This week, I wrote a response to a Reedsy Weekly short story competition entitled Return to Me where the prompt read:

At first, and I’ll be honest, I wasn’t very enamored with the concept. I had no real experience writing Matryoshka-like, nested stories, and the prompt grained against my brand. I feel my style is more direct, opting toward linear narratives that can be easily consumed and digested. I hate twisting up a story like a pretzel because it meets an artistic aesthetic. Why make something more convoluted than it had to be?

Further, I didn’t feel I could write a compelling nested story in under 3,000 words. My usual model for a story this size would be three acts in 1,000-word blocks, but this story called for maybe twice the number of acts and quick transitions between scenes. I had to insert a device to transition the reader between scenes without disrupting the flow of the story.

On the one hand, I was turned off by the prompt, thinking it’d be too much work for the reward. Yet on another, it was a cool technical challenge from an accomplished short story author, Erik Harper Klass. Thinking on it, if I were taking a creative writing course, would I turn down the opportunity to try a new technique? Nah! I’d try to do the work. So I hopped to it.

Researching these types of stories, I decided on the wolfhound as a transitionary device for the reader. When the wolfhound appeared in the narrative, I signaled that we had moved on to another scene.

The beginning of the story is actually four segments in. We encounter my antagonist, Rof Mok, attending a funeral service for a fallen soldier, Wen Fak. Before that, we met Rof as a desperate thief, looting a grave near the Temple of Silvanus in Mumling. Rof Mok sins, stealing from the dead, and is rewarded by encountering the wolfhound.

The hound is a grim - an omen - that conveys a curse. Throughout the story, the grim haunts Rof Mok, driving him mad and to a point where suicide becomes his only option to escape it, taking us right back to the opening scene with Bartram.

Grims are old folklore. Grims are guardians and defend a church from those who’d commit sacrilege against it; they often take the form of black dogs. In the past, black dogs were even buried under the cornerstone of a church so that their spirit would guard the grounds. I took some license with the legend conveying a curse that followed Rof Mok around.

The nested story needed a more sympathetic/empathetic flavor to contrast against the cautionary, spooky folklore. I used the trope of a reflecting widow to weave the second story in. Reflecting on a story allowed me to stay in the past and build a foundation for Sae Fak’s backstory. I wanted to get the reader to like Wen Fak and feel sadness/empathy for Sae so that returning the ring to Wen meant something to the reader.

So what I wanted from the story was a little sweet and sour: a love story nested within a darker, more ominous one. When I read this story aloud to my beta team, I found that everyone would get really tuned in during the love story and brace for the ending. The circular movements of the story with its transitions also forced me to pause a little while reading it, and I felt it took longer to read. A more winding trail, I think, rather than a direct route, and the mind seemed to play with it well.

Thinking about transitions in that way was, in itself, a good experience and another tool in my writer’s kit. I really liked how the story turned out. I’ll definitely use it again. Bartram Humblefoot played a good protagonist to my villain and fit right in with Wen Fak’s story.

In this story, I mention that Bartram’s 66 years old, and I foresee this story taking place a few years earlier than The Murkwode Reaving.

Some “Behind Baseball” Details:

1. Wen Fak is actually the name of a Mumling NPC Fighter used in my D&D campaign. The original Wen Fak was an 80-year-old veteran that kept rolling nat-20’s and saving the party’s bacon. He was truly an awesome NPC. Wen Fak eventually died, eaten by a giant frog; I didn’t want to have to explain giant frogs in this story, and comedy wasn’t what I was going for, so I went with goblins. After I wrote the story, I shared it with all my players. They loved it and thought it was a fitting tribute.

2. I was going to write a grim into The Grotesque of Silvanus when I prepared its commercial version. That story also takes place at the same temple. I probably still will.

3. Mumling is mentioned in several of my works but most notably in The Murkwode Reaving. Bartram is a military commander for a Gaelwyn (human) city-state - Mumling - and the contention between his role as an officer and his religious calling is explored in that work.

4. In the story, I mention Brigantia, and in The Blood of the Catacomb Captive, I explored Brigantia’s wealth inequality due to its silver mines.

As always, thanks for reading, and thanks for sticking around.

R