Episode 3 - An Unconventional Tea by Heather Martin

Episode 3 - An Unconventional Tea by Heather Martin

Allister: Welcome to Battle Hardened. On Writing Battle, stories live and die according to the decisions of anonymous judges. Kearston: But vote count is not a measure of story quality. Allister: High scores feel great! Duel wins lead to final showdown appearances and honorable mentions. Kearston: If you participate and you have received either honor, that is something to be proud of. However, at Battle Hardened, we want to mine for hidden treasures. Allister: We are interested in stories that blew us away. Kearston: Those whose value goes beyond their vote tally. Allister: Diamonds in the rough. Allister: So happy birthday. Kearston: Thank you very much. It was a nice day. Allister: Do you have anything else to celebrate besides another trip around the sun? Kearston: I do have a couple of things I'm pretty excited about. I won the Foofaraw Crumbs Drabble competition, and that's coming out soon. I'm very excited to be in the Foofaraw Zine. Allister: That's awesome. Yeah, have you racked up any other wins? Any other submissions or contests? Kearston: I have. It's kind of, I don't know, in my head, it seems kind of braggy. So talking about it always makes me feel just a little bit uncomfortable, but I do. Allister: No, you should be proud. Kearston: Oh, yeah, I had a story pop up for selection in the Coin-Operated Press Romantasy Zine. And I won a little micromance Monday, me cute. It was a Star Wars-themed one, so I was pretty excited about that one. It was adorably cheesy. Allister: Well, you should be proud. I'm proud of you putting it out there. Kearston: Thank you. Allister: And I hope you stabbed that imposter syndrome straight in the neck. Kearston: Like my plump little dumpling. Allister: Or Kevin. Kearston: Oh, Kevin deserved it. Allister: I saw some people wondering why. I was surprised that people wondered if he was even real. Kearston: That made me laugh too. They were like, how long have they been together? What else has he done? I'm like, it's a rant. He deserves to be stabbed because it was funny. Allister: Yeah. Ultimately, that's the reason, right? But I mean, so in character, it's because he just never will voice his feelings or thoughts, right? Kearston: Correct. I thought that it was just a fun little poke, fun little stab at the communication dynamics that people sometimes experience where someone is just looking for more in terms of communication direction, just bluntness, and the other person just isn't going to give it. So I've seen a few comments that made me laugh where they were like, this is the perfect kind of feminist revenge plot in here. And I'm like, it was not intentional, and that's how it turned out. And it is so funny to me. Allister: Oh, that's fitting for this episode. Kearston: I thought it was. Allister: Yeah. Okay. So aside from birthday and all of these great celebratory things, how's the running going? Kearston: Oh, it is going. I'm making progress. I am trying to stick to a plan and I'm counting down the days until October 25th when I am running this 10k. Allister: Have you started tracking weekly miles? Kearston: I have. I'm using a couple of different online apps. So I am tracking weekly miles. I'm doing about six to eight right now. So I'm slowly getting more. So every day I'm doing between a mile and a half to four and a half on my long days. Allister: Nice. So you're already over 10k a week. Kearston: Yes. And it's gotten so much easier. I've been training for five weeks now. So I've made some progress and I do not feel as sore and I feel like my lungs have gotten more efficient, which is kind of wild.  Allister: Yeah, and you've dropped a little weight without even trying eh? Kearston: I have. Whereas you have been trying. Allister: I have been trying. We'll see if I make it a couple days left until I find out. Kearston: You're so close. Fingers crossed. Allister: Yep. And we'll see how much it compromised my strength so TBD. Kearston: Well, and as soon as you're done, you're going to bulk back up. Yeah. Allister: Yeah. So we'll also see how much one day of recovery will help me bounce back. Kearston: Yes.  Allister: Okay. So this story was written for Fear 2025 with a character prompt of farmer and an object prompt of hacksaw. The word limit was 1000, of which Heather used 999. Kearston: Content warnings for this story include implied or described sexual assault, and now, without further ado, let's see what's brewing. An Unconventional Tea, narrated and written by Heather Martin.  Heather Martin: Donna pushed the hacksaw forward, applying just enough pressure for the finely spaced teeth to make a smooth cut through the PVC pipe. “Did I check the tension before starting?” she asked acerbically, “Of course I did. I’ve just been building these damn systems for years now,” she scoffed. She pulled the blade back towards herself, easing the pressure as she did. “It’s not like sawing is rocket science, I don’t need someone who’s never held a saw in his life telling me how it’s done. Even if it were rocket science, the audacity of suggesting I, a fucking scientist, can’t manage a simple machine is unforgivable.” Donna pushed the saw forward more forcefully than before, wincing as she felt the blade bend in protest. She took a deep breath to calm herself. Her temper had led to mistakes in the past. Attaching this new reservoir for her flower farm was already eating into time she didn’t have. While she could always cut a new pipe, she could never recoup the wasted time. This addition wasn’t strictly necessary for growing the henbane used in her research, but she had recently read about using compost tea to boost growth in hydroponic systems, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to give it a shot. She had just the detritus to add to the tank. She fitted her newly cut pipe to the intake port on the reservoir and tightened the coupling before applying a sealant. “I’m so tired of my competence being questioned at every turn…am I aware of the toxic effects of henbane?” She slammed her palm against the metal of the tank, the hollow sound reverberating against the concrete walls of the basement under the hydroponics farming building. “Of course! I must have missed that while writing my damn dissertation on the attributes of the entire nightshade family! Am I aware,” Donna repeated derisively, glaring into the darkness of the open tank. No answer was forthcoming. With one pipe fitted, she moved to cutting another. Donna found a calm in the cutting of the hard plastic. The slight resistance when pushing the blade forward, the light scrape as she released tension while pulling back. In the small room, the sound bounced off the walls creating an almost meditative effect. For her at least. It was a reminder of what was to come. She continued to list grievances as she fitted the pipes into an elbow joint, connecting them to the water supply. “They think I don’t hear them whisper ‘witch’ behind my back, all over my flowers. Absurd. It’s the 21st century, we know these plants have medicinal properties, but suddenly I’m cosplaying a witch because I think these flowers possess insight to neurodegenerative diseases? Just because they’re not up to date on current research doesn’t mean I have to limit myself for them!” Donna grimaced as her final cut came out slightly crooked. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do. She patted the tank fondly. It wasn’t much to look at, but she had a feeling it would bring some peace into her life. Remove an annoyance that just wouldn’t get the fucking hint. Nothing else got through to men, so she really had no choice. With a big sigh she leaned back, working out the cricks in her spine that had grown while she worked through the night. She could vaguely hear the work party that was going on a few floors above. She wouldn’t be missed; she had yet to join a single party, seeing them as a waste of time. The absence of her guest, however, would likely be noted. The smarmy bastard. Donna finally moved to stand directly in front of the reservoir tank and looked inside through the open door. A man looked back at her, eyes wide with terror. Ugh, Todd. Earlier, when they had passed outside her office, purely by coincidence, the sot had jumped at the opportunity to explain to her the proper way to set up a new water reservoir when she mentioned her current project, explaining how many women didn’t understand the simple concepts of plumbing. Donna had told him his help was unnecessary, but he had insisted. On their walk to the basement, the drunken fool refused two more invitations to escape, saying he couldn’t possibly leave her in such a helpless situation. Getting him into the tank had honestly been child’s play. When she bound his wrists, his blood rushed away from his brain, making a man who was usually mildly clever more idiotic than normal. He had seemed confused when she had taped his mouth shut, and that confusion turned to concern when she shoved him into the opening of the container. He looked at her, bewildered and desperate, and Donna felt a twinge of guilt. Then she remembered the way this man had cornered her on multiple occasions and her resolve steadied. “This all must be so disorienting,” Donna said, putting as much sympathy into her voice as she could stomach. “You don’t need to worry, the chamber won’t fill completely. You’ll be able to breathe. Though I’m not sure how long the water will remain safely drinkable…” she made a moue and then shrugged. Todd made some token argument, though it was too garbled to understand. Donna’s grin was sharp, “Um, actually¸ Todd, hyoscyamine from the henbane can be utilized for Alzheimer’s research. I’m not surprised you were unaware. Enjoy your time thinking. You’ll be an integral part of helping my flowers thrive.” Donna slammed the door, sealing it. She turned the valve and listened quietly as water started to flow. The water pumps drowned out any other sounds that may have been made within. With a sigh she walked upstairs to look at her beautiful towers of henbane. One day they would provide solutions to the world's worst neurodegenerative diseases. She smiled, reveling in the knowledge that one of the people standing in her way would now only benefit the project. Allister: Well, thank you for joining us today. That's awesome that you are willing to share your story. Heather: Of course. Allister: I got such a laugh out of it. Heather: I'm glad. It was fun to write. Allister: Did you have any professional experience or hobbies that helped dial in the voice and the experience? It felt very lived. Heather: Some of the stuff, yes, I'm a pharmacy technician. So I'm a little bit familiar with the medications. I did a lot of Googling to make sure the flowers I was talking about were real. Google is probably very concerned. Allister: Yeah, get yourself on an FBI watch list. Heather: Because I was worried about a body decomposing is going to affect how something grows. So what kind of flowers would do well with that? Google is like, if you have a body, you need to call the cops. Allister: For the purposes of a story. Heather: A little warning like that. Kearston: It was staging an intervention for you right there online. Heather: But when I was writing it, I was thinking about what is a slight that just would really annoy me to the point where I'd want to be very bad. Allister: Like it feels like he deserves it? Heather: Yes. And the thing that just popped into my head was mansplaining. And we have things like that. A lot of pharmacists are female. And we will have these patients come in and just talk to the pharmacist like she barely graduated high school and just like, oh, well, do you understand how this medication works? And completely talk down to her and then turn to one of the male techs and ask him a question instead of the pharmacist. So it's something that I see a lot, and I was like, oh, yeah, that would be up there on the list of petty slights that would drive me crazy because I did want it to be like a real thing that someone would be angry for because then it would sort of defeat the ridiculousness, I guess, of her motivation for it. Allister: The gallows humor. Heather: M'hmm. Kearston: Heather, I was not really a horror genre person myself. I don't really watch a lot of movies. I'm very easily frightened. Were you a fan of the horror genre before you got this prompt? Heather: No. Not at all. I am easily frightened myself, and I am prone to nightmares of the ridiculous scale I've had zombie nightmares and dinosaur nightmares. So I generally avoid horror. The only sort of caveat to that is I do like a good ghost story. I'm really into folk tales and folk tales do sometimes veer into the more eerie, creepy side of things. And so I can read a good ghost story. Kearston: Like Ichabod and Mr. Toad, the Headless Horseman? Unknown: Yeah, yeah. Unknown: But mainly my go-to reading is fantasy and not so much the horror. Allister: Do you have any favorite fantasy authors? Heather: Oh, actually, yes. I'm a big fan of Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. Allister: Awesome. Heather: They are my go-to; I also have gotten really into Naomi Novik and Tamsin Muir. I'm desperately waiting for Elect of the Ninth to come out. Allister: So how did you feel about how Brandon Sanderson wrapped up The Wheel of Time? Heather: I was just happy it got an end. Allister: Yeah, same. Kearston: I have not read anything by Brandon Sanderson, so I don't have any complaints. It's on my TBR. I'm going to read it eventually. Heather: It's a massive undertaking. So he has a short story called "The Emperor's Soul," which is probably one of my favorite things he's written. I have a soul stamp tattoo from that short story, and I want to say it's like 120 - 140 pages, so it's a lot easier to digest. Kearston: Nice and short then, yeah. Heather: And it's my favorite thing that he's written. I always recommend that to people who don't want to jump into a 1200-page book right away. Kearston: I don't mind the 1200-page books. I don't. I just have a very, very long TBR right now, so I'm trying to prioritize. And then with competitions, it just kind of pulls away as well a bit. Allister: Yeah, I don't know how you find time to read at all. Kearston: I do a lot of audiobooks. Allister: Yeah, and the audio on Writing Battle as well is so helpful for me. I appreciated for sure your narration of this story. Kearston: What were your initial thoughts when you received your prompts, and then did you do any re-rolls? Heather: It's been a while. I do think I did re-rolls because I remember thinking, oh no, and then thinking, oh no again. Kearston: Laughing Heather: So I know I did a re-roll on the genre. I don't remember what my first one was. And then I got horror, and I was like, oh snap. I don't know if I did a re-roll on the object. Because I was like, oh, hacksaw, that works for horror. And then Farmer was the other one. And so I was like, OK, I think I can make this work. And then there was Googling about what a hacksaw is and isn't able to cut. Again, a lot of really weird Google searches. But what ended up directing me on it is I spent some time thinking about horror that I have read and that I have enjoyed. And I landed on Poe. I've read a lot of Edgar Allan Poe that I've enjoyed. And I really like modern retellings of things. And I had just gotten into discussion with one of my friends who also happens to be one of my beta readers about The Cask of Amontillado. And so I figured I could do a retelling of Cask of Amontillado with the prompts that I got. And so that gave me the direction to go in. Another thing I remember when I was trying to think of things, I did a lot of Googling on what the difference between a farmer and a rancher was what constitutes as farming, because you can farm fish. And so there was a lot that I was trying to figure out how much I could stretch the prompts and have them still be accurate, which I think is always a fun part of the Writing Battle system. Allister: Absolutely. Pushing things, subverting things. Heather: M'hmm. Kearston: Trying to find creative interpretations for all of those prompts so that you aren't telling the exact same story as a prompt twin, possibly. Heather: M'hmm. Even then, I took this, I took an ancient literature class in school way back when, and the professors started the class out with saying there are no new stories. And that was the paradigm that we took, where we were reading all of these stories from 4,000, 3,000 years ago. And seeing how we're still telling those stories today. Even when they're telling the exact same story, it's going to be different. And that's where a lot of the interesting stuff lies is in how they view it differently.  