Author Insight: Prologue
Hunting the Beast
This flash fiction story was one of the few times that everything seemed to click in place from the beginning. I’d been dissatisfied with a lot of the stories I had been working on up to that point. It was good writing, but I just didn’t feel any kind of emotional connection with any of it. It had also been a while since I had written a good action sequence, and much longer since I had done any kind of a fighting scene. I sat down at my laptop late at night when it seems creativity comes easier. I made a quick playlist of music to listen to mainly made up of surreal 80’s Hair Metal, which for me always provides imagery of fanciful situations backed by hard-hitting action. Then I just sat down and started writing.
I had no concept of what the story would be. At first it was just a collection of images. The heavy mist on the ground, the beech trees, shafts of moonlight. The idea to have a hunter stalking a monster came from a Steampunk game I’d been playing. I purposely left the beast itself vague because I wanted the reader to fill in the creature’s unmentioned details in their own mind. Before I knew it, more than an hour had passed by and I had a rough draft that needed very little polishing to become this story.