Walk With Me appeared in the Spring 2023 Flash Fiction competition on Writing Battle.

It did reasonably well, receiving a score of six, and made it through five peer judging rounds.

Unfortunately, it did not score a seven or higher and thus did not make it through to the finals.

The way that Writing Battle orchestrates its competitions is a lot of fun. Basically, you have a random card draw that chooses the Genre, Subject, and Word you’ll need to write about.

In this flash competition, your story can only be 500 words. My selection was Magical Realism, Satisfying Revenge, and Grandiose. I did have the opportunity to draw a new card on any one of these and take a chance on getting something else that I didn’t want to write about, so it’s a bit of a game when you get started.

Like other writing competitions, you’re placed into a cohort (a House) and judged within the context of the competitors in your cohort.

However, I was concerned when I found many contest participants mistook Magical Realism - which has its roots in painting’s surrealism - for Fantasy. Inasmuch, most wrote fantasy stories with trolls and witches and spells and things that don’t relate to Magical Realism. As paying customers, these competitors weren’t disqualified or judged on their strict adherence to the genre and - for me - muddied the water a bit.

That aside, I had a great experience. It’s a great competition with lots of nail-biting suspense, and I’ve already signed up for future competitions for the rest of the year. I’d recommend it to any contest-seeking author.

As the cover for the story suggests, I took a direct line from surrealism with this piece and had my protagonist, Luciana, walk into paintings as if they were memories. She takes her husband, Kent, by the hand and effortlessly steps into one place or another.

Specifically, in the story, Luciana takes Kent into a memory they shared in Durango, Mexico.

So why Durango? At the time, I was also researching and writing my Grist contest entry, Benevolencia, which centered on Durango, so I decided to apply the same research to this work.

The competition version of the story also had Luciana stepping into a painting-inside-a-painting of the White Cliffs of Dover.

Its theme is something most women of a certain age might relate to, where promises made at the beginning of a relationship aren’t kept by their husbands after marriage. Life sets in; complacency takes over; promises made are opportunities lost. What was originally fervent and passionate becomes more mundane or lost in the minutia of life.

In this case, Kent promised Luciana they’d travel more, and - as Kent isn’t receptive to her complaints - in the end, Luciana decides to take matters into her own hands.

The judges mostly got the surrealism concept and its theme, but some were confused with what I did with Kent in the ending. I got high marks on writing, mechanics, imagery, and the immersiveness of the story. Yet still, this was another situation where my story could have been improved with more explanation at the end, giving the reader a better understanding of what happened before I exited.

Even though this story didn’t walk through the competition - ah, you see my pun there - its rewrite found new life elsewhere. Walk With Me was picked up for online publication with a storytelling site. It’ll appear on their website around the first week of August 2023.