Kearston: That's a fantastic approach. I picked up the Emily Wilson version of the Odyssey, her translation. So I'm really excited to pick up any of those differences that she captured as a woman writer, translating it for the first time. I'm excited to see how she's changed that narrative a little bit. Heather: Yeah, I feel like we need more things like that for the older stories that are in dead languages now. Kearston: And I am a big fan of the feminine revenge stories. And yours absolutely captures that. And it has definitely gained popularity. Do you have a favorite book or film in the genre? Heather: I don't know if I have any that are focused on revenge. I really like the idea of consequences. So there's this book series by Anne Bishop, The Black Jewels Trilogy. And this isn't a central point, but there's a part where one of the characters sets up this thing where everyone gets back what they gave in, essentially. So all of these characters who had hurt other people, the hurt that they had put out in the world, was now coming back to them. And all of their like, you know, I want to survive this. And she's like, well, how many people survived you? And so it was this idea of not seeking revenge, but making sure people got the consequences of their actions. And I personally like that a little bit more. Kearston: I love Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. In my mind, that's one of the best feminist revenge stories that springs to mind anytime I think of someone giving out the consequences for the actions. Heather: Okay, yeah, the violent side of revenge. It can be really cathartic. But it makes me so uneasy. One of my favorite movies, was Contact, originally written by Carl Sagan. In it, Jody Foster is this scientist, and no one believes her. And then at the end, she's vindicated. And so I think those vindication stories call to me the most. Maybe I just haven't been wronged enough to really feel the draw of the revenge stories. Allister: I thought you were going to say to feel the murderous rage. Kearston: To shove a body in a tank. Heather: Either or either or. But there aren't any where it's the main part of the story.  Allister: Do you remember if you got any pips or trophies for this story? Heather: Oh, I think I got one of each. I got pacing, creativity, and character on it. Kearston: Well, and the creativity is perfect because you were growing things from decaying bodies. Heather: Yeah, yeah, it's perfect fertilizer. Kearston: Perfect for those flowers. What was the most challenging part about writing a horror story in a thousand words? Heather: It's rough figuring out how much of a story you can put into a thousand words. And it's going to be different for every writer. And I figured out that's a scene with some occasional flashback to thinking of something outside. And that's not just related to horror. Although with the horror, you gotta build the tension. So that also adds to the difficulty in getting it into a thousand words. Anytime I sit down to start writing these, I always end up with a whole lot of words that I then have to pare down to try and get within the limit. Allister: That's always a fun challenge. That's definitely one of the easier parts for me, at least in beta swaps. I tend to be pretty good at hacking and slashing. Heather: One of my friends that I always have read my stuff, she is an English teacher. Allister: Nice! Do you have just a one trusted beta reader? Do you circulate to a broader group? Heather: I've got three friends who I give my writing to. There's my friend Ashley, who's the English teacher. Taylor who's just the best cheerleader in the world. And she's also a lot of fun to bounce ideas off of. And then I have my friend Hunter who he and I have almost the exact same taste in books. So he's the closest I can get to what my take on reading a thing would be. And so those are the main three. And then the nice thing about writing battle is, that was the first time I've ever shared my writing to people that I don't know well. So that was terrifying, but also really rewarding after building up the courage to do it. Allister: What's been the best bit of feedback you've gotten from that courageous step of sharing your work with strangers? Heather: I don't know if there's any one bit of feedback, but the comments I got, like, oh, your main character, she's super unhinged, and then I really got it. I had a judge who was like, yeah, this just wasn't for me. You don't have to write something that everyone will enjoy, as long as you enjoy writing it. Allister: Yeah. Kearston: I think sometimes that's a mentality that people have in competitions as well, is that they write to win instead of writing something they enjoy. And so they sometimes lose the joy of writing in that heat of competition. And then when feedback comes in, and it didn't do as well, because they weren't really writing for themselves, I think it maybe hits a little bit harder versus knowing that what you wrote was something that you really enjoyed and loved. And whether or not somebody else liked it as much as you did, it's okay. Allister: I'll just say, I think viewing this character as unhinged and liking the story are perfectly compatible. Heather: Yeah, okay. I mean, I totally get her. Kearston: She seemed like she was really fun to write. There were several comments that she was unhinged, and I loved that about her. She was so entertaining to read. What was she like to write? What was your process like? Heather: One of the things I do sometimes when I am just so frustrated with something is I will vent, and it'll be just like a caricature of whatever's going on. So I usually only ask for help when I have tried everything that I could possibly think of. And so I'm like, hey, I need help. I'm having this problem with the computer. And they're like, well, have you tried turning it off and on again? And that frustration was what played into some of her ranting about… talking down probably isn't the right way. I know when people ask those questions like tech support, they've got a checklist to follow. But still, that was what was going through my mind while I was trying to think of what grievances she could be listing off. Kearston: As she's just hacking through. Allister: It definitely seemed like a relatable emotional core, even as a man. It felt like it was written from a place where it was emotionally real. You weren't just making it up. Heather: Mm. That sense of frustration is something that everyone can relate to. I know that I was specifically thinking of mansplaining, but that bit of someone talking to you like you don't know what you're doing. I think it's something that everyone has experienced at some point in their lives because that's just what life is like. Kearston: Absolutely. Is writing another form of creative expression for you? And then do you have any other artistic hobbies that you enjoy? Heather: Yes, so writing is definitely a form of self-expression. It's like how I said earlier, there's no new stories. A lot of times when I am watching a show or reading a book or reading comics, I will be thinking about, oh, this is really neat. But what if? So I'm a big fan of fan fiction because a lot of times that's what people are exploring is the what if this happened instead of that. As far as other artistic things, I crochet and I knit. I don't know how creative I would consider those things because I have to follow a pattern when I do them. So it's not so much. I'm always amazed at people who can just sit and create something all on their own. I need instructions and I'm like that with most things. I can play the piano, but I have to have sheet music. I can't just sit and make music the way that some people are able to. Allister: Well, and some people apply that sort of formulaic approach to writing too, right? Heather: I wouldn't look at those people and say what they're doing is any less creative. So I suppose it's not fair to hold myself to that standard. Kearston: Absolutely. Heather: And say it's not creative when I do it. Kearston: And I love that you crochet because I love to crochet as well. Heather: Crochet is a lot of fun. It is a lot of fun. I recently was a crochet in as much because I had Carpal Tunnel syndrome and my hands would go numb, but I had surgery on both my hands. So I can go back to crochet and knitting without my hands going numb. Kearston: I had taken a break from crocheting and to get me back into it this year, I'm doing a granny square for every book that I read. Heather: Oh, nice. Is it just any granny square or are you trying to make it themed? Kearston: Kind of make it themed. Yeah. I'm a few squares behind but I.. Allister: That's because you read so fast. You got to slow down. Kearston: You just need to finish one of the books, both, all of the above. He's saying that because we have books that he is behind on reading for book club. Heather: M'hmm. I see, I see. Allister: I know. Any of them. I'm just jealous. So you said something that really piqued my interest. I think it's come up a few times in this interview, but you said there's no news stories. And one of the things that really made it hard for me to get back into writing and feel motivated was this idea that all art is derivative. And so what would you say to someone who's struggling with that concept? Heather: I think a lot of it depends on how we're viewing it. So my mother was hyper-fixated on folktales. And so when I was a little girl, every night at bedtime, she would read folktales, which more or less normal, but then she would write a summary of them and then cross-reference them based on theme and where they were from. I found that when I was older, I was looking through it. And there are some really complex ideas that exist all over the world, like the Selkie story from, I think, Ireland, where a seal sheds her skin and a fisherman picks up the skin and she can't go back to being a seal. And then Japan has the Tenyo story of a spirit coming down to bathe and a woodcutter finding her cloak and stealing her cloak. Those are essentially the same story. And then there was an anime that I watched, I want to say in the late 90s, early 2000s called Saris that was looking at that Tenyo story, but from the point of view of the spirit that came down as opposed to the woodcutter. And so even though art is derivative and every story has already been told, it hasn't been told from every perspective. Allister: The power of the modern retelling. Heather: M'hmm Kearston: Narrative voice as well, has such a huge impact on how a story is told, because your own personal experiences with your life, how you've grown up, your family, all of those things. I think it all overlays into whatever story it is that you're to tell, so even if you're telling a story that, The Hero's Journey, it's going to be your hero's journey versus Heather's Hero's Journey or my Hero's Journey. Heather: And also, sometimes we enjoy seeing the same story over and over again. How many Marvel movies have there been that follow more or less the same story, so even if we've heard the story a ton of times, that doesn't mean we can't enjoy the retelling of it. Allister: Yeah, tropes are tropes for a reason, right? Kearston: Absolutely. Heather: M'hmm Allister: Another thing I noticed, I just reread this story and it occurred to me that it's pretty heavy on flashback, which I liked and thought was an interesting choice. Like you said, you got a pacing pimp. So probably another judge agreed, but what made you choose flashback for such a core storytelling tool to use? Heather: Oh, I'd like to suggest something that it was all skill, but she's in this room and she's building this thing to bury the guy. And it doesn't make sense if we don't know why. So that was what the flashbacks were. And I think that was a way to save space. Because if I started at those flashbacks scenes, it would just Allister: Clutter your pacing. Heather: then you're adding more scenes essentially to the story and it would end up being just way over a thousand words. Plus, I also in reading, I absolutely love the unreliable narrator. That's probably my favorite point of view to read is an unreliable narrator where you can never really tell if their understanding of something is what actually happened. And I think in that writing, there's a lot of flashbacks used to let the reader know that maybe what they're sensing or seeing is not 100% accurate. It's a writing trope. I enjoy reading. And so it ends up in my writing as a result. Allister: And it's such a tough perspective to pull off well. Kearston: Which you did. You pulled that off very well. Heather: Oh, thank you. Kearston: So I end up with a huge graveyard of murdered darlings because that's just part of me being a plotter. I just overshoot all the time. Did you end up with a graveyard of more dead bodies that you'd shoved into tanks as you were writing? Heather: No, I want to be a plotter with my writing. I feel like when I do plot things, I am more successful with the writing, but the ADHD is rough. I'll start plotting. And then my brain is like, this is boring. I want to write because I have an idea. That's one of the nice things about the 1000 word limits is you're less likely to write yourself into a corner. And when I sit down and try to write a novel or something, a bigger story, I tend to write myself into corners because I was not disciplined in plotting things very well. Kearston: Allister is a discovery writer. He loves to explore the stories. I need to plan them all out, but that often gets me into a lot of trouble. Heather: Is it like you never start because you're spending so much? Kearston: No. So I do start, but I also have ADHD. So I have a lot of idea generation. So I have a lot of projects that I start and then I get a new idea. So I'll start a new whip. But for me is I will go through and I'll break it all out. And because I'm a plotter, even if it's a 500-word story, I'll start. And then my outline is 700 words because what I want to tell in the story is now too big. And then I have to go through and carve it all out. But I do the same thing even with my 2500s with the feedback that I got was, wow, this could be a novel. And I was like, I know, I probably could have maybe pared back some ideas. Heather: I think it really helps me that I was, I had The Cask of Amontillado sitting in the back of my brain while I was writing as a loose framework. Because he's only got the one friend that he's bricking up in the wall. So it helped keep it from growing too large, though I could see Donna having several people throughout her… Kearston: She's going to have to replenish it, get that fertilizer drip to really just feed all of the- it was Bella Donna, right? Heather: Yeah, it was a branch of the Hensbane. Kearston: Love it. Murder plants. Heather: I had a lot of fun coming up with flowers. The Hyoscyamines from the same family of plants. And I wouldn't