“To Live is the Rarest Thing in the World” and “Thirty to Fifty (Plus) Non-Feral Hogs
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!
Both “To Live is the Rarest Thing in the World” and “Thirty to Fifty (Plus) Non-Feral Hogs” feature disaffected teens, but the characters’ approaches are quite different.
“To Live is the Rarest Thing in the World” features a non-binary teenager with powers including invisibility and wind control, but when the drag queens they’ve been watching practice run into problems, they call in favors from their friends to help out. They also receive some sage advice from one of those drag queens, giving them a new way to look at their existence. The title from this piece is an Oscar Wilde quote.
“Thirty to Fifty (Plus) Non-Feral Hogs” takes its name from the claim some people made about the need for automatic firearms in semi-rural areas, but the story takes place entirely within a high school and mashes up high school life and mad science. This one is a much more humorous take on disaffected teens, even as the problem the characters face is substantial.
Both of these stories are exclusive to Weathering Youth! You can read them, along with other stories featuring young protagonists in a variety of settings, in print and ebook formats!
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