Return to me

LGBTQ fantasy flash and a bit on my writing process

Kelara watched the horizon as she did every end of day, until the sun’s last rays died at the edge of the world.

“I’ll come home to you at sunset,” Ilene had whispered during their desperate last embrace. “Watch for me.”

The bands had come, conscripting for the war effort. Every household owed one able bodied soldier. Ilene had volunteered before Kelara could speak up to put herself forward. Ilene had known she wasn’t strong enough.

Ilene came to stand beside Kelara, not seeing her. She too looked out at the horizon, wondering why her wife had lost faith, why she had thrown herself from the cliff only days before her return.

Ilene shivered with cold as Kelara turned away from the fading light, stepping through her love, before disappearing into the darkness.

Image by Sarah Richter from Pixabay

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I initially published this ghost story on Medium. One of the commenters said the story had given her chills. One of the things I like about it is the hint at death in the first line. I also like the twist, with the soldier returning home to find the love she had thought to protect dead, and that both are repeatedly drawn back to the cliff, unable to find closure.

You might think, reading this, that I consciously plotted this out. I didn’t. What my subconscious was doing as I wrote the story remains a mystery to me. Very often, when I’m writing very short stories, I write from just a spark of an idea. I have no idea where the story is going until it takes me there. I consider this part of the magic of writing.

I do plot out aspects of my longer stories. In order to start writing them, for some reason, I need to know both my beginning and my ending, and then I drive the story toward the ending I have chosen.

The longer a story is, the more I end up plotting, but I do it as I go along. This is called headlamping (I didn’t make this term up). I’m able to plot as far ahead as I can see. Early on, this may be a scene, or a chapter or two ahead. By the time I really get rolling, I’m plotting 2-3 chapters ahead. In the book series I’m writing (just finishing first draft of the final book), as the story grew in my head, I started plotting entire books ahead.

It’s clear to me that the tales I write, though molded by my conscious mind to some extent, rise from some mysterious place within me. Maybe it’s the place dreams come from. I don’t know. What I do know, is that it’s a never-ending source of wonder for me to watch a story come into being as my fingers move on the keyboard.

Even when I think I know what’s coming next, sometimes what happens surprises me. It’s like I’m reading someone else’s story, eagerly devouring every word, even though I’m actually pouring them out onto the screen.

I could never become bored with writing. I’m too excited to see what comes next, as avid as any reader lost in a good book. And if that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.