say it's the most common medication we dispense, but it's a pretty common nausea medication that we dispense at the pharmacy. And it is made from the flower, not from synthetic stuff. So that's pretty cool. Kearston: Today I learned, I feel smarter. Thank you. Heather: M'hmm. Kearston: So what made you join Writing Battle, and then where can you find more of your work? Heather: Writing Battle was- I was feeling a little stalled in my writing and I was looking for a community and also sort of competition so I could get feedback that wasn't from a friend on my writing. And Writing Battle was one of the first things that popped up on Google. And I don't really have anywhere else for it. Like I've got my, the two pieces that I've actually finished and submitted are public on Writing Battle. But the rest of my writing has been trying to get larger pieces done, but none of them are done. So none of them are available anywhere. Kearston: So then are you working on a novel? Heather: Yes, I think working would be doing a lot of heavy lifting. I was working on one and I got, I want to say like 35, 40,000 words written on it and then I sort of wrote myself into a corner. And that was when I was starting to look into the writing battle and everything. So it's been a year. So I don't know how much of an excuse I have for not having gone back to it other than life has just been a little crazy and busy. So I've just been tired a lot, but I am working on one. Kearston: That was why I joined writing competitions as well. I was writing a novel, and I realized that I needed to really work on character development and plot development, and I came across a different writing competition, but I just passed my one year doing writing competitions, and I feel like I've seen an improvement in my writing. Heather: M'hmm. Reading a lot of other people's writing has also been helpful. Writing that hasn't been polished by editors and made perfect is also helped because part of me has the if it's not perfect, why is it worth it? Why am I doing it if it's not perfect? So seeing how things can be really good and enjoyable to read, even if there's a typo here and there has really helped me be less critical on myself with my writing because I don't feel those critical thoughts towards other people. So why am I feeling them towards myself? And that's been helpful. Kearston: That's beautiful. Allister: Cool. Yeah, I think that's all our questions. Did you have anything you want to ask us? Heather: How are you guys enjoying the whole podcast thing? Allister: It's really fun. Yeah, I've learned a lot about audio processing. That's definitely a huge chunk of it. It's a big project for sure. Kearston: It is very fun, though. When we started, it was kind of like, oh, we're going to go into it and just treat it kind of like writers. So lots of edits and revisions and piecing and figuring out how it would go. So it has definitely been an interesting learning experience, but it has been so much fun. And then Heather: Aww Kearston: We also get to talk to amazing people like you about their stories and your processes. So it's been interesting to have those conversations and see how other people go into writing and create their stories. Heather: That's awesome. I was really excited when I saw that you guys were doing this. So that is very cool. Because I know when I got the message about y'all wanting to talk to me, I told all of my friends and family about it because it made me very happy. And I know they all said that they wanted to listen to it once you guys put it out. Allister: Awesome. Kearston: Heather, thank you so much for joining us at Battle Hardened. It has been such a pleasure talking to you today about your story and learning more about your process and the creative influences that you have. So thank you very much. Heather: Well, thank you so much for having me. Allister: It's been a pleasure. Kearston: Allister, it was fun talking murder and hiding bodies. I also loved that her main character was named after a murder plant, which is so funny to me, now we had talked to Heather about beta readers, and she had a small group of people that she used as beta readers. What are your thoughts on soliciting beta reads, and then how do you determine what feedback to take and what feedback to leave? Allister: Yeah, I'm greedy. I try to get as many as I can, honestly. Last year, I went more whole hog on that. I have scaled back a little bit, but I still feel like getting the most diverse set of viewpoints you can is helpful. Like I said, I just feel it is kind of this data set. You get a bunch of people praising one section, you know, to keep it. You get a bunch of people telling you to cut a section. It is probably right, even if it's very darling to you. And yeah, I actually think there's a lot of value even in the contradictions, right? It's like, okay, I can see where I'm taking a risk and some people aren't going to like it. Some people are going to like it, but this is my story and I believe in the direction I'm taking. Or you might start questioning it if you're not really all in on that. So I think all three scenarios, they tell you a lot. But if you only have one or two beta readers, you can't do that comparison. Kearston: On the story that I had make final showdown. I literally had one beta reader. Allister: Was it me? Kearston: Yes. Allister: That was like at five minutes left. Kearston: It was. I submitted that super close to the deadline. Allister: Yeah. It was good. Kearston: I get overwhelmed with too much feedback. So I would rather have a smaller group of people that I know and feel comfortable with provide me with their feedback, especially if I know that they are going to just be very honest with it. Like you are always going to be very honest in your beta feedback. So I don't feel like I'm missing out by not having a very large group. And then I've got a small group of other folks that I lean on when it comes to beta feedback. Allister: Yeah, I can see that for sure. I just don't have any problem disregarding what people say for better or worse. And also, you know, sometimes it's really good feedback that I just don't have the skills or brain power to implement in the moment. You know, that's happened a lot. I've gotten a lot of good feedback that I'm like, man, you're right. That's brilliant, but I don't know how to get there. So I'm not going to do it.  Kearston: I had that with my 1000 and because we're on different teams, you weren't able to beta read for me, but I had two amazing folks that were in one of our mutual writing groups that spent like the last hour with me just kind of going through to really tie in that ending because I do struggle with the the sadder stories I struggle with hurting my characters. Like being mean to people, even if they're my own fictional characters, is really hard for me. Allister: Yeah. Kearston: I struggled with that, and I had I had them kind of pulling me through, telling me to be meaner to provide to provide more  Allister: More feeling? Kearston: Mm, more angst. Allister: I see. That's where a lot of the emotional impact comes from, right? Some sort of pain, uh, conflict. Kearston: And I think this is why I've struggled with that in a lot of my stories, at least in the pro-judged stories where I've been able to go on impact. It's because I do struggle with being mean with hurting my characters. So I think that by working through that, I will become a better, emotionally impactful writer. Allister: Yeah. Trying to push a specific boundary of your comfort zone. Kearston: Yeah. Yeah. Making them suffer. Allister: I don't even know what my focus is for improvement right now. At the start of the year I was really focused on clarity. It's tough though, because I think I end up telling instead of showing a lot when, when I focus too much on that. Kearston: I think in the short shorts though, there, there's a balance, you know, with telling versus showing. Allister: Yeah. Kearston: And sometimes and people may disagree, but I think sometimes it's okay to tell versus showing. Allister: It's absolutely okay. Sometimes. Yeah. Kearston: Like sometimes it's just okay to tell. Allister: But I think I've tipped over the line sometimes where it's too much telling, where it's not the length that's got me going there. It's just in that case, sloppy writing, maybe lazy writing, just trying to get that first draft out and then never finding the right edit. Kearston: Yeah, that can be tough. Allister: Cause, especially for the first draft, it's like, yeah, just tell whatever, you know, get it down. And then once the idea is there, you can look at it and tweak it. You know, this one should be showing telling's fine here. Kearston: I think that you would be quite proud though. I did not plot a single one of the last four stories that I wrote. Allister: Oh, wow. Just winging it, huh? Kearston: I just wung it. I wasin Disneyland for five stories because it was also NYCM that was due the second round for 100. So I just wrote it, and I actually wrote, I think I wrote like five different stories and put it out for feedback on which one I should go with. Allister: Yeah, I've been meaning to try to do that with the micro stuff more, to try to write a few different drafts that just don't have that have completely different plots. But it's so hard with the prompts. I just get dialed into one plot like every time I see those prompts and I'm like, this is a story that needs to be written. I really hard to breaking out of that vision and looking at it from different angles. Kearston: I don't have any problem with the ideation of a story. I can look at it, create it, think of a million different ways to say it. But I struggle with, as I'm writing, I want to edit as I write. Allister: Oh, yeah. Kearston: So sometimes just knocking out the first draft is really hard for me because I'm like, oh, wait, no, I need to go in and tweak this. And oh, no, I need to make sure I've got this comma here because when I open it up for a beta reader, I don't want the line edits to be the focus of the feedback. I want it to be the story. So sometimes I struggle with that. Allister: Yep. That's definitely a crucial skill to be able to just power through and get a draft down. Kearston: So you said that you don't have really an issue when you get feedback, deciding what to take and what to leave. How do you make that decision? Is it just what resonates with you or just if it you don't agree with it, you just go nope? Allister: I mean, yeah, if I don't agree, then it's easy to discard for sure. Yeah, I mean, what resonates with me, like I said, it's my story. And yeah, if someone's got a totally different vision, good on them. It's interesting that it inspires that sort of take, but it doesn't help me. Like I can't tell the story the way someone else wants. If someone can get on my wavelength and say, you know, I think you would be telling your story better in this way or that way, then I'm on their wavelength too; then it works out. Kearston: Did you end up reading The Cask of Amontillado? (pronounced terribly) Allister: Not yet. Amontillado. Kearston: Thank you for the correction on that. I was like, I'm going to butcher the way this is pronounced. It was a quick read. It's the first Poe story that I have read in ages; it's been so long. And I was very entertained by it. I thought it was good. Some good old-fashioned revenge. Allister: Nice. Kearston: Heather was right. Allister:  I did restart the Stormlight Archive though. Kearston: Oh, nice. Allister: I'm going to try to get all the way through. Kearston: I believe in you. You can do it. I'm still I'm trying to get through Allister: Audio helps. Kearston: Audio definitely helps. But right now I'm literally reading three post-apocalyptic stories. So  Allister: Not The Road though, right? Kearston: No, I'm not going to read The Road. It's too depressing. I can't do it. I know it's sad. Um, but I'm, my son watched Project Hail Mary, and then he remembered me reading it. So he wanted me to read it to him. So that is our bedtime story right now: Project Hail Mary. Allister: Alright. Kearston: And then I've got The Dog Stars, and I'm reading the second book in a dystopian fantasy series. Allister: I do really want to read Parable of the Sower at some point. That should go on our TBR for a book club. Kearston: I'm going to make you read a romance book. Just watch out. Allister: I think it's got to be a good one. Kearston: I'm going to make you read a dragon romance. Watch out. Allister: It has to be something I actually finish. Wait, what dragon? That might be the series. My wife is obsessed with. What dragon romance? Kearston: So is it, does your wife like Fourth Wing? Because that's not the one I was thinking. Allister: No, but there's there's a book she keeps always calling her dragons smut series. I might recognize it if I heard the name. Kearston: Please, please find out the name of it for me. I would really like to know. Allister: OK, she might even have him on audiobook. That would help a lot, actually. Then I could just power through them. Kearston: M’hmm Allister: Just space out if I get bored. That was the problem with the road, actually. I mean, I hated the complete abandonment of quotation marks to be perfectly frank, but I just I it wasn't that it was dark. It just I just kind of got bored. It didn't grip me. Kearston: I will tell you right now, Batman was like, don't read the book. It's going to destroy you because he and Ryan were the two that dragged me across the tragic finish line for my story. And they were like, "make it sadder, make it sadder, make it sadder." And I'm like, this is as sad as I can. Allister: Well, maybe you need to read that stuff to really like tap into it, right? If you don't have an internal source of that kind of material, reading it and seeing how it can be done really well, and maybe help you open up those. Kearston: It's called a traumatic childhood and um dissociation and avoidance. That's what that's called. Allister: Yeah. I mean, sometimes it's nice to be able to not write what you know or to not have it be something you know. Kearston: Yes. All right. And then Heather had while she was writing her story, she had some really funny search prompts that she was using in Google. Is there a wild crazy one that you remember doing that probably landed you on some list? Allister: No, no, I haven't had any crazy searches. Although I probably could. I I just danced around it with the Killing Them With Kindness story. And yeah, it's about a serial killer. So, but I don't think I wrote any crazy searches. And I just put for the purposes of a story in there. So hopefully, you know, hopefully not on too many watch lists. Kearston: I've never put for the purposes of a story on any of my searches. Allister: I don't know if it works, but I heard it helps. Kearston: So Google, Google just, I think, rolls its metaphorical robotic eyes at me. Anytime it sees me start going down a research rabbit hole. But I think probably my craziest one is for a story that I have not actually written yet. But it's one that I've talked about quite a bit, and I will eventually write. But the idea for it came up during Fear last year. And I had to Google what the boiling point of an eyeball was. Allister: Audible groan of exasperation. It's just water. Well, it's saline. So it's a little higher than water. Kearston: Yeah. Allister: It's just salt water. Kearston: So yeah, that was, I think, probably one of my weirder Google searches is what's the boiling point for an eyeball. Allister: It sounds like one I will not read. Kearston: It was for the maggot love story. Allister: Yeah, no, thanks. I'm out. Allister: And it looks like that's all we have time for today.  Allister: You've been listening to Allister... Kearston: ...and Kearston. Thank you so much for joining us!

