Another journal

Storytelling Collective does a yearly challenge for flash fic, with prompts and a nice community format. Every year I complete a run I pick my ten favourites and collect them into what is basically a zine. With 2025’s up, now it’s time to share some faves from 2024.

It was Tuesday. It had been Tuesday for, as well as Mel could reckon it, something like five years. This would have been fine, they thought, if it was a solo or limited affect time loop. If it was only Mel, or only Mel and like a dozen people around the world, experiencing Tuesday, that would have felt surmountable.

But the whole world had been experiencing Tuesday for something like five years and had decided, after about a year of panic and then a year of recovery from that panic, that Tuesday was fine, actually.

That first year there had been spates of bank robberies, vengeance killings, strange pranks, horrible suicides by people sacrificing themselves in an attempt to reset the day. A lot of weddings, also. Money stopped meaning anything, what one spent on Tuesday was back in the bank on Tuesday morning. Even Mel had participated in an outrageous indulgence, purchasing a ticket for a first-class international flight. They’d had to buy it a couple of Tuesdays in a row, waiting for everyone else’s choices to line up for there to be pilots who chose to spend their day at work, for the airport to be intact, for the ground crews to also decide to spend their day at work. Mel was fine waiting. The airport was like a mall and it was as good a place to spend Tuesday as any.

All the social sites and forums reset each day as well, but Mel had gleaned enough over the months to know that they wanted to cross the international date line eastbound. Going west would just pop them right back into Tuesday. Going east let them enjoy the view, the food, the very nice accommodations. When they grew tired, they let themselves fall asleep, knowing they’d wake up in their bed, Tuesday morning.

They’d played, cautiously, with what defined “Tuesday.” It was some point of sunrise, the light gaining momentum as it spilled across the hills and they’d blink and they’d be opening their eyes on a fresh morning and another Tuesday.

Despite what was happening in much of the outside world, Mel spent those first two years more or less enjoying Tuesday. It was, in the old parlance, their “Sunday,” and what was a day that once held its own special dread of the work week to come now felt like a kind of haven. They did find it frustrating that any work they did on various craft projects was undone each day, calm hours cross stitching emptied from the aida. Eventually the frustration was filled with a sort of existential peace. It was the action more than the finished work that Mel liked anyway.

One of their mutuals on a fibre artist forum wrote a poem about Penelope and somebody with a better memory than Mel memorized it, adding it to the boards early Tuesday morning. Memorising the poem and sharing it became a ritual for Mel’s friends.

It was somewhere in the third or fourth year of Tuesdays that Mel’s manager called them and asked them to come into work. Mel hesitated, they’d always been very protective of their two days off in a row and the instinct wasn’t broken by years of Tuesdays. Mel’s manager then told them that “even if Tuesday forgets, I won’t,” the threat clear in her voice. Someday Tuesday would end and if Mel wanted to be employed that eventual Wednesday, then they needed to come in. And so, they did.

Mel’s manager wasn’t the only one who tried to claw back a semblance of order, playacting a normal week of days across a string of seven identical Tuesdays. Mel felt bad for her for a while, realizing how empty her Tuesday must be without the self-definition of her job. Mel’s pity lasted for a couple of months and then the habit of going into work carried them another year. They’d always been easily swayed into routine, and the pattern of going into work was a more practiced one than having a day off.

Then, one Tuesday lunch break, Mel read their mutual’s Penelope poem again. Someone had filmed themselves speaking it, over slowed video of a sweater being frogged. They’d done a great job with the sound, the popping rip of the yarn coming undone not overpowered by the words of the poem, but supporting them like a drumbeat. Mel watched the video three times in a row, then walked out of the store, leaving their apron on the hook in the break room. Tuesday morning the apron was back, folded on top of Mel’s dryer. There was also a very long text from their manager that Mel did not read before replying “Sry, day off.”

When Wednesday came, Mel wanted it to be a day shaped by their choices alone.

