I have a new story out today in the Sunday Morning Transport! This story is up this morning for all subscribers to the magazine. It’s my second appearance in Sunday Morning Transport, following my debut a couple years back with “Demonic Invasion or Placebo Effect?” But this story is weirder than the demons were, if you'll believe that.
This story is called “A Taste of Justice.”
It is a fairy tale about a boy with an unusual gift for holding onto the spirit of a moment, and it's also about ace love as I've never written it before, and about fighting with one very corrupt judge. It's personal and it's magical. In other words: it is the trickiest story to encapsulate and explain that I’ve written in a long time.
It’s one weird story.
Now, when I say a story is weird, a friend will inevitably say, “Your stories are always weird!”
This is one of those stories that took me outside my comfort zone. Usually I have a very tight grip on pacing and the passage of time in my stories. Here, I let my grip go. The fairy tale structure felt right to explore an amorphous sense of time, in which hours or days might pass within a single sentence. I used no traditional scene breaks, so the story would remain in the same single rubbery flow of time from beginning to end.
It was more nerve-wrecking to release my grip on time, and enthralling to feel the magic of the world unfold in a way natural to it. The dirt-tasting magic and Andrei’s growth into a man were punctuated in an almost omniscient way.
Typically when I try to bring the supernatural to life, I personalize it by bringing the audience deep into the emotional point-of-view of someone in the story. You live with them, moment-to-moment. Here, the moments didn’t matter. It was the bread crumbs of a fairy tale that mattered. I hope you’ll enjoy it.