“The Storyteller” and “To Choose a Name” in Weathering Youth
Because Weathering Youth is my biggest collection to date, I’m grouping the short stories and flash fiction stories in pairs for my posts, based on the way they fall in the collection. This lets me look at the connections between the stories and how I decided to arrange specific stories in the collection!
“The Storyteller” is a story I wrote specifically for Bikes in Space when they were looking for stories with a “bikes and books” theme. My idea was to have a young woman in a post-apocalyptic world who was interested in fiction in a world that was focused on practical books. The story is also a bit of a coming-of-age tale, as she journeys to a major book swap on her own for the first time. Though the fiction book in Kezia’s world is not one of my personal favorites, it was a good option for a more timeless series with plenty of adventure and excitement! The notebook Kezia receives at the end of the story is related to a notebook brand I know of through my day job, where the archaeologists need waterproof notebooks in the rainy Pacific Northwest when they’re in the field. (One of my co-workers read this story and immediately recognized that detail, which I loved!)
The coming-of-age theme ties in with the second story in the collection, “To Choose a Name.” This one started as a flash fiction piece that I wrote during Clarion West’s Write-A-Thon in 2023. I combined it with a prompt from The Wayward Writer and wrote a story in a sci-fi generation ship setting about the day when students move from their education into the working world by selecting an adult name, rather than the letter and number sequence they were assigned at “birth” (which may very well be “decanting,” though that’s not addressed in the story–it was certainly the idea in the back of my mind, though). The main character in this story has a difficult time choosing the name that suits xem best and has to deal with a “best friend” nagging xem to get over it.
As an amusing (to me) twist, K011, the main character’s birth name, was my university-assigned username when I started college in 1992. Every student in our year had either a J or K and a three-digit code like this, which was the username for most people’s first email address. The name the main character chooses is also related to one of my first self-chosen online identities, too.
If these stories sound intriguing to you, you can find them both, along with many others, in Weathering Youth!
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