Destiny By The Numbers

I announced publication of this story several weeks ago, but I think it is only reaching newsstands as this blog is written, so it is a good time to look at the numbers behind my tongue-in-cheek crime story of nominative determinism -- Destiny.

Destiny is my fourth story for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and at just 600 words it is the shortest story I've sold to Queen or any other market. It's the fifth flash story I've had published, if flash is 1000 words or less, and the second flash story I've placed at EQMM, following my 2023 debut, Teddy's Favorite Thing.

Destiny is an outlier in that it's creation came fast, and it came easy. My notes showed I worked on it only one day -- June 21st, 2024 -- and that the story took 2.5 hours to complete. It is rare I write a story in less than ten hours, regardless of length, and my notes call it a magical thing that didn't exist yesterday, and now it is here today and forever. It's worth remembering that not every story's creation is like picking at your scabs!

Also magical: this story was written on vacation, in Monterey, California. The location had no bearing on the story, aside from being a creative place and part of Steinbeck country, but it was on the car trip up from Southern California that I conceived of the story, in a silence-filling conversation with my son Jack, talking for no partiuclar reason about junior high school teachers I'd had that seemed condemned to their jobs owing to their unfortunate names. Next day, poor Floyd and Maynard were robbing a bank, their destinies truly not in their stars, but in their names!