My story “Fire Rode the Cold Wind” is up at The Sockdolager this week! The summer issue has fully eleven lovely stories in it, and I’m so pleased to have this little piece in such fine company.
The origin of this story was actually the Random Title Generator, which is one of my favorite ways to start a story without a lot of a baggage going into it about how I think it should turn out. The original title the generator spewed out was “Fire Rode the Cold Worlds” and the contrast between fire and cold immediately suggested to me the mismatch of culture and expectation that the story winds up being about, and from there it latched on to a pre-existing thought I’d scrawled down in my notes about a person having a secret name only ever shared between them and the most important people in their lives. What if the person you want to share your most intimate secret with doesn’t understand what you’re trying to give them?