“A Year Without an October” and “Hatching a Plan” 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!
“A Year Without an October” and “Hatching a Plan” both involve a young protagonist trying to solve a problem, and while neither of the characters are me, they’re certainly inspired by aspects of me! While the former is flash fiction and contemporary fantasy, the latter is a nearish-future short story, though not entirely sci-fi (though part of it was inspired by a sci-fi TV show).
In “A Year Without an October,” the protagonist, who loves Halloween (like me), discovers that the world has decided to skip the month of October for no apparent reason. She wants her favorite month back, or at least to be able to enjoy the spooky season, so she works to solve that problem.
“Hatching a Plan” has a young protagonist who chafes at restrictions regarding checking out library books (something I dealt with at a younger age) but needs to find a way to protect the chickens that she and her older sister are raising while their parents are away working. This is also very much one of my “siblings who bicker but love each other in the end” stories, and some readers might be able to identify the inspiration I used for one of other characters.
Both of these stories are exclusive to Weathering Youth, where they sit alongside other stories featuring younger protagonists. In early December, I’ll wrap up my recap of all the pieces in this collection with a look at the microfiction and poetry pieces, which I haven’t talked about yet!
Comments