My Sudden Fiction, or Why I’m Suddenly Obsessed with Egg Cups

Sudden fiction or flash fiction is very short stories, although technically, what I’m writing is called micro-fiction, under 400 words. As I write this post, I have nineteen different egg cup micro-fiction stories, the longest of which is 103 words. All together the posts are just under 1000 words, all inspired by photographs of the Egg Cups of the Damned interacting with others at their family reunion.
So this probably needs some explanation.

I was making myself insane trying to write in chronological order quickly, two things I should never do. This was NOT Bob’s fault, he kept saying, “We have plenty of time, we don’t need to publish these fast, we can wait until 2025” but my own self-imposed guilt was making me insane. Everything I wrote was dreck, I was falling back into depression, and then Bob said, “This needs to be funnier,” and I started to scream.

I’m not funny on purpose, you know. The characters do that. I once had a very nice lunch with people from Writer’s Digest who wanted me to write a book on how to put humor into fiction. I kept saying, “You can’t put humor into fiction, it has to come from the characters, be intrinsic to the characters.” They were both lovely people, but I never wrote the book because you can’t put humor into fiction.

Where was I? Oh, right, I couldn’t put humor into Rocky Start.

So to keep working, I started thinking about the secondhand shop that’s the main setting in the book. It was supposed to be full of junk, but the guy who brought the junk in from his travels around the tri-state was an ex-spy with a perverse sense of humor, so the junk would have to be interesting. So I went to eBay and did a search for “weird.” Don’t do that, by the way. It turns up some very upsetting stuff. But it also turned up these demented egg cups:

which I called the Egg Cups of the Damned.

And then somebody on Facebook (Shelby Lynne) said she’d keep them in the basement, so still just playing around, I put them on my kitchen counter with my Spaghetti Monster canisters and one of my Betty Boop cookie jars.

Which is when I saw them interacting with other characters. Made me think about what kind of people they’d be. Male, for some reason. Probably teenagers. Mean little bastards. I started wondering what their names would be. And because I kept searching for the weird for the RS books, I found these:

These looked like girls to me, possibly cousins of the Damned, and I imagined them meeting at a family reunion. They’d drive the Damned boys crazy, I thought, just smugly smiling through all the Damned’s harassment. I decided they were from the Damned’s mother’s side of the family so their last name wasn’t Damned, it was Smug-Chuckler. (Mama was born a Smug. Her sister married a Chuckler.)

And then I gave the Smug-Chucklers names–Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Marie Therese–and it didn’t seem right that the Damned had no first names, so I called them Shelley, Keats, Byron, and Howard, and the stories appeared. Names will do that.

So there’s a lot more–I widened my search to salt and pepper shakers and hit gold–but basically, this was play. It was just for me to have fun. It would never be a novel. (No, seriously, I will never write a novel about hostile delinquent egg cups.). But every time I’d find something weird on eBay, I’d mentally put whatever it was next to the Damned egg cups, and a story would appear. A very short story (the shortest one is fourteen words). At first, I was doing just one piece of flash fiction per new character–“This is X. Here’s how the Damned feel about them/what they did to them/etc.”–but then sequels and inter-relationships appeared which is the real key to story–how do these people change in relationship to the people they interact with–and now I have nineteen pieces of flash fiction and I don’t think I’m done.

You want your creativity back? Write something simple that’s fun and that you don’t have to do. I do think it’s a shame that Charlotte Smug-Chuckler accidentally broke Howard Damned’s heart, but Howard was just assuming too much. Meanwhile Byron Damned is hitting on everybody, and then Uncle Robert Damned, a terrifying egg cup, showed up with his four daughters, Medea, Circe, Medusa, and Gladys (another find from searching for “weird”) and the Damned boys are frankly a little afraid of them. Well, not Byron. Byron will hit on anything.

Sometimes I look at that and think that joke of naming the fourth egg cup something different loses its impact by the third time, but then I remember this is just for fun and I do the Meatballs chant: “It just doesn’t matter.” Nobody’s depending on this stuff, it’ll never be formally published, and I’m cracking myself up. The only downside is that I’m going to end up with a lot of weird small china, and frankly, I’ve been here before (yes I still have some of the Walking Ware).

The big thing for me is that writing fiction is fun again. Even the Rocky Start stuff because I’ve re-discovered my inner ham, the writer who will stoop to ever lower levels to find depths of her characters thinking things they shouldn’t and doing things they really shouldn’t. (The Damned boys stole Aunt Emily’s egg, but Charlotte made Howard give it back. He’s helpless in the force of her fluffy little smirk.). I think I’m going to start putting a flash story up every Monday on Facebook. There’s just not enough egg cup fiction on Facebook.

Yes, it’s all dumb. And I’m having a wonderful time. So that’s the explanation for the egg cup stuff.