Flash Fiction Friday Challenge: Week 2

Well, Flash Fiction Friday Number Two is under my belt! I think that I actually like the story that I wrote for this week’s prompt more than I like the one from last week. But I’ll let you be the judge of that. What do you think? Leave me a comment!

This week’s prompt: a horse, two cinnamon rolls, and a mixtape.

As I said last week, I made up all the prompts that I’m using for this challenge, and I think of all of them, I was the most excited for this one. If you’ve read my bio, you know that I’m from a very small town in the middle of Kansas. That’s where I spent the better part of two decades, so it’s somewhere that I’m very familiar with. So, that makes writing in that setting easy but also fun.

For this story, I decided to write in first person POV. I don’t often do that as I find that first-person POV is rather irritating to read. However, this choice was strategic. Because I wanted to write in a setting in which I’m intimately familiar, I wanted my character to be able to make commentary and provide the reader with a monologue of background details, introducing mixed tapes and his girlfriend before we’d even gotten to the heart of the story.

After my main character, my favorite part of writing this was creating a magical horse. At first, I thought I would go with something obviously comical. I considered giving the horse a unicorn horn, wings like a Pegasus, or turning him blue. However, the more I wrote, the more I realized that my horse needed to be organic. My MC needed to believe that this could be real life with just enough mysticism that the reader would know that we were not, in fact, in real life.

If you’ll allow me for a moment, I’d like to go off on a tangent. I didn’t realize this when I was writing this prompt, but it occurred to me when I sat down to fill the prompt: One of my favorite books in the entire world is Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin. If you enjoy long books with lots of detail and a hint of magic, I highly suggest that you read this book! Anyway, I referenced this book in the very first poem in my poetry anthology, The Secrets Behind My Eyes. The poem is called Full of Books. The specific line I’m referring to talks about a horse walking across New York’s snow. Because of this reference being fresh in my mind from working on my audiobook over the past few days, I used that as an inspiration for the setting and my horse in the story I wrote to fill my prompt.

This week’s story comes in at nine words over the allowed limit, which, if you remember from last week is one thousand five hundred. However, I’m not concerned. This is, after all, my own challenge, and I can decide when I’m allowed to break the rules.

Like last week, the story that you’ll read by clicking through to my link is in a very raw form. It’s barely edited, and it’s likely that there are many, many mistakes. I’ll do my best to correct those before I publish my anthology.

If you’d like to read my fill, you’ll find it here.

Just like last week, @soultouchingpoetry wrote a fill for this, a poem about meeting your true love at a sweets shop. You’ll find it below. If you like the poem, I strongly encourage you to follow the author on Instagram at @soultouchingpoetry! Thank you for writing!

Total August word count: 17,896

Thank you for reading! I’ll be back next Saturday with a new blog post, and there will be a new newsletter coming out next Sunday. Have a great week!