“Gosutouotchi” and “Remote Control” 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!
“Gosutouotchi” and “Remote Control” were two stories that I wrote during the Clarion West flash fiction write-a-thon in 2023. Both of them have a protagonist who’s right on the cusp of young adult/new adult, but still dealing with elements of their past and family, in a way.
“Gosutouotchi” has elements of real life worked into the story, though with a much more speculative twist, as a younger sister gets upset with her older sister for neglecting her Tamagotchi, even though the younger sister hadn’t explicitly asked the older sister to do so. (I was a little older than my protagonist was when this actually happened!)
“Remote Control” has more of a speculative vibe from the start, with shades of Eleven from Stranger Things as the protagonist fights back against a former mentor who is taking things too far with younger recruits. Even though it’s not a biological family situation in this story, the characters within are a sort of found family or family of circumstances, and the protagonist adopts the elder sibling role without batting an eye.
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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