Episode 2 - Lady Rosemary by Alex Waits

Allister: Welcome to Battle Hardened. On Writing Battle, stories live and die according to the decisions of anonymous judges. Kearston: But vote count is not a measure of story quality. Allister: High scores feel great! Duel wins lead to final showdown appearances and honorable mentions. Kearston: If you participate and you have received either honor, that is something to be proud of. However, at Battle Hardened, we want to mine for hidden treasures. Allister: We are interested in stories that blew us away. Kearston: Those whose value goes beyond their vote tally. Allister: Diamonds in the rough. Allister: And we're back! Alright Kearston, so how lonely is your gym bag lately? Kearston: Oh, my gym bag mocked me today, but I did go yesterday and I'll be going tomorrow. But I did not go today. Allister: Seems like you've been going a lot though, then getting some running miles in. Kearston: I have, yeah. I've been trying to get miles in on the treadmill. So I've been making progress by working my way towards a 10k at the end of October. Gonna do it. What about you? Do you have anything that you're working with goal-wise? Allister: Yeah, I've got some goals for this year for sure. I'm trying to hit three plates on bench and four on squat and five on dead. So we'll see how close I get to any of them, but I'm getting there. Kearston: Yeah, and my goal is just to finish the 10k. I have zero interest in being fast. Allister: Okay, so this is interesting to me. Do you consider yourself a runner? Kearston: No but— Allister: Because I do. You're more of a runner than I am right now, even though I've run a marathon before. You're out there doing it. And so it circles back to writing. For me, it's a yes or no question really, is being a runner part of your identity? Is being a writer part of your identity? Kearston: Well, I would agree. I do feel like being a writer is a part of my identity, although I don't usually talk about it with people that are not already writers themselves. But I don't feel as though I'm a grown-up writer or an accomplished writer or a real writer. I feel like a baby writer. Allister: You don't have to go out and run a two hour marathon to consider yourself a runner, right? Kearston: But I do like the quote that you have about instead of being imposter syndrome, that it's just brilliant con man and just faking it until you make it. Because I do think that having that mindset is so important for success and anything that you do because it can become so easy to get back down and negative thoughts. And I think that that kind of switch of, nope, I'm just gonna fake it until I make it. I'm gonna fake it to myself is a really positive way to look at it and would probably be more beneficial for my self esteem if I did that. Allister: I guess for me, it's hard because I don't really see it as a dichotomy. I see it as a progression or a journey like we were talking about with the training. I'm all about gradual adaptation and a customing your body, your mind to these things that we want to do. And you just work on it. Kearston: I know, I am. Enough about me! What are we listening to today? Allister: The contest was Fear 2025 in the mystery genre with a character prompt of rival and an object prompt of ticket stub. The maximum word count was 1000 words of which Alex used 992. Kearston: And there are no content warnings for this story. Without further ado, still away and enjoy. Allister: A Letter by Lady Rosemary Vane of Bath, from an Undisclosed Location, Regarding One Wintry Night in 1753 Hannah Fulwell: My darling husband, I cannot describe the horror I felt at Handel’s latest opera premiere in London. While you spent the first intermission with your paramour in the box once reserved for the two of us, I was thrust into hell itself— a ransom note given me by an unwitting servant, demanding my entire inheritance for the safe return of my dear infant son! I was to procure the first two thousand pounds by the end of the performance— an impossible task. Furthermore, I was to remain at the opera house and maintain a guise of normalcy. My failure would seal my son’s fate, the note concluded. Fighting my rising hysteria, I fled to the dressing room of my loyal companion, tenor extraordinaire Andrelli, for aid. Andrelli examined the note as I flung myself upon his couch, narrowly missing a nearby wine bottle in my distress. I steadied myself with the hope that if this monster was swiftly exposed, my son could yet be saved. Andrelli recognized the violet seal on the note-– he had seen an identical design used by his professional rival, the perpetually-morose Cardoza. So once the second act began, I slipped into Cardoza’s dressing room untroubled (for you know of my reputation as trustworthy to everyone at the opera) and discovered the exact stamp inside Cardoza’s vanity. Andrelli once said that Cardoza’s nasally vocal quality is the result of turning up his nose at the world, thinking himself entitled to things he does not deserve. Would his sense of entitlement drive him to kidnap a helpless infant? O God above, where was my little darling? At that moment, Cardoza himself entered the room. He expressed outrage at this breach of privacy, conjecturing that it was yet another ploy by Andrelli to sabotage him, but when he noticed my trembling hands, he composed himself and offered me some wine. Had Andrelli treated me cruelly? I replied in the negative and asked about the origins of his stamp. He confided that this seal is used by all members of a certain secret society in London. Only one other member was present tonight, he informed me, and while he couldn’t reveal his identity, he was certain this person could never wish my son harm. I found Andrelli in the wings, and he scoffed at Cardoza’s claims, calling them “a contemptible fabrication by a contemptible performer.” At that moment, Cardoza stalked past us, and shot us a withering glare. “Contemptible,” Andrelli repeated, loud enough for Cardoza to hear. The second Intermission came, and Maestro Handel called for a toast in the reception hall— he was to announce the new leading male singer of the Royal Opera House. He had been so plagued with admirers that he failed to procure his own wine glass, so I gave him mine. Had I been less weary in spirit, I might have mourned giving it away— that wine was a thank-you gift from Andrelli for my influence in securing him the promotion over Cardoza. If that physician had not so readily recognized the signs of poison in Maestro Handel and acted accordingly— but I need not tell you what a grim fate would have befallen the Maestro. And to think, that glass was meant for me! It became clear that whoever this would-be murder was, they acted not out of indifferent greed but personal loathing for me. Why else would someone take my beloved child for ransom, only to kill me before demands are met, if not to torment me before ending me? They wanted me, not impoverished, but extinguished. Would Andrelli, my only comfort in your abandonment, betray me after all I had done for him? And why? Maestro was carried home and his assistant stepped in to conduct the third act. Despair took hold as the music plunged toward the opera’s conclusion. Would my successful death have saved my son? I would gladly drink that poisoned wine if only I knew it would deliver my child to safety. As the final scene played, I stepped onto the balcony for some air. Cardoza, having finished his role for the night, joined me briefly, and seeing my wretchedness, assumed it concerned the mistress now occupying my former seat in our your box. To my surprise, he took my hand. “I suppose,” he said, “that’s the difference between us. When Andrelli” – he spat out the name– “cheats me, I can find another occupation in Vienna or Rome. But when your rival usurps your rightful place in your husband’s heart, you have no recourse.” He placed a piece of paper in my hand. “Andrelli asked that I give you this. Found it by the wine bottle, he says. Not only does he swindle me out of advancement, he treats me like an errand-boy.” He muttered another curse about Andrelli before departing, but my thoughts were too demanding to comprehend it. You must already know what he placed in my hand: a ticket stub, smudged with violet wax, spelling out the box reserved for its owner. A box we both know well. At that moment, dear husband, I knew my child would live. I knew that he was in safe, though unscrupulous hands, because while you would gladly dispose of your wife, you wouldn’t touch your own heir, would you? The rivalry between Andrelli and Cardoza is nothing to what has festered between you and I. Above wealth, above love, you crave admiration and influence— things you held before your affair. In your blaming of me, attempting to destroy me in spirit and body, you have undone yourself. You lost the loyalty of many in treating me so disgracefully, Maestro Handel despises you, and half of London distrusts you. I will embrace playing as your rival. You are ruined, and my son and I are safe. I have beaten you at your own game, and you will never find us now. Sincerely, The Wife of a Man With Nothing Kearston: I am so glad that I did not try to power through and narrate that story. That was fantastic work by Hannah. And now joining us is the author, Alex Waits. So Alex did not get to hear Hannah's narration of her story prior to sitting down and interviewing with us to talk about it. And the first time that she gets to hear it is going to be when she listens to the podcast. Allister: Okay, so first and foremost, is that your dog in the profile picture? And if so, is it a boy or girl? What's the name? Tell us about them. Alex: Yes. That is my dog. His name is Wilbur. And he was named such because when he came into the shelter, he was extremely overweight. So they named him after the pig in Charlotte's Web. We got the weight off. He's doing great. He's at a very healthy weight. But the name stuck. He is extremely melancholy. But he is just a big sweetie and he's an old man. So he is living his best life in a retirement home, which happens to be our home. Allister: How old is Wilbur? Alex: We're not sure. He was a rescue when we got him from the shelter. They said he was at least eight years old and we've had him for close to four years now, so he's getting up there. Kearston: Other than writing, of course, what do you do for fun? Alex: It's actually very convenient because I studied classical music in high school and college. And so I do opera, musical theater, ballet, both for fun and I've done professional stuff. Allister: Who's your favorite classical artist then? Alex: As far as music artists. That's so hard. I love Bach. Just number one, he was very formative for modern music as we know it, but his life was just incredibly interesting. So as far as just reading about somebody's life, I like hearing the stories about him and his 10 million children. Kearston: Really? I don't know anything about Bach. Alex: I don't remember how many kids, but it was over 10. Kearston: Oh, jeez. Allister: So he was prolific in more than one area in life, huh? Alex: Seriously! Allister: Do you listen to music when you write or do you just prefer silence? What do you listen to if you do? Alex: So, honestly, I would probably be slightly more productive in silence, but I don't like to. So I try to stick with instrumental, because if it has words, it does distract me. So I just try to pick something that matches the vibe of what I'm going for or the mood. And so sometimes it'll be accurate to the time and then other times it'll be obviously modern for a historical setting, but it gives the mood and takes my emotional space to where I want the story to be. Allister: Help you get in the mindset. Kearston: I'm a weirdo. I listen to ASMR while I'm writing. I like the scratchy sounds. Alex: Some people love that stuff and I can't stand it. I thought it was a joke when my sister-in-law told me that that was a thing. I did not believe her till she showed it to me and then I was like, turn that off, please. Kearston: The mouth sounds do not do it for me; that just grosses me out. but head scratching sounds? Oh my gosh, it's so relaxing. So I met huge reader and I love adding books to my TBR. Have you read anything recently that you just loved? Alex: If you have a time on your hands, I just finished the Stormlight archives. But if you're looking for [cough] not spending the next three months, I read Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Kearston: Okay. Alex: I was reading that while I was writing this mystery, and I would say that was probably the best coincidence to happen because I was studying the Queen of mystery while I was writing a mystery. So if you can time it like that, that was really helpful for me. Allister: And that was coincidental? Alex: It was coincidental. I was reading it for book club when I got the draw for mystery and so it just worked out really well. Kearston: That is just wonderful synchronicity. Alex: Yes. It was great. Allister: Did you say you hadn't read any Agatha Christie before? Kearston: I have not. Yeah, no, I have not. I had a boss at a prior job. I would take meeting minutes, and I was very detailed, and he was like, this is like Agatha Christie. And I didn't realize that at the time that he actually meant it as I was creating a mystery for him to unravel in the notes. Alex: Oh, well. Allister: Do you have a favorite Agatha Christie novel? Alex: Roger Aykroyd might be my favorite so far. Because I figured it out right when I think she wants the reader to figure it out, and it just led to such a satisfying ending. Allister: Yeah, when you figured out for yourself, it is a huge feeling of satisfaction. And I noticed a lot of readers pointed that out in the comments that they were really satisfied with how you structured your reveal and the hints. Alex: Yes, and honestly, that's why I was so thankful that I was reading Agatha Christie at the time. Just to look at, how did she achieve this and how can I, in a very rudimentary way and then 1000 words try to emulate a very miniature version of that. Kearston: Yes, a mystery in a thousand words was a challenge. Alex: For sure. Allister: And you did as well, right, Kearston? Kearston: I did. We were actually in the same house. Allister: Oh, were we? Kearston: We just didn't battle. Alex: Which one was yours? Kearston: Mine was Alarm Bells. The wedding photographer who had the groomsman in a bush. Alex: Oh, okay. Kearston: I did a cozy mystery. Before the next cozy mystery. Oh, and I was not familiar with mystery at all, because I didn't really read it. So I had to do a lot of research going into it, figuring out what all of the beats were. It sounds