I look over the fallen, my sadness fighting with my pride. You, who I nurtured from an orphaned waif, this is the work of your terrible hand. These wounds, those marks, I recognize them all; I taught you all this.

Each body under my boot deserved this end, I say to myself. I split your tutelage between how to wield this power and why. Did you learn one lesson better than the other?

This littered ground continues toward the sun. With heavy breath, I follow the dying light. I made you; that obligates me to see what wake you leave.

===

Back-filling some missing dates in my journal. If I'm going to claim the mantle of writer, I ought best keep my nibs sharpened.

I'm noticing a trend in my flash - I don't go for the shock of a twist ending. I think it's because I've seen it fail so often. Instead, I seem to choose more anticlimatic ones.

My stories are also usually very small in scale, to use the term in a theatrical / cinematic sense. This one is the exception; it has the dead-strewn field, the mists and blood splatter.

It's very hard to pack enough description into a hundred words and still leave enough room for plot. My personal taste for large-scale stories may be because it's easier to make the payload proportional to the scale.

If it's a huge battle, but the end is devoid of meaning or meme, then why have it? Yes, a simple battle of hundreds takes little more ink than a battle of two, but to do one justice requires much more work on both author and reader's behalves.

Most of my flash fics are internal. They aren't necessarily meditative - each of the four I've written recently have ended with a choice, a commitment. To quote one author's rules, "Something must change." It's very hard to work interaction into this compressed form.

That said, the most obvious enemy is "show, don't tell." If I don't have much room to move, and I don't have much space for dialogue, it's difficult to not tell. I try to mitigate this by trying to personalize each tale's vocabulary, to infuse the words with emotive content as well as their surface meaning.

Random thoughts from a random story.