Storytelling Collective does a yearly challenge for flash fic, with prompts and a nice community format. Every year I complete a run I pick my ten favourites and collect them into what is basically a zine. With 2025’s up, now it’s time to share some faves from 2024.

Seb held up his hand and felt Aurok gently run into it. The small bird nibbled softly at the back of his hand before turning around and patting away. Turning his attention back to the parchment, Seb dipped his pen and continued outlining the flowers framing the verse. Although he liked adding the colours as well, Seb enjoyed this step the most, feeling the sweep of his pen follow twining stems. He was not so entranced by the process to miss the tapping sound of Aurok returning.

With the deftness of practice, Seb caught the bird before it closed in on the parchment. Aurok peeped cheerfully, nodding its head to duck within the warm cage of Seb’s curled fingers. Knowing what came next, the scribe hastily cleaned his pen and set it aside before placing the bird back onto the desk, an arm’s length from his workspace.

Merrily, Aurok strode toward the parchment. Seb caught it up again, the bird giving a high flute of excitement. Back to the scarred wood of the table, the bird’s steps jauntier, eager for the next part of the game. Once more Seb scooped up the bird, adding a small swoop to the path of his hand as he returned Aurok to its starting point. They repeated this cycle several times, until Aurok nipped Seb’s finger in a clear declaration of the end of the game.

Seb returned to his work and Aurok returned to its current project of tearing apart an old rag. Without interruptions, the outlining was done quickly. Seb tidied his workspace to make room for the paints. Seeing Aurok well occupied with its rag, he turned around to fill a dish with water.

The pleasant sound of splashing covered the noise of any crimes, and Seb turned back to the desk to see Aurok halfway across the parchment, the dainty claws of its feet leaving a trail through the not fully dried ink.

There was mercy in heaven, Seb thought, for Aurok’s path had not crossed the careful script of the verse. Quietly, he set the dish of water down and closed the distance to the desk. Aurok, focused on its quest, ignored him as it rummaged between the assorted jars and containers that accumulated on any working surface. Smoothly and swiftly, Seb’s hand darted out and captured the bird. Aurok showed no distress at this, nor in Seb wiping its feet, as it was far too engrossed in prising out the meat of a walnut half. Seb could not remember when he had last eaten walnuts and resolved that in the future he would pick up and wipe under the things on his desk rather than sweeping around them.

Its prize obtained, Aurok expressed no further interest in crossing Seb’s desk. The scribe spent the rest of the daylight incorporating Aurok’s inky steps into the design. The end result, he had to admit, was quite harmonious.

Another year down! This is the fourth year I’ve completed Flash Fiction February and the fourth year I’ve put my favourite pieces into a wee collection and stuck it on Itch. And you can get it right here I’ve always likened the challenge to using a sketchbook, it’s an exercise, more often than not, to learn you can make some words come out at will. “Write 500 words from this prompt” feels very similar to my brain as “look at all these hairstyles and practise drawing them.” But, just like some pages of a sketchbook, sometimes you get something tangible from the practise.

Since writing flash tends to be a more contained practise than a sketchbook page, I am lucky enough to find ten stories every year to bring together, edit, illustrate, and share. My favourite part though, is that once I’ve got a new collection up, I take four favorites (of the ten favorites) from the previous year and share them on my blog. I really just like sharing stuff I’ve made. I like to think people read what I write. And after a year, picking four favourites really does bring the focus in on the most interesting or fun stuff.

Anyway! This year the illustrations were in the vibe of headpieces, with central images. Always a fun challenge to keep it: photocopy black and white AND somehow visually illustrate what isn’t often a visual set of words. In theory I could print any of these out into proper zines. Maybe someday I will.