like you were fairly familiar with some of it. But was there a lot of research that you had to do to figure out how to tell a successful mystery? Alex: Yes, it's always good to, just see what the experts say because even if I think I have an idea, I am by no means an expert. And so, just looking online and saying, okay, what are the essential beats? Am I missing any of these? And trying to figure out the steady drip of knowledge, and insight for people. That that's something I didn't understand when I was younger, that I'm trying to find the balance of more is. I think Alfred Hitchcock explained it in the lecture once, the difference between surprise and suspense, and how suspense can give you twenty minutes of tension, versus surprise gives you five seconds of shock. And how that knowledge can make the difference between five seconds of satisfaction and twenty minutes of satisfaction. Kearston: That's great advice. Alex: So really trying to emulate that and seeing what are, what are some of the strategies. What does that look like on paper for people like Agatha Christie? Kearston: Now, I murder darlings left and right, and I keep an entire graveyard on my working document. Was there a specific piece of information or a line or anything in your story that didn't make it into the final cut? Alex: There was, and I thought I put it in my graveyard, but I went to find it yesterday and I couldn't find it. So I can't read it to you. But because the story was so plot heavy, every single line had to further the plot, but I really wanted to keep one line that gave physical description of the atmosphere because there's none of that, in there really you have to infer it from the setting the title, which is why the title so long I was trying to get as much information out there as possible. But one line where basically it's right after she has read the note and how the crystals and the chandeliers and the colors have gone from bringing pleasure to bringing mockery. All of a sudden it's not reflecting her mood, but contrasting the mood. And it was so much better than what I just said, but I couldn't find it. So it's dead dead. Kearston: Yeah, we've mourned it's loss. Alex: Yes. We've moved on. Kearston: Oh no! Now, in some of the comments you had made mention of a backstory with the paramour as well. Was that something you'd written out? Or just something that lives like as backstory in your mind? Alex: It lives on the outline and character development part of my document. Because that was another thing that I had to cut was a lot of the potential motivations for the other characters. So we could have had more red herrings, but I just did not have the time. I had to keep it very concise to just a few people, but in order to develop her, I had some stuff written down that I wanted to share when people would comment about that. I considered telling them, but that I thought if I come back to this, they might not want to know. Allister: Spoilers! Are you willing to share with us? Alex: Yeah, if you want. Kearston: Of course. Yes. Alex: She is Lady Rosemary's best friends sister, but that connection is not made known to Rosemary because she's like, my best friend knows that his sister is sleeping with my husband, but— Kearston: Okay, so Andrelli knows then? Alex: Yes. Kearston: Oh, that adds so much fun layer to it. Alex: He knows his sister is sleeping with Rosemary's husband, but he neglects to tell her that's his sister, because he knows his connection with Rosemary is advantageous to him, because she's influential with the people in charge of the opera. Allister: And I only picked this up from the comments, but she so she Rosemary is also sleeping with Andrelli, right? Alex: It was left intentionally vague, but Andrelli is not interested. Kearston: Why would that be? Allister: So was she faithful or unfaithful? Alex: No, her relationship with Andrelli is more about making a statement against her husband. He is the gay best friend, if I have to spell it out. Kearston: I was I was picking up what you were laying down there. I was, I was just waiting for it to come out in full words. Alex: Yes. But I also liked the idea of people wondering and not knowing. Because it's more fun to make up a story in your head than have it explained sometimes. Kearston: So was he sleeping with his counterpart that he ended up usurping for the role then? Okay. No, because he made the comment about being cheated— Alex: Nope. Allister: Back to the paramour. A few comments also mentioned just wondering if she was the kidnapper. So she plays the role of a red herring. But did you ever consider making her the perpetrator or was she always set up that way? Alex: I did. This is, this is one of the places where I took a page out of Agatha Christy's book. Whereas I normally reverse engineer my stories, I decide the conclusion first. I purposely fleshed out the characters before deciding who actually did it. And I considered her, but she seemed obvious. And she's already not a good guy in, in our story. And so I wanted to add a little bit more complexity to a person that's not already painted as a bad guy becoming an even more bad guy. I find that more interesting. So I figured she could have her vice and we'll give the big bad vice to somebody else. Allister: She's a really interesting character to think about. She had this big role that you cut out. I'm almost wondering if you ever considered cutting her out entirely on the flip side? Alex: No, she was one of the people that I knew I wanted in there because I had the feeling that some people would automatically assume that it was her and would be hard pressed to be convinced that it wasn't. And so I think she did her job pretty well based on the comments. Kearston: How did the ticket stub make it to Andrelli was it from his sister then? Alex: It was the husband that dropped it when he was putting the poison in the line in Andrelli's dressing room. Kearston: I was curious whether or not it was two separate drops or if they were one in the same? And was the husband also hoping to kill Andrelli as well or was he just going for the wife? Alex: That would have been a happy byproduct for him. He was mainly going for his wife and in doing so he accidentally drops the ticket stub. Kearston: Okay. Alex: And the ticket stub also had the purple wax that associated him with the secret society that Cardoza knew about and he was a fellow member of. Kearston: You had so many fun little things in this story that you were able to weave together. You had the adulterous husband, the musical rivals and this secret society. What was your process like creating this story? Because it sounds like you spent quite a bit of time planning it out. Alex: The prompts just fell into place in a story more easily than the other story that I've done. So a lot of it felt like it wrote itself as far as the place and the time. And the prompt of rivals really intrigued me because it was something that very quickly in my mind developed not only as a singular character, but as a theme. And so exploring the rival could be Rosemary against her husband. The rival could be the paramour. The rival could be Andrelli or Cardoza. Exploring those different layers led to a lot of the story itself. And then for some reason I had it in my mind that a secret society would be really fun because that was really intriguing to me. And then I had 10,000 ideas because I always overshoot and create a story too complex and then I have to bring it back. But then just tying those pieces that I knew I wanted to keep tying those to one another and then distilling that until we have a tangled web was was a lot of it. Almost like a syllogism of this person connected to this. Reading it and thinking does this make sense no I'm confused let's go back. No one's going to get this. Allister: That's an interesting part of it to think about is a lot of people talk about have this consistent habit of overshooting your consistent habit of undershooting and trying to fill it in. Do you find yourself frequently ending on one side of the other of those word counts? Alex: I always overshoot. I don't think I've had a single single story that I didn't feel like I was not in over my head with my ideas. Kearston: You must be pretty excited about this 2500 that we have coming up. Alex: Yes. I'm more excited than my calendar is because it looks like a lot of work, but we'll see if I jump in on that. Kearston: Allister and I are both contest gremlins and we do a lot of them. Do you do other contests as well or is it primarily Writing Battle? Alex: I've done Writing Battle and NYC Midnight. Those are the only two that I've done so far I've looked at a couple of others. But I have to pace myself. Kearston: Yeah, the time commitment, especially when you have a little one, it can definitely pull away from that or just make you go crazy with super late nights. Alex: Yes, for sure. Allister: You talked about your outline a little bit. Do you do plot all your stories out? Do you mostly plot your stories out? Do you pants most of the time? Alex: I am very much a plotter. I have had to pull back on that with pantsing. I'm trying to move on the spectrum more to the middle, but I definitely lean more toward plotting. Kearston: I also am a plotter. Alex: Okay. Kearston: Allister? Allister: Oh, I'm a panster all the way. Discovery writing. That's me! Kearston: And I have a very detailed outline. I'll get my prompts and I'm like, inspiration has struck! When the prompts came to you, you sound like you were kind of excited. How did you feel about genre? All of that. Did you do any rerolls? Alex: This was not a reroll. It was surprising how quickly the story started falling into place. I've been around the opera world, the ballet world, the theater world. And so when I saw the ticket stub, I immediately thought of, you know, live theater. And then rivals also felt like such a natural fit because the auditioning world can be brutal. And so that was my original thought was two auditionees, two people vying for the same role. And from there, we got Andrelli and Cardoza. And then it just kind of expanded. Kearston: I love it when it falls into place. It's fantastic. Alex: Yes, the last two stories I've written, I've felt like I've had to wrestle them into submission, but. Kearston: And that'd be brutal. Allister: I've only written one period piece before. And for me, the vocabulary and syntax were such a huge challenge to dial in. I would like to know how much research you had to do in that area, as far as setting the story and 18th century London and getting the voice to fit so well. Alex: I read a lot of old books and I read a lot of historical fiction. So the main thing was every now and would verify that the word was around at the time. I did find that the more I leaned into their style of speaking, it saved me words because one big word counts as one word versus three small words . It was incredibly advantageous for that reason to lean into older style English. Kearston: Well, that's fun and convenient. Alex: But it was also a challenge finding the balance between something that's not going to be so older English that I'm losing the readers and it feels like it's trying too hard. Trying to find that balance. Allister: Exactly balance. Yeah, it's a hard one to strike with period pieces in particular and just voice in general trying to come up with any unique narrative voice is so hard. It's one of the hardest aspects I've found for writing because you just write with your own voice. Trying to write with someone else's voice, whether it's a period piece or an accent is tough. I thought you did a great job. Alex: Well, thank you. It was a lot of fun to explore. Kearston: It was a lot of fun to read. Alex: Yay. Kearston: I really enjoyed it. Is there anything that you've learned by doing writing competitions that you'd like to share that has really, I don't know, made you a better writer. Alex: Appreciating the prompts and the limitations that they bring because creativity thrives under limitation. Because when I was first told, you can't just write whatever story you want, at first it felt like, oh, well, you're cramping my creativity, but it's actually a conduit for it. And so if you can see it that way, that can help with a mental block. Kearston: I agree. That can really push you outside of your comfort zone. And I know I've ended up writing in genres and characters and doing things that I would never have done if it hadn't been for a competition. Alex: And they never would have existed if you hadn't gotten that prompt. But it gives you something beautiful that never would have existed without it. Kearston: Do you have your stories published anywhere? Have you submitted anywhere? Or is there anywhere that we can read more of your work? Alex: I haven't done any submissions. They should all be visible on Writing Battle. Kearston: And then if you had any questions for us? Alex: Oh! Well, we were talking about plotting and pancing. So, Kearston, you're a plotter. Kearston: I am Alex: And Allister, you're a pantser. So, Kearston, do you find yourself overshooting with complexity and having to reel it back? Allister, is that the same for you? Because I'm wondering if pantsers tend to have more room to fill it in versus plotters. We tend to overplan. I'm wondering if that's true for you all. This is my... Kearston: I do. I will overplan it, but I have learned a secret. In my head, each scene, and I tend to do my stories in kind of progressive scenes, but each scene is about 250 to 300 words. So, knowing the word limit for that specific story helps me figuring out just about how much plot I can fit into it. So, for 100 words, it's like a quick moment. I can't really put a whole lot into it. I'm kind of nervous about the 2500. Allister: I just watched the word count as I write. Honestly. And so, I never overshoot by much because I'm just like, okay, I'm working on the conclusion, denouement, whatever. So, I've got 100 words left or 250, whatever it is. Yeah, maybe sometimes it feels rushed, but that's what we write drafts for. Right. So, I'll just write a lot of drafts. Kearston: He does. Allister: Yeah. A lot of beta swaps, trying to find the right balance, but I just keep an eye on that word count as I'm exploring the story and the characters and the world. And try to keep the pacing in mind and that word count in mind as I'm approaching the finish line. I haven't had any problems with overshooting. Okay, so you got a lot of compliments about the epistolary format and pulling it off really well. But one thing people asked in the comments was why is she writing this letter? Alex: Out of story, because I tried to write it in third person, past tense, and there was no