In February 2020, my short story “A Valentine’s Fear” was published by Every Day Fiction. This is the story of how “A Valentine’s Fear” came to be. Unlike my other published stories, the origins of this story are pretty straightforward.
In November 2016, Apex Magazine held a contest for Valentine’s Day flash fiction of no more than 250 words. Now I’m the first to admit that I have a hard time writing anything short. My flash fiction usually turns into short stories. My short stories turn into novels. My novels turn into series. And even then everything is really long and needs to be trimmed in a serious way. At that point, the shortest thing I’d ever managed to write was a 550 word story that started as an assignment for a creative writing class. When I saw the announcement for the contest, my first thought was “There’s just no way I can pull off a story in 250 words.” So of course I tried it.
Obviously I had a theme going into this story—Valentine’s Day. Otherwise, I’m not quite sure where the idea for this story came from. I think it was inspired by the pain merchants in Janice Hardy’s Healing Wars series—merchants who buy people’s pain to fill weapons. Here, I created merchants who bought fear, usually from people embarking on something scary, and then sold it, usually to adrenaline junkies. I was also inspired, unfortunately, by the 2016 election. You might notice a reference or two to how pessimistic about our future I was feeling at the time. Ultimately, though, I wanted this story to have a happy ending. It is Valentine’s Day after all, and I’m secretly a hopeless romantic.
My first draft of this story was about 600 words I think. Honestly it could have been longer. I cut and cut and cut. It was a great exercise in working on my writing on the word and phrase level, cutting out absolutely everything that wasn’t necessary and finding one or two strong words to replace whole phrases. I got the story critiqued by beta readers and revised. And then I submitted it. I didn’t win the contest, but I believed in the story, so I kept looking for a home for it, and here I am. I’m so happy Every Day Fiction decided to publish “A Valentine’s Fear,” and I’m also really happy that they put it up so close to Valentine’s Day itself. It was a lot of fun writing this little story, and I really hope you enjoyed reading it.