Four Letter Words
Veronica Scissors is out. Thanks to those who bought it! Time to ready the next story for publication.
I’ve written here previously about the end of the world showing up in a lot of my stories lately. Let me be a little more specific. These stories lately involve a soft apocalypse, where the world doesn’t end outright, but instead undergoes a slow decay, and people attempt to adjust and survive. This was the second of my apocalypse stories, and I wrote it right when Covid was first entering the headlines. No one knew how bad Covid was, or how long it would last. Politicians and experts issued statements that were contradictory and confusing and self-serving. The word “lockdown” had just entered the national conversation. My Dad had just died.
The story I am readying for publication came to me as a title first (a rarity: usually I get characters and setting first). Fuck, Marry, Kill. It’s based on the word game where you pick a person to fuck, a person to marry, a person to kill. There is a causal cruelty to the game, and I wrote the story at a time when the world seemed casually cruel. Paired with that cruelty is a simple, honest, clear-eyed love story. Love versus the end of the world. The story takes all my uncertainty and fear and grief, and balances it with a faith and belief in other people. Which is similar to how I dealt with those uncertainties and fears in real life. And how I deal with them now.
Anyway. The title has a four letter word in it, so it’s been a hard sell. I’ve sent versions out where the U in “fuck” is replaced by an asterisk, but that did not help sell it either. So the story is going out to you, dear reader. Without the asterisk.