“Just a Dollar” and “Sugar Wars” 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!
“Just a Dollar” and “Sugar Wars” are both contemporary fantasy stories with characters that are arguably not young adults. “Just a Dollar” is a flash fiction piece that takes place at a convenience store that had a customer come in and then leave by bending part of a steel door at the back of the convenience store. But it turns out that neither that character nor the story’s protagonist are entirely what they seem. And though the characters are ostensibly adults, they’re also not normal adults, having a bit more of a “newness” to their being.
“Sugar Wars” features college-aged characters from two rival organizations of witches, the Ghoul Scouts and the Bonfire Girls, which were clever names I came up with for contemporary alternatives to the Girl Scouts and Campfire Girls (in my mind, these are also fully gender-inclusive organizations, even if the representatives of each in the story are femme presenting). It’s a short story that deals with their rivalry but also with coming together to face a larger threat to both organizations. And though the characters are ostensibly eighteen or older, there’s still a bit of a YA or new adult sensibility to the story.
Both of these stories are exclusive to Weathering Youth, and they’re accompanied by many other, similar stories with younger protagonists!
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