My flash story “The Heartbreaker’s Apprentice” is out today at Flash Fiction Online! This story is loosely inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” and involves a bittersweet love story and a young woman who is trying to learn the craft of breaking hearts. I was very excited when FFO took it for their Winter Folklore issue because that’s such an exact description of the vibe of this story; it’s told by a chorus of the nameless residents of an unnamed city (in earlier drafts it was obvious that the city was Ottawa, but sometimes those things go by the wayside in bring a story down to flash length), and it involves some very icy magic powers.
This is another story I started writing back in 2019 but couldn’t figure out how to finish. I had put it in the “trunk” file (for stories that I was no longer intending to complete), but early in 2024 I took it out, read it over, and thought “if I could figure out the ending there would be something here.” For a bit it transformed into a poem, and then back into a story, and today I’m happy to share it all with you in its final form.