumably) read all the fun stuff, and now you’re stuck with this statistical analysis of the event. You’ve gobbled down all the nice chocolates in the box—and they were sweet—but now you’re stuck with nothing but coconut. Dry, mathematical coconut. Sure, you could just skip this section. You could just chuck all those coconut chocolates in the bin, still lovingly encased in their shiny blue wrappers. But you won’t. You’ll wolf down this unappealing block of graphs, and do you know why? Because I heard some guy say you couldn’t.
Let’s get started.
Fig. 1: As you can see, this graph wasn’t quite ready for its moment in the spotlight and is currently having a mini freak-out.
Fig. 1 is a style of graph I’ve been using since I first started doing this in 2012. While the word count across individual days (red line, square markers) ma
kes trends hard to interpret because it forms such a spiky line, taking an average across five days (green line, triangular markers) smoothes things out and makes it much easier to see what—if anything—is going on.
What appears to be going on is that word counts across the month remained reasonably steady (or steadily erratic, if you want to look at it like that) with a bit of a slump in the middle. Besides a fairly impressive peak at around 900 words on Day 10, there’s not a lot else going on. Compare that to previous years:
Fig. 2: This graph illustrates variations in topography across Middle Earth—from the Shire to the Misty Mountains to Mordor. Just kidding, it’s more average word counts.
I’ll admit, this one’s kind of confusing. However, that’s partly because the average word counts for all three years start off so similar. For about a week near the beginning, there’s not more than about 200 words difference between the three years. It’s only towards the end that they really start to separate out, with my first attempt at Flash Fiction Month finishing off with a long string of short stories, my second attempt ending on a high note, and this year’s work wrapping up pretty solidly in between the two. Which sort of screws up my analysis from last year in which I concluded that the first Flash Fiction Month, combined with eleven months of miscellaneous writing experience, had made me better able to produce work more consistently on demand.
So yeah. I’m starting to think that my B in GCSE Maths hasn’t really set me up to do this kind of thing in a statistically rigorous fashion.
Fig. 3: I may as well just have been sticking pictures of cats in here all this time.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. Having now participated in Flash Fiction Month three years in a row—producing nearly a hundred individual stories in the process—I’ve collected enough data to do some things that I couldn’t before. For example, up until now I’ve been relying on averages across five days to explore trends over the course of each month. But now that I’ve got three events to work from, I can work out an average for each day across all three years!!!
Okay, it’s probably not exciting enough to warrant three exclamation marks, but here it is anyway:
Fig. 4: This graph is smooth and mellow, like the voice of James Earl Jones when he’s not playing an asthmatic cyborg.
This graph shows a word count for each day of Flash Fiction Month (blue line, diamond markers) averaged across the 2012, 2013 and 2014 events. Obviously this is going to even out some of the extremes since I’m unlikely to produce a 1,000 or 55 word story on the same day each year. Day 11 is notable for its average word count of 979, as is Day 31 (the final challenge in both 2012 and 2014 demanded a 369er, requiring a word count of exactly 207).
To make any trends across the month clearer, I’ve also worked out an average across every five days of the three year average (red line, square markers). Put like that, it sounds anything but clear, but it does exactly the same thing as the five-day averages in Fig. 1 and 2: instead of taking into account every individual day, when I might have ended up with only twenty minutes to mash a story out of my keyboard or been handed a 999 word challenge, it averages out how I was doing on any given five days.
Changes in this five-day average are likely due to my personal performance varying over the course of the month: either a period of getting worn down or gaining a boost, or a run of unusually long or short stories. With the exception of the dip at the very end—caused entirely by Day 31’s challenges bringing down the average for the previous two days—it looks as though I had a fairly steady run. There’s a gentle peak around Day 10, perhaps due to me getting into the swing of things, followed by a slow decline up until about Day 23, then a boost during the last week (ignoring that anomalous Day 31).
Fig. 5: A man walks into a bar graph and...oh, you’ve heard that one?
While I’m basically making the assumption that “more words” equals “doing better,” which is absolutely not true, it’s...well, actually kind of true. It may be possible to write a brilliant, Baby Shoes style masterpiece in only a handful of words, but during this kind of event a string of long, complex stories is naturally more of an achievement than a string of snippets thrown together just to get through the week. With that in mind, looking at the average words per day in any given year (alongside the minimum and maximum numbers of words possible, for perspective) should give some idea how it went. This year is middly. The stories have definitely been longer on average than they were for the first event, but it’s nowhere near matching the average from last year’s, which was pretty astonishing.
Still, it’s not all about length. While I definitely feel like I had a harder time keeping up for portions of this year’s event, I also think the quality has stayed reasonably consistent. I didn’t write anything I really wasn’t proud of, and I think even the stories that were written in less than ideal conditions—with very little time, on the road, in hotel rooms, that sort of thing—were inventive and entertaining. Overall, despite having now produced a hefty number of stories for Flash Fiction Month alone, I don’t feel as though I’m running out of new ideas. In fact, I feel like I’m coming up with more than ever. And really, I think that’s what this event is all about.
The End
Here we are: the end of the book. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. Also, if you’re my nephew, I just want to take this opportunity to point out that at the time of writing you are less than a year old, so the fact that you’re reading this means that this message has travelled forward in time to reach you. Cool, right? Though given some of the jokes in this book, I hope it’s travelled forward in time significantly and that your mother is okay with it. For everyone else, please consider sharing this book with a friend: it won’t cost you anything, it would really help me out, and I’m sure they’ll enjoy it. Everyone’s a winner!
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Books by Damon L. Wakes
Prehistoric Fantasy:
Face of Glass
The Flash Fiction Month Series:
OCR is Not the Only Font
Red Herring
Bionic Punchline
Osiris Likes This
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