The 2nd Round of the Short Story Challenge 2024 is officially underway! I scored well with The Miller’s Wife and landed in a new contest of 2,258 writers participating in 75 groups with approximately 30 writers per group.

We had ~72 hours to write a 2,000-word short story. It’s stiff competition—these are great writers from around the world—and I’ve never made it to an NYCM Round 3, but I’m hoping my story can carry me through.

My prompts were great (Sci-Fi, Self-Defense, a Postman). However, I fear the prompt’s subject (Self-Defense) pigeonholes writers in my cohort into a trite “dog bites mail carrier” yarn. The subject must play a material role in the story, so it’d be difficult to escape it.

My first idea included three sub-plots, four characters, and a time-traveling love story, but I couldn’t make it work without diminishing the self-defense requirement. I was afraid to reduce it to such a level that the self-defense aspect didn’t need to be there, taking me down a road of disqualification.

I tried to create a story with deeper concepts that could be conveyed between an act of violence and self-defense. The violence had to happen to arrive at the story’s conclusion and the character’s transformation, although I did try to make the story about more poignant, broader themes.

We’ll see if it works! Fingers crossed! I hope I can make it to the third round!

2024.06.06 — Good news!

My story, Relics of an Analog World, placed 4th in the competition! I’ll be moving on to the next round, the third round, this weekend! W00t!

In Washington, D. C., around Dupont Circle, around the latter half of the next century, a mail carrier named Jamal delivers mail with a robot carrier named Archie.

The story’s central themes are technology adaptation, memory, and aging.

I wrote the story after returning from a trip to Washington, D.C. where I stayed at the Cairo. The Dupont Circle area was bustling with people and activity, and I thought it’d be a perfect backdrop for a postman delivering mail. Its sights, sounds, and businesses greatly influenced this piece and gave it texture.

Under the hood, this story speaks to the problem of economic adaptation to automation and humanity’s response to sentient machines. In that respect, I felt its contours were similar to In Time of Roses, exploring our inevitable problem with accepting AI/robots as “people.” It layers in ideas of chronic social discrimination (Washington, D.C. offers a strong contextual setting).

I’m proud of the story, and I’m so pleased it did well on NYCM!

R