way I was going to get that information I wanted to get into a thousand words. And so, changing the format to a story allowed me to get away with skimming over a lot of information. And allow the character voice to do some extra interpretation. In universe, she is letting her husband know why she has disappeared and the fact that he will never see her again and to gloat because she is petty. And rubbing it in his face a little bit. Kearston: I loved her sign off. It was sassy. Allister: Yeah, the ending was phenomenal. And my read was that she was gloating. Alex: Okay. Good. Kearston: So. Was there a favorite piece of feedback that you received? Alex: Hmm. I really loved the guesses. Because that gives me information on what they've picked up on, especially the subtext. Because if it were obvious, they would just say, I love how you did this. But when people start guessing, that tells me what they've picked up on that they didn't realize was, was even in the subtext or a red hearing. And so that, that just gave me really good feedback as well as it was just really fun to see. Because that tells that was telling me that people are enthusiastic and they're getting into the story. Kearston: So what were your intentional red herrings? Alex: The fact that the letter is written to the husband and she starts with my dear husband. The intent is when you first read my dear husband, she saying that in earnest and then by the end pick up on, yeah, she's being sarcastic. The, the secret society was a red herring because there were two possible people and Cardoza's confidence that the other member that's present here would never do such a thing was unreliable information. And then I originally had some red herrings for Maestro Handel himself. And then obviously the paramour, just her existence was enough. Kearston: Absolutely. Alex: So I gave her a break. I figured she had enough. Allister: Are you working on any novels or anything? Are you just stick to contests? "Just." Alex: A few works in progress. Nothing that I feel confident enough about. Kearston: Did you have any other questions for us? Alex: Who whose idea was it to do the podcast? Kearston: Allisters. Alex: Okay. How long? Kearston: He asked on like March 17th, March 18th or something. Alex: Okay. Kearston: And so we got that first episode out really quickly. Alex: Yeah, y'all got Addison fast. Kearston: Addison does happen to be one of our friends. Alex: Awesome. Well, I enjoyed that one so much. Allister: Yeah. He's great. Okay. I thought up one more question. So. Do you ever do you try to chase the unicorn or the dinosaur at all? Alex: Oh, I am a unicorn hopeful, but. I'm paying too much money to write a story to sacrifice for unicorn. So I try not to reroll. And I like the fact that those prompts are there to stretch you. So I try to really let them stretch me before I reroll, but I don't, I don't have a streak yet. I have rerolled. So. I lean unicorn hopeful. Allister: Unicorn hopeful. I like that. Kearston: I'm going either way. I would love a dinosaur. I'd love a unicorn, but if I'm going to reroll and going all rerolls so that I can go for the dinosaur. Alex: I can see that. Allister: Nice. Well, thanks so much for joining us. Alex: Yeah! Kearston: And you go by Alex right? Not Alexandra. Alex: Yes. Kearston: Alex, thank you so much for joining us on Battle Hardened. You have been a joy to talk to. Alex: This has been so much fun. Thank you so much for asking me. I was so excited— Kearston: I'm so glad. Alex: —to see Allisters comments and I'm just really honored, and it's just such an honor to know people love my story. Kearston: We definitely did. Allister: It did bring us joy. Alex: I'm so glad! Kearston: Yes. Kearston: All right. Well, thank you so much. Alex: Absolutely. Thank you. Kearston: Bye. Kearston: Okay, we had a very good conversation with Alex. Was there anything that we didn't touch on in the interview that you wish we had? Allister: Character arcs and how they grow or regress are such an interesting challenge for microfiction. How do you even fit an arc in a thousand words or less? Kearston: Absolutely, especially in the very short word counts—50 words, 100 words—it's hard. You're either doing character or plot, depending on word length. And for me, I tend to focus on character-driven stories and don't often do plot-driven stories. So I usually look at what is the starting point of my character and how are they changing from the beginning of the story to the end of the story. And I like to see that progression. So there's usually at least a mini arc for my character that ties into the overall plot arc, but not everybody does that, and it's not always necessary. Allister: True. And I liked what you said about how sometimes you have to choose between character development and plot development. And that's one of the things that really great writers do in these contests, when it's a short word count, is find ways to make. Things do double duty, but it is easier said than done. Kearston: So Alex was saying sometimes you just need to write it and stuff will fall into place with her approach moving from plotter to panster to finding that middle ground. And I agree with that. For me, it was the opposite. I started off as a panster, figured out that I was a plotter and I'm somewhere in between really depending on the story length. If it's over 500 words, I have to do some kind of plot, some kind of outline. And if it's under that wing it, have you felt that there's anything for you that there's those story length that you need to give it a little bit more thought in terms of word count. Allister: Even with the 2500, I still just did discovery writing. I had an idea where I wanted it to go and then I tried to make it work and it didn't really play out the way I expected it to. I thought I would be able to cram a lot of humor in there and play these characters off each other with their inherent conflict because I got possession and monk. So conflict is built into the prompts. Kearston: Absolutely. Allister: But it didn't really end up being as funny as I wanted, and I ended up pivoting more to trying to make it heartfelt. That's one thing I've learned about comedy is a lot of the best comedy does hit you in the feels somewhere. I read a lot of Christopher Moore, for example, and the first book I read of his was lamb and it doesn't have any real emotional moments that I remember anyway. But then I read dirty job and honestly, even in the first page, he really hit me in the feels and I almost had to put it down for a little while, but it had some really good emotional moments that weave in with the comedy and make it linger more. It makes the jokes feel more worth it when the whole story coheres into this journey that feels like that emotional resonance helps you grow. Kearston: So one of the things in the interview that I really liked was Alex's take on Alfred Hitchcock and how she had kind of summarized the quote from the interview that he did, where she talks about the difference between surprise and suspense and how suspense can give you 20 minutes of tension versus surprise, just giving you five seconds of shock. And I think keeping that in mind as you're building out a story is really interesting. So I thought that was a fun takeaway from our conversation with her. Allister: Yeah, absolutely. Kearston: He talks about a bomb going off under a table versus knowing a bomb is there. It's a cool quote. We'll put it on Patreon. Kearston: And then the way in which this story was written was epistolary and I'm not sure everyone is going to know what that terminology is. I had to Google it. So epistolary fiction is just fiction in the form of a letter or journal entry. And I think that was interesting how she decided to tell the story. Allister: Agreed. I think it can be multiple letters or multiple journal entries. Kearston: Oh, yeah, no, agreed. It can be messages, logs, transcripts, blogs, transcripts… Really any other type of communication. Allister: And that's the structure for this is how you lose the time war. Kearston: So I'm so curious. I have not read anything by Agatha Christie, but I did look at her entire catalog after a conversation with Alex. And I do think I'm going to read the murder of Roger Ackroyd that she had been reading while writing this story. Have you read anything by Agatha Christie? Allister: I've read a few of her books, but I honestly, it's been so long. I couldn't tell. Kearston: And there's a lot. Allister: Yeah, it's a huge catalog. Kearston: She was a prolific writer. Now, you have not read that Stormlight Archives, correct? Allister: I read the first four and then it was so long between four and five that I started relistening a couple times and I just keep getting distracted. I do audiobooks for them, which is really nice because for a book that long to be able to do 2x speed or 2.25 is amazing, because even as it is, I keep getting distracted and losing the thread. If I'm ever going to have any hope of catching back up, it's going to be audio. Kearston: And I also primarily do a lot of audiobooks so that I can listen while doing a lot of other things, like housework and driving. Allister: If I'm looking at a paper book, that's all I'm doing. And it's just really hard to carve out 12, 15, 20 hours to read that book. Kearston: I'm going to do it while I'm making dinner dishes and folding laundry. Allister: Exactly. But if I just have to sit there and do it, fitting that into my schedule with the kids and lifting, and writing and stuff. Kearston: It's not going to happen. So I've added it to my TBR. I just don't know when I will actually be getting around to Stormlight Archive. Allister: It's a big commitment. For you, what's your playback speed? Do you have a max? Kearston: I won't go above 2.5, but I cannot listen at one speed. And I know that there is so much debate about this speed in which you should listen to an audiobook, but I'm a very fast talker. So when I listen to narrators and they're talking very slowly and intentionally with fantastic enunciation, I want to crawl out of my skin, so I have to speed it up. Allister: Have you listened to any good audio yet? For Verdant Owl? Kearston: I have a few that I usually go to because they are not Americans. And I really enjoy listening to their stories because of their accents, and also, they're generally good storytellers. But yeah, I've listened to a few that I've enjoyed. What about you? Allister: Yeah, if it's on audio, I have a chance, this contest. Otherwise, not looking good. Kearston: And I didn't do an audio for this go-around. Allister: Oh no. Kearston: I did not. The difference with the pro versus peer is that you have a lot more time to prepare for debrief on the peer battles because of the actual duels that you're doing. Whereas when you do pro, you're lucky if you get 24, 48 hours after you submit to when debrief starts to open. Allister: Yeah, that's so hard. You gotta turn around the audio, the cover, all this stuff. Or just share with out and then add them later. But on the flip side, it is exciting to start reading stuff. Kearston: And I've noticed the delay for momentum increases the longer the word count is, although I did feel like a thousand words was kind of a sweet spot. And I think people were really getting into the thousand words, but I think the 250 were going to see a lot of momentum and debrief. Allister: Yeah, it's easy to fly through 250s, and honestly, end up writing more feedback than the story sometimes. Kearstons: Yeah, absolutely. Allister: It just doesn't take that long. Kearston: The 2500 was a slog. Allister: Seriously, and huge apologies for not doing return reads, not really doing any reads for this contest. I'm just backing off and avoiding the burnout. Kearston: And it's so easy on debrief, especially the larger word counts to get burnt out. Unknown: Oh, yeah. It's easy to hit 100,000 plus words of material that I read on these. I'm not cranking through novels in real life, but on writing battle, I'm basically reading novel length amount of material in any given contest. And it's really fun with the wide variety of material. Kearston: We'll just say that debrief is the reason that you have not been able to finish any of the books that we've started for book club. Allister: Yeah, there we go. Kearston: It's been really hard. And then we just had another competition that we finished. Allister: Yeah, and another one coming up. Twisted starts next week, right? Kearston: Yeah, it's going to be exciting. 50 words, 100 words, and then a thousand. Those are all very fun, different lengths. And so far, I've only done side quests where they've been at the 50 words. And it is so much fun to try to get a whole story into 50 words. Allister: Yeah, that's tough. Kearston: Well, that's when you move into Alex's trick where you go back to the older English and use the very big words that cover the meaning of a lot of smaller words. Allister: Speaking of 100 words, talk about the drabble we did. Kearston: So the three prompts for the first Battle Hardened drabble off were music, rain, and be witching. And it was interesting that people were trying to guess which of the two I had written, and we both took a romance approach to it. So it just was interesting, the rationale behind people's guesses and who had written which one. Allister: Well, yeah, it was 50-50, but then someone voted on the one they thought was less likely to be you. Kearston: Laughing Allister: That was fun. Kearston: It was fun, and those are still up on Patreon. Allister: Which is free to join. Kearston: For Writing Battle, that was your first writing competition, correct? Allister: Yes. Kearston: Did you see an ad or did you hear about it from someone else? How did you join Writing Battle? Allister: Yeah, I saw an ad on Reddit. What about you? Kearston: I actually started writing competitions through Forest and Fawn, and I saw an ad on Instagram. And from there, I found a small community on Discord, and they were talking about Writing Battle, so a few of us joined. Allister: Yeah, writing groups are great. I've definitely enjoyed using Discord to try to grow community. It's definitely got a different flavor than forums or anything like that. Kearston: Absolutely. And this podcast has a Discord as well. Allister: Feel free to join. Kearston: Absolutely. We'd love to have you. Come and talk stories with us. Okay, one last thing. What was your favorite part of the episode? Allister: Wilbur. Yep. Star of the Show. Kearston: Wilbur, I know that's such a fun story. I loved hearing about the Chunky Dog. Allister: And it looks like that's all we have time for today.

[PREVIEW] Alex Waits Interview - Extended Cut

Transcript in progress...

