The Devil By The Numbers

The devil is in the details, and the details are in the devil!

As with most of my short stories, “The Devil Downsized” was written during a break in longer work -- in this case begun after finishing the first half of the second major revision of my debut novel, Gumshoe Frankenstein. My notes offer no hint of the origin of this story, but I remember my mind wandering when I was watching the Fargo television show (and that is an indictment of my attention span more than the show), thinking how the villians in that series exist in the world but have vaguely supernatural powers, getting away with evil on a scale that would daunt most of us. I wondered if all those villains were the devil in disguise -- world-weary bad guys, worn down by bureacracy and failure -- and if they were the devil, why they chose to keep at the job.

Maybe they had no choice but to continue.

More interesting -- what if they decided to retire?

From those vague origins, I derived a title -- The Devil Downsized -- and got to work, finding out in pretty short order that this was a conversational, flash-length bit of fiction, a meeting between the devil and a mark. My Gumshoe Frankenstein revision had led me into researching stage magic, and I borrowed that research and maybe even a character for Devil. My novel has a stage magician named Jimmy Ferris, and he might be the same Jimmy from this story. It's not terribly important, except that it got me going.

My notes indicate this story took 10.5 hours over ten sessions to complete, and that I worked on it, off-and-on, between February and September of 2024.

There was the usual wrangling over structure and the ending. I chased my tail for a long time, trying to structure the story like a magic trick, and I got there, sort of.

Some of my notes:

2/19

Dunno if the story is worth anything, but glad to have started it. I think it is a flash, in three parts, but I have only the first. 

2/23

Brute forcing my way through this. 590 words of flash … but I don’t know my ending. I know what it should be, but I don’t know what it is.

5/21

Spent about an hour researching magic tricks and thinking about the three act structure of this story.

7/22

Thought I had an ending, whereas what I really had was a conclusion. Went around and around a bit and quit when it got toxic.

7/24

Still don’t like my ending. It goes back on the shelf.

9/12

Since I will seemingly do anything to avoid starting another novel, I went back to this and I think it is finished. As usual, the trick was to accept a happy ending.

9/13

Tweaks and it is done. Friday the 13th seems a propitious date to complete this story. Submitted.

Sometimes stories just take their time -- this was one of those cases.

The path to publication for this story was as extenuated as its creation -- nine submissions, seven rejections, one withdrawal, and eventualy publication at SPOOKY Magazine, which published the tale after a six month printing delay and promptly went out of business. Maybe the devil was working in mysterious ways.

However devious the path, I am glad this story is in print. It is short, it is singular, I may never write anything like it again. But as a Twilight Zone-style story, it does cross over a bit with my mystery and crime stories, and wouldn't be entirely out of place if I ever anthologize my short story work. 

But those devilish details are for another day. Thanks for reading.