Behind the Story: "The Blooms of Sorrow"
Hello hello! Now that I have another story published, it’s newsletter time!
The story in question is “The Blooms of Sorrow” in Issue 24: Hauntings and Horrors issue of FIYAH. Get your issue here, and please do check out the other stories as well!
(image: cover of the Fall 2022 FIYAH issue, art by N’kai DeLauter. A Black person with glowing white eyes that appear to drip mercury or light, with five arms and wearing a green trench coat over a white-and-black plaid shirt. They hold a length of chain and a wooden house appears to be disintegrating behind them)
Actually, check out FIYAH as a whole. It’s an awesome, award-winning mag giving voice to Black writers, and the stories and poetry are stellar. I’ll add also that DaVaun Sanders is a wonderful editor to work with—he fully understood what I wanted to do with “Blooms,” and his edits—actually more like insightful comments—pushed me to deepen my themes and make the story the best I could. I truly believe the story found its perfect home, and I’m honored that it makes my debut in FIYAH. Also, at over 6,600 words, it’s the longest story I’ve had published. #milestone!
Gushing aside, I imagine you’ll enjoy this newsletter more if you read the story first. Even so, I’ll try to keep this spoiler-free, but to be safe you may want to read only the first section.
All that out of the way, let’s get started.
So, where’d the idea(s) for “The Blooms of Sorrow” come from?
I’m a member of Codex Writers’ Group, an online community for “neopro” speculative fiction writers. Codex regularly runs writing challenges or contests. For the Halloween contest, writers receive “story seeds” and write a horror story or a story that is otherwise somehow “Halloweeny.”
This story began life as part of the 2018 contest. My seeds, which came from two different people, were:
“A sudden movement in the darkness when you open your back door at night”
An image of a ball with teeth [I’ve unfortunately lost the image]
Playing with an “Evil Noise” generator till creeped out and inspired to write [I’ve also unfortunately lost the link, but it was similar to this: https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/desertedSoundscapeGenerator.php]
“Three black feathers sticking out of a jack’o’lantern that’s filled with candy corn”
From there, I went with my standard process of freewriting to brainstorm ideas. Often my total brainstorming wordage meets or exceeds the length of the story itself. It’s interesting reviewing my brainstorming notes: I wrote a lot of Opinions about how horror is often focused on fear of the unknown, what feelings I wanted to leave the reader with, and several dead-end scene ideas I’d forgotten about.
And yes the 2018 contest. To be fair, the first draft sat for two years, during my pregnancy and then parenting an infant, and I didn’t begin revisions till fall of 2020.
You wanna talk more about revising, then?
Don’t mind if I do!
(Note: Some of the following could be construed as spoilers; stop reading here if you want to read the story 100% spoiler-free.)
As part of the Halloween contest, when you turn in your story you’re expected to read the other stories and provide comments. The comments I received indicated people largely understood the story’s heart: a focus on where trauma has left Monica and her mother and brother now.
However, people also felt the brother, Theo, wasn’t very well developed. And he wasn’t. The word count limit for the contest was 5000, if I recall correctly, and the draft I turned in was close to that. If you’ve read the final story in FIYAH, you’ll see the story gained over 1500 words. Much of that went to adding the mother’s—Helen—and Theo’s flashbacks.
I debated about those and whether the POV shifts would work. Ultimately, I decided that since the story is about this family as a collective, it was important to show the trauma from all three perspectives.
The trauma of my main character, Monica, of course is only presented in the now of the story, and then through the lens of Helen and Theo’s POVs in the past. That, too, I felt was important. The effects of the father’s abuse remains and overshadows the interactions of the family. In many ways, the family as a whole is a character.
I also deliberately didn’t name the father, both from a perspective of wanting to push back against narratives that prize the perpetrator’s story over the victims’, and from wanting to focus on the now, the fallout.
Got anything else to add?
Though I never wrote about it in my notes, I think the movie Hereditary, released earlier in 2018, influenced me also. That movie is very much about inherited trauma (it’s literally in the title) and the breakdown of a family. It’s very well done, but unpleasant, and I have no desire to ever see it again.
But it stuck with me, and I see echoes of it in “Blooms.”
Further, during revisions and from my new perspective as a parent, I thought also about how easy it is, or how easy it feels it can be, to screw up a child. Even having the best intentions, parents mess up and say or do the wrong thing, and because children are their own people with their own minds, it’s impossible to say what will stick in their psyche. How much worse is it when one of the family members is an actively evil person?
And, no, alcoholism isn’t evil. But nor is it an excuse for abuse.
Caveat: it’s quite possible I’ve read too many stories about awful parents in Dear Prudence and the AITA? subreddit and needed to purge some of that.
Okay then. This is getting a little long; any final words?
Yes. The mums used to be pumpkins. (Hey, I went literal with the seeds at first.) But I’m pleased with the change and believe I’ve managed to make flowers creepy.
If you’ve got mums growing in your own garden, I hope that every so often you’ll worry you’ve spotted a gold tooth among them.
Cheers, and happy October!