Episode 1 - Riptide by Addison DeFrancisis

Allister: Welcome to Battle Hardened. Kearston: Two important questions right off the bat. Allister: Who the heck are we and why should anyone listen to us? Kearston: Well, I'm Kearston. I write flash fiction, collect rejections like Pokemon, and somehow still have a handful of published stories. Allister: And I'm Allister. At least that's what I go by on the writing contest circuit. Those of you who read Dungeon Crawler Carl might recognize the moniker as the thirteenth author of the Dungeon Anarchist's cookbook. Kearston: I've been competing for over a year, recently long listed with Not Quite Write, and left my house, making it to the Sweet Sixteen for the last Tempest Owl writing battle for Cozy Mystery. Allister: I've been writing since August of 2025. And I have also made it out of the house once for, what it's worth, in my first battle with a story called Comfort. Kearston: I'm a rabid reader, usually with one on my Kindle, one on Audible, and a paperback in hand in a valiant effort to vanquish my never-ending TBR. I'm also working on two novels, which I avoid with remarkable consistency and creativity. Allister: I enjoy reading fantasy and comedy, and my favorite author is Michael J. Sullivan. Much like Kearston, I also have a couple novels I am kicking around, and which I avoid astutely. Kearston: My focus is really centered on creating engaging characters with compelling story arcs. What about you? Allister: One of my biggest focus areas has been on how to provide high quality feedback. Those efforts were rewarded in the Tempest Raven contest with a coveted Panda trophy, for which I am very grateful. On the Writing Battle website, I've read over 700 stories totaling about 650,000 words, and I've left feedback to the tune of 110,000 words on Debrief, give or take. Kearston: You've read an impressive number of stories from Writing Battle. Is that what gave you the idea for the podcast? Allister: Actually no. To be honest, I saw the forum posts warning us that Vote Count is not a measure of story quality, and my rational brain internalized that message. It thought, okay, perfect. Makes sense. Unfortunately, my emotional brain didn't get the message. Some of the results day reveals were totally devastating, and there's still this war going on between my logical and emotional reactions to judging results. Kearston: Yeah, it can really sting when you've put your heart into a story that just doesn't resonate with whether it's peer or professional judges.  Allister: Well, this story certainly resonated with me. Kearston: So, tell me, what are we listening to today? Allister: This story is from the Fear contest which had a 1000 word limit. The genre assigned was Horror, character was Charmer, and object was Surfboard. Kearston: Please be advised, this story has been tagged with the following content warnings. Allister: Implied or described Sexual Assault, Violence, Gore, and Sexual Content. Kearston: Without further ado, sink into this story with us. Riptide, by Addison DeFrancisis [https://writingbattle.com/story/debrief/cb326761-0989-46cd-821e-2acfd98a8255?uploadedStory]. ---------------------------------------- LMHO: The first time I saw him, the sea forgot to breathe. Now he rides the surface above me as though it belongs to him. No fear. No pleading. Not like the sailors before. Even the swells open themselves to him, sighing, as he glides between them like starlight on that pale shard of land that refuses to sink. His heartbeat echoes through the water and into my bones, a pulse that isn’t mine. I begin to rise before I understand why, drawn to the heat of him, to the way the salt clings to his seamless throat. I smell his sun-dyed skin through the dark sea between us, and I taste the sky, wanting it for the first time. I break the surface in silence. The air bites my scales, sharp as coral. I know I should sink back below, but my body won’t obey. He hasn’t yet seen me. He’s too busy chasing the dying light with a kind of joy I can’t understand. I drift closer, letting the current carry me like flotsam, my hair dark as ink spilling around me. His laughter wrests the very soul from me, and before I know it, I’m singing the ocean’s song for him. He stills, searching, the pull of me already in his blood. When his eyes find mine, surprise flashes across his scaleless face. There is wonder there, but no fear. He steadies himself on the ivory slab that keeps him from me, and I hate it for a heartbeat. Then he smiles, and the hatred melts to foam. My song hangs between us, soft and free in the blushing half-light of dusk. The sea quivers at the sound. He does not. He speaks, a word shaped like my name, though he cannot know it. His voice pierces through me, bright and warm and foreign. I need to taste it, to pull it closer, to make it mine. He calls to me again, and I echo without words, only melody. The sound folds the air between us, drawing us inward like an undertow, until we are only a wave apart. He leans down from his wooden island and offers me his hand. I shouldn’t take it. His warmth is a wound waiting to happen. But I do. His lonely fingers, webless, close around mine, and I shudder at the dryness of them. The sea grips my waist, pulling, jealous. But his breath pulls me harder. My song tells him of wonders the sun would never let him see. His smile broadens, and I know he understands. I pull him gently from the board, and he follows, trusting, the way a wave follows the wind. The surface barely ripples around us. I feel his warmth against me. Our eyes stay locked, unblinking, as I guide him down. The water takes us like a lover long denied, hushing the noise of the sky and wrapping us in its cold embrace. I lead him through the blue twilight where the fading sun filters down in ribbons. I long to show him everything I love, the coral cathedrals, the gardens of glass. He clings to me, startled at first. I feel his soft, porous skin yield to my scales as I pull him closer, thin tendrils of warmth unraveling between us, crimson and cerulean. The sea hums its approval, curling around us. I taste the copper of him, and I can bear it no longer. I take his face in my hands and press my mouth to his. My fingers carefully open the skin behind his jaw, giving him the breath of the sea. Bubbles rise from his lips like laughter, and I laugh too, overjoyed that he’s learning so quickly. I feel his pulse quicken. I kiss him with a depth only the ocean could know. My sharp tongue explores the cavern of his pleading mouth. His body trembles. His trembles turn to throes, then to something deeper. My body writhes with his. Locked in a tidal pull, we plummet farther under, past the cathedrals and gardens that flit by unseen. I lose myself in the pleasure of it, wild and turbulent. We land, entangled in a bed of seagrass, as the boundaries of us unravel. He is salt, I am the current, and the sea takes the rest. His body seizes in ecstasy. The ocean inside him finally tears free, and I hold him through it, gentle as the hush between waves. A final gasp of pleasure, his eyes rolling white. At last, our tempest abates, and I feel his body calm beneath mine. The current rocks us for a time, slow, tender, unfeeling. I kiss him once more, but he doesn’t respond. The beat of his pulse eludes me. Like the sea around us, it has grown silent. The heat in him fades, leaking into the leagues of isolation that surround me. His hand drifts from mine, and his fingers, lifeless, brush the bone-speckled seabed. I wail and beg him to return. Only silence answers. I gave him everything. My love. My breath. My song. I gave him the ocean and still he abandoned me. I leave him there with the rest, the current bearing me upwards through the hollow of my grief. At the surface, the wood still drifts, white, patient, defiant. I rake my claws across its skin, carving my sorrow into its grain until it bleeds splinters. Still, it does not sink. The wounded board gleams in the vesper light, a monument to what I’ve lost. A gravestone to my love. I hate that it floats. I hate that it remembers. But I know the sea will take it soon enough, as it does all things, sanding away every trace of him. The waves will smooth its scars and whisper his name where I cannot. When they do, there will be nothing left to grieve. The sea begins to breathe once more. I sink back below, letting it close above me in a curtain of foam, alone. ---------------------------------------- Allister: Thanks so much Addison for sharing that with us. Love that story. And thanks as well to LMHO for really bringing it to life. Addison: Oh man she did an awesome job with that narration. Kearston: Love it. Addison: So, when I wrote that, in my mind, I feel like I was trying to focus more on like a romantic feel with subtle undertones of that predator horror kind of thing. And that reading was like flipped with that where it felt like the horror in that alien monster nature was the forefront with the subtle undertones of the romance. And I think I like that more. That was awesome. I really like that. Kearston: Yeah same. Allister: One thing that caught my interest on rereading that I didn't realize beforehand was: I just pictured this narrator as unambiguously female. But looking closer there's no explicitly stated gender. Did you have an intention for the mermaid to be male or female or something in between? Addison: Typically when I write I tend to leave the gender of my characters ambiguous unless there's a specific reason for clarification. That said in my mind this was a female being a siren or mermaid or whatever you want to look at it as. But I think the story works either way if it's a male if the reader prefers that. Allister: I definitely picked up on the siren aspect and I particularly liked how you inverted it in a way because she is unable to resist her own temptations right she tries to turn away and and let the surfer live, but she can't. Did you do that inversion of the typical siren song intentionally or did that just evolve naturally as part of the story writing process? Addison: Originally I was going to write this from the surfer's point of view… being charmed, but once I started thinking about the story I didn't think that it was going to capture the the horror aspect very well. But when I started picturing it from the siren's point of view it felt really predatory, which I tried to lean into. And I think it caught the horror a little better but it it felt a little too creepy to me so I wanted there to be a little bit of misunderstanding of love or lust of some sort and it turned into the siren feeling like she was being charmed by the surfer as well which added a different layer to it. The charmer prompt led me down that path and it made for a unique point-of-view. It also helps that I'm really not comfortable in the horror genre. I'm much more comfortable writing romance stories so that helped me lean into something I was a little more comfortable with while still capturing that horror point-of-view. Allister: I think that helped give the character a sense of naivety which gave her more nuance and made the character much more intriguing to me. Addison: Yeah. I didn't want her to feel like a monster just with no other qualities so I tried to make her feel like she was in love or something along those lines so that the reader could almost feel bad for her. Kearston: And it worked. Allister: It worked for me for sure and I did not read much horror before this contest—full disclosure—but one of the things I found I liked most about the genre was that trope of the monster that doesn't realize they're a monster, especially when they're the narrator and this story was a great example of how to combine those elements effectively. Addison: Thanks. Kearston: So those are some pretty tricky prompts to weave together what was your ideation phase like for this story. Addison: Oh, the prompts were miserable. So I'm going for a dinosaur, so I rerolled all of my prompts. I kept charmer because I was like okay I can work with charmer there are definitely worse character prompts out there and then I got the surfboard and I wanted to die. So horror is one of my least favorite genres to begin with, or at least as far as writing. I'm just not the horror guy. So I was already uncomfortable, but I mean that's kind of why I'm doing writing battles, is to get out of my comfort zone. And when I saw surfboard, I thought I was toast. But I knew the story had to revolve around water, with the surfboard there and the charmer prompt just screamed siren to me. So I was like okay I guess we have a siren that's going to charm a surfer I just let the story fall in place from there. Luckily I had a pretty quick idea of the content of the story and the prose and the POV came later but you know those prompts just helped me lock down a story and I didn't go through that weird spend two days trying to figure out what I want to write. This seemed like the only sensible story that I could write with those prompts and I just went for it. Allister: For sure. Kearston: You mentioned a dinosaur and I don't know that everybody's going to know what a dinosaur is. Addison: That's a good point. So in Writing Battle there are trophies that you can earn for doing various things. You can get slot machines for using all of your re-rolls in a battle and if you have I believe nine slot machines you can combine them to make a dinosaur trophy, which I am one story away from doing! So. Allister: On the precipice! Kearston: RAWR! Addison: Yes, rawr. I'm excited. Kearston: Nice. Allister: Is there anything you learned from writing this story or from the feedback you received on this story? Addison: Actually yes! This story taught me a ton of things. First of all, I knew that this story was going to be very difficult to write, and I knew I needed to write the hell out of it in order to sell it, so I focused on the prose and just trying to tell a horror story using subtext. Since it was from the point of view of the siren, and she doesn't think that anything she's doing is monstrous or terrible. I needed to try and figure out a way to tell the story from her perspective as a love story, but have the reader understand that this guy is getting murdered. So there's gore and there's death but I didn't want to rely on the shock of it for it to land. I learned a lot about telling a story by implying things instead of just graphic explanation. And the feedback that I got was overwhelmingly positive, even in terms of normal Writing Battle feedback. I've got serious imposter syndrome just like most writers, but this is one of the few stories where I felt like I wrote it well, once I got all the feedback from everybody. And when I got zero points in the judging, I didn't win a single round, I thought that was going to be a disappointment to me. But it actually wasn't. I was honestly totally fine with that. The feedback I got and I learned a lot of writing techniques and gained some tools through this. And that just told me that the story was good. And the zero points basically just felt like three judges that got a different story that they liked better. It felt like a preference thing over a quality of my story. And that actually felt amazing. It helped me put everything into perspective that the Writing Battle scoring is not a status of how good your quality is. It's just whether a single judge who read two stories shows your story to win in that moment. Your story can be good, and your story can score poorly, and they are not mutually exclusive things. Allister: That's definitely one of the driving ideas behind this podcast, so I love to hear you say it. Kearston: Well, and I think it'll be interesting to see how that changes with the upcoming battles and how they've changed the scoring for them for pro. I think that'll be interesting because I do think that this story would have done a lot better in the new format. Addison: That's fair. Allister: Yeah, they're doing away with the duels. Addison: I also think that this story would've done better in a Peer battle as opposed to a Pro battle. I think that a different feedback could have helped shed some light onto why this didn't perform particularly the well in the pro battle. I didn't get any feedback from the pros that screamed, you know, you did this wrong or you did this wrong, or this could have been better… this is why I voted for the other story, so I'm not 100% sure what the disconnect was there. But like I said, it honestly was fine. Like I'm still very, very happy with the story. Allister: And I'd just like to circle back to the point-of-view again because another thing I noticed on reread is that the death of the surfer is actually not the ending. About the last quarter of the story is the siren character contemplating their actions. And there's no remorse. It lets the scene breathe and the consequences settle. Addison: Yeah, I tried to humanize that the monster in that moment by showing that she's she's upset about the situation, but not because she just