Princess Soup-Bone – The Process
Princess Soup-Bone is story number nineteen in the #52ShortStories challenge.
**SPOILERS BELOW. If you have not read the story and want to be (hopefully) surprised, come back to this when you’re done.**
I felt like doing another historical piece this time around, set in my favorite California Gold Rush era; only, this time, I wanted to emphasize a straightforward tale with the supernatural elements only playing a small part (if any…up to the reader to judge what was really going on here).
I also wanted to practice my character separations, meaning that I really wanted each character to come off as well-integrated in the setting but entirely distinct. Making Luca and Johnny rather FOB immigrants made it a little easier to give them distinctive dialog with slightly broken English. I wanted Davis to be a more educated type of fellow, and of course, the gambler was just your stereotypical silver-tongued cardsharp.
It was a nice break to write this one in a more realistic vein than most of my work. I’ve been reading a lot of literary short stories lately, most of them written in the 19th and early-20th centuries, so I think some of that has been rubbing off. The title itself was inspired by Sherwood Anderson’s A Death in the Woods (Oh, if only I could write such a striking story).
Hope you enjoyed another one of my subconscious’s creations!
Here’s the general scratch file:
And the daily journal entries:
- Monday, December 25th
- Tuesday, December 26th
- Wednesday, December 27th – Skipped
- Thursday, December 28th
- Friday, December 29th
- Saturday, December 30th
- Sunday, December 31st
-Phillip