killed someone. Because she doesn't understand that she just killed someone. And I think that's the horror of it. The character's obviously done this before. She's probably going to do it again. And the real sad part of it is that she doesn't even understand that she's the one causing her own problems. Kearston: And I think she blames the sea as well in some parts of the story. And I enjoyed that because of the naive way of thinking that none of the actions were actually taken in malice, and she was just in awe of them wanted to take in all of the warmth and sun kissed skin into herself. So the shift from losing breath and that… lovers embrace way of describing the drowning was interesting to me. And then the shift to frustration and anger as they drop their lover to the pile of bones and all of those that came before to go and just claw at the surfboard. I loved that full loop that you brought us through. Addison: I do have to admit that was also me taking out some frustration on that prompt. [laughter] Kearston: Well done. Who would not want to claw surfboard? Addison: I did! Kearston: It made me think of a shark and just what you would find after, you know, what what those that loved this surfer would find is just a clawed scratched up surfboard. Allister: And another thing about that focus on telling the story through subtext that I was really impressed by was how even though this narrator is unaware that they are the bad guy, you can still tell early on in the narrative that they are a predator. There's these little tells like the mention of the sailors, the focus of the heartbeat. There are a lot of little details that you can pick up on or you could totally miss on the first read, and then look back on later and see how it's so obvious, that this character is in fact a predator. Addison: Yeah, I tried to think of… like I said, I don't watch a lot of horror, but I've seen films and any time the killer is watching the victim and you have that sense of someone being hunted, it's really creepy. So I wanted to try and capture that with from the sirens point of view, but you know, use the subtext that it didn't feel, as scary. But I tried to use as much imagery and symbolism as I could that was aquatic and creepy, but also I tried to add a little bit of erotic subtext to it. And I think that accidentally gave it a little bit more of a creepy predatory feel that kind of worked with it, and I just let it let it lie once I realized it was happening. Kearston: I loved that as they're holding their lover, they're piercing into the flesh behind their jaw and the slow rivulets… Allister: Oh, yeah, that really made me cringe. Kearston: Yes! The blood that's just flowing like ribbons and the description of the body slowly losing the warmth. The things that the monster wanted to bring into themselves, they're just slowly losing all of it until they're nothing and then they just drop them. Allister: Yeah, that scene is so beautiful and horrifying at the same time. Addison: I appreciate that. Allister: Do you have any closing thoughts, Addison? Addison: First of all, I love the concept of this podcast. I know that in the forums for Writing Battle, we always talk about don't get too upset if you get zero points or low points or whatever. But I think talking about expectations and what the score really means is really important. And I appreciate that you guys are doing that. I know I got a lot of feedback from this battle in particular from other authors that I really respect who are extremely talented, who also scored poorly. But they felt a little better about it having seen stories that they really liked that also scored very poorly. And I think it helps everybody put things into perspective when you find a story and you're like, that story's great. It's going to win. And then you look at it later and it's didn't perform as well as you thought it did, but everybody agrees. It's a really good story. The more of that that gets out there is helpful. So I really appreciate you guys doing that. Kearston: The story is going down in infamy. It is it is still actively talked about so often because of how much everyone who read it loved it. And then to have zero points, everyone's like, Oh, well if it happened to Addison, then I feel better. [laughter] Allister: That's a great perspective. I try to tell myself that all the time, but I'm working on really believing it. This conversation reminds me of the silver medal paradox, which I think about a lot, where bronze medalists tend to be happier than silver medalists. And it has to do with counterfactual thinking. Bronze medalists tend to think, "If I did a little worse, I'd have missed the podium." Silver medalists, conversely, think, "If I did a little better, I'd have won it all." I see this counterfactual thinking all the time with "I only made Honorable mention" or "I only made the Sweet Sixteen." Kearston: So many people get disheartened when their stories don't do well because they put so much stock in winning a competition that if they don't, they're like, "Ugh! I'm a failure! Never writing again!" Allister: Right! Wherever those goalposts are, that mindset steals so much joy from the process. Maybe one good thing to come from some of my low scores is making that bronze medalist mindset a little easier for some of my friends to adopt. I think we should celebrate the wins, and these stories and the act of writing have value in and of themselves. Addison: Absolutely. Kearston: Thanks so much for joining us. Addison: Thanks for having me guys. I had a blast and good luck with the podcast. I think this is a really good idea. So I'm really excited to listen to it in the future. Allister: Yeah, thanks again. ---------------------------------------- Kearston: Addison was so sweet, that was so nice of him. Allister, we did it, we just had our first guest on Battle Hardened. Did we talk about all the things you had hoped to cover with him? Allister: One thing I liked that I didn't notice when we were talking to Addison, but the moment where she ultimately kills this surfer… I thought there was a word repetition at one point when I was stitching the audio together. And I realized that I actually really liked the similarity between the sunlight ribbons and then the blood. Kearston: Oh, and the blood. Yes. And it's the warmth of the sun and then the warmth of the blood as it's billowing out in ribbons around this siren who does not realize that the amorous embrace is not amorous, but murderous and they're drowning. Allister: Yeah, and it does harken back to it early on, there's this, yeah, his warmth is a wound waiting to happen. Kearston: Yes. Allister: So warmth and cold are used as another inversion in this story, where normally we see warmth that's good and cold is bad and this character has a very opposite approach to that, which is that the cold is viewed as positive, wrapping us in its cold embrace, this sort of language that tells us the narrator sees cold as positive and warmth as pain. So that is an interesting motif that is woven throughout this story. Kearston: Agreed. Allister: There are a lot of different aspects of the narrator's personality that are very clearly conveyed through language choices. We see things like the scaleless face, the seamless throat… She's disgusted by the dryness of his hands, right? She shudders at the dryness of them. His lonely fingers. Yeah. So just the phrasing here, right? His fingers are lonely because they're webless, right? So this narrator's worldview comes through so many different places with just one word here, two words there. Kearston: All those things that are different. Allister: Yeah. Kearston: And I think you just hit on something really important is the loneliness of the surfer, but at the very end of the close of the story, it's our narrator being once again alone, which is beautiful and full circle. Allister: Yeah. So many structural parallels between them, between the motifs, between the inversions. Kearston: It was a fun one. And I think it was a good first episode story too, just because of how well known, how appreciated that specific story is because of just the overall attention that it received and then the score that it ultimately pulled from the judges. Also, I do have to say, because we haven't talked about it, I know that I suffer from imposter syndrome horribly. And I think that— Allister: We're working on it. [laughter] Kearston: It's horrible! But Addison talks about dealing with the imposter syndrome as well. And he doesn't seem as though in this case, because of how comfortable he was with the way he told the story, he was fine with the score that he got. Allister: Also just, I think it takes some bravery to offer up a story— Kearston: Absolutely! Allister: —for a concept like this, even though we are trying to build up people's stories and say why we think they're great. It takes some courage to come out and talk about your story and why you're okay with getting zero votes. And fortuitously, I think, even though we hadn't talked about it in advance, Addison sees things the same way we do, which helps. And another thing is that, and I could be wrong on this, but I think a lot of people do look up to him in the Writing Battle community. Kearston: Yes, I would agree. I would say that Addison is very well known and appreciated in the Writing Battle community. So I think that maybe some folks felt personally offended on his behalf for that. Allister: Totally. So as for analysis, I really liked how there was a flat character arc that was used to good effect in this story, which is not usually something you see as an effective storytelling tool. Usually, we see these growth arcs that make us encouraged for the character or these downward spirals that show them losing their integrity. But in this case, the character is always this predator that…the tragedy stems from their inability to recognize it. Kearston: And I agree. One of the things that I loved about this story was that everything that the creature, the monster, the siren that they wanted were things that they could never actually have. So this perpetual longing for what they couldn't have was really effective. And then as the body is just sinking, you know that this is not the last time because it definitely wasn't the first time that it's happened. Allister: And they just have no ability to learn from this mistake. And that's what makes it so tragic. Kearston: Absolutely, which adds to the horror element of it, which I thought, you know, he did a really good job capturing. And then maybe you can talk about why this was the story that you wanted to do for our first episode. Allister: Yeah, I mean, I think we covered a lot of the reasons already. Like you said, a lot of people were blown away by the vote count this story got. It's not just us. And as Addison said, a lot of those people reached out and told him how much they loved his story. So we know that this story resonated with a lot of people and it had a big impact, even though it didn't have a big score. Kearston: This story is so loved that getting a zero, I think, made everyone feel better about the judging process. Because if Addison can get a zero on a story, he's good as this one, then it's okay if we get a zero or a one or whatever number that is. Allister: Yeah, totally. I've seen a lot of debates in various writing circles about how much of this contest is luck or skill. And there are definitely some hardliners that think it's all luck and some that think it's all skill. I definitely think it's somewhere in the middle. I think it's a lot more skill-based than it is luck-based. But at the same time, it's like you're flipping a coin and you're really just trying to weight your odds a little bit, even if you write. Kearston: And what prompts do you get? Allister: Absolutely. Yeah. Prompts are a huge struggle sometimes, as Addison mentioned. I've had some sets of prompts that really had me scratching my head. And that's definitely where a lot of the fun of these competitions comes from. But it can make it quite challenging to write a story that resonates with you as the author. Kearston: Which as the author, that you hope is going to resonate with the readers and sometimes it just doesn't happen. Allister: Yeah. I've definitely had that challenge in some of my recent contests where the prompts just felt lackluster to me and I just did my best. Kearston: Yeah, sometimes inspiration does not strike when the prompts drop. So you've got to re-roll. See if you can get something better or something that helps you create a story that you love and that hopefully the readers would love. Allister: Yeah. I totally was chasing the unicorn for a little while there in the fall. And I didn't like the results of that pursuit. And I don't think it's worth spending so much time and effort just to chase a few pixels. I don't have too much pride to re-roll. So I'm not really chasing the unicorn or the dino so much is the best story. Kearston: And the unicorn is the opposite of what the dinosaur is. The unicorn is nine no re-rolls. Which is I think even harder than the dinosaur. Allister: Yeah, it's tricky for sure. What's your approach to re-rolls? Kearston: Oh, that's a hard one. So for me, it depends. If I'm going to do a re-roll and lose my opportunity at unicorn, I'm going all re-rolls so that I can track the dinosaur. Which is what I did on the last one. But the one I made Sweet Sixteen with, I did no re-rolls. But I felt that every single one of those prompts just fit so nicely together. I didn't need to do a re-roll to be inspired to write it. Allister: Yeah. And that story came together great. Kearston: Thank you. It also came together on a Saturday morning in four hours. Allister: Oh, wow. Yeah, it's another interesting aspect. I spent so much time on my stories in autumn. And I almost wonder if I over edited them. And I know there are people who spent maybe 2% as long on their stories as I did on mine and did better as far as the vote count goes. Kearston: Well, and I think number of beta readers also plays into that as well because you can get too much feedback, which then by the time you're done editing, the voice of your character is completely gone. You can absolutely edit out your own voice with just sheer number of beta reader feedback because they're giving you what works for them and that's not always what works for you. Allister: Yeah, that's fair. I definitely at that time was thinking, it's all just a bunch of data points, right? And if one person says something doesn't work for them, okay. But if five people will say they don't like it, then that's a much stronger set of evidence that it actually is worth changing. Kearston: I enjoy your very analytical approach to that. One, I find it endearing, but two, there are so many writers that I have made friends with in this past year that are as data driven as you are and use each little new detail that they pick up to help them improve their craft and they're always thinking about it. And I think it's amazing. Allister: Yeah, that's definitely one of the things I'm still trying to figure out is if these contests are helping me learn and grow. And I think they are, again, I don't think that judging results tell me whether I'm getting better or not, but I do think the contests are helping me grow. Kearston: I agree. And that was why I started it. You know, you had a goal of becoming better at feedback, which is an admirable skill to have as a writer. And for me, I wanted to work on building better craft and creating stronger narration and clear characters and creating compelling story arcs that just kind of took you through and pulled you into the story. And I do think that over the last year, those have been areas that I've improved on, whereas this year I'm focusing on impact because that has been pretty consistent feedback is that my impact lacks on some of my stories, which is why I think I do well in cozy, but maybe not in some of the more dark genres. Allister: Well, I think you do a great job pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. And I think that's also all we have time for today. You've been listening to Allister... Kearston: ...and Kearston. Thank you so much for joining us!

Episode 0 - Mission Statement

[music] Allister: Welcome to Battle Hardened. On Writing Battle, stories live and die according to the decisions of anonymous judges. Kearston: But vote count is not a measure of story quality. Allister: High scores feel good! Duel wins lead to final showdown appearances and honorable mentions. Kearston: If you participate and you have received either honor, that is something to be proud of. However, at Battle Hardened, we want to mine for hidden treasures. Allister: We're talking about stories that didn't make it out of house. Kearston: We are interested in stories that blew us away. Stories whose value goes beyond their vote tally. Allister: Diamonds in the rough. [music] Allister: We hope you'll join us Kearston: as we explore these stories together.