Until then, here’s the pitch snagged from the collection’s page on Itch, where you can get it for a dollar:

Ten flash fiction pieces collected together with illustrations for each. There’s time loops,

There were probably better ways to spend a time loop than a job interview. Luz had done them. Made a lot of memories. Great stuff.

a smidgen of softness,

The cookbook was one of Cara’s most prized possessions. She’d found it at a junk sale, which seemed to be how it had entered every previous owner’s home. It fell open to the most-used recipes, some pages spice-stained, others clearly the victim of spills… On any of the most-used looking recipes, there was commentary from a half-dozen ghosts scrawled in any empty space.

and also time loops.

Check who is in front of you, is it the same group as every morning? Are they wearing the same clothes as every morning? No! How wonderful! The auntie two people in front of you is wearing a shawl not a sweater today, that’s great! That’s two things different this morning already!

This 7.7k+ word flash fiction collection is available as epub, mobi, and pdf files.

Content warnings: unreality, time loop death.

It’s difficult, to get back into the specific habit of blogging. I mean I do it – I “microblog” on Tumblr and I’m so far sticking well to my goal of weekly updates at Comradery and Patreon. Even my newsletter is kind of bloggy. But beyond that, it was a habit I kind of lost when I left LiveJournal, to a degree. My problem, I think partly, is I always want to cite lots of sources or have a ~reason~ for a post. Which is silly! I like posts that are just little life updates or complaints or stories or whatever whatever. And not just from others, I mean I also like stumbling across the ones I’ve written myself.

Anyway right now I’m in the middle of Flash Fiction February, as held by Storytelling Collective, I guess this is the fourth year I’ve really gone for it, though I’d picked at it previously. In 2022 I got an AlphaSmart and it helped me re-focus how I was going about things. Here’s a little video from then of how it works.

This year though, I’m typing on the computer, specifically in Ellipsus, because they have a very sexy little snippet you can do now and that’s fun. The always wonderful Zilla Novikov (who wrote Query, which you should read) does a “post the first line in your WIP” on Tumblr that I enjoy and don’t partake in enough, and I figured the snippets would be a good way to do that.

In 2023 I made a spreadsheet (of course I did) to track the prompts, word count and genre of what I was writing and to better note what should go in the collection I put together for each year (find them over on Itch, they’ve illustrations and everything). It’s a nice way to see, with these little bits of story that are like working in a sketchbook, what I keep returning too. Here’s a snapshot of where I am for this month, which is generated from daily entries. If the genre-description-type thing doesn’t make sense to you that’s fine, I mean this is more for me.

It is difficult to balance working in a lot of media. While I’m writing I’m also (supposed to be) shooting some stickers to finally get them in the shop, working on some sculptures, finishing a quilt, mending my coat, etc etc etc. But that’s life! I dunno! It’s how its always been. Finding a balance, sticking to the to-do lists that keep me on track without putting me in a rut, building new habits or rebuilding old ones.

Like blog posts without a point, really. Other than saying “I’m here! I’m here please!” Which are good posts to have and to see and to make.

I got into my head that Tamsyn Muir’s The Unwanted Guest needed to be bound to look like a Samuel French script. You know them, if you’ve done theatre. And although they’ve redesigned their covers, they looked the same for a very long time. I’d hoped to unearth one of mine as a reference (No Exit, by Jean Paul Sartre), but I have no idea where it disappeared to in the two decades and half-dozen moves since I first marked it up.

Luckily, “vintage” acting editions abound in the second-hand world and I was able to find reference images to suit. I think I did a good job getting the vibe right. I made three copies, two gifts and one for me (which worked out great since I fully forgot orientation for my printer and the inside cover of my copy is upside down).

For this bind I added a lot of fluff, like inside covers advertising posters, other scripts available from the Mithraeum Play Service Inc. library and a new play available – The Noniad.

I also wrote little character descriptions, which I’m proud of. Luckily the script book I had to hand to physically ref was also a two-person play so it helped with the vibe. The inside text block is… fine. I realised way too late that I had mucked up the scene headers, so we won’t look at those.

Also fun: text on the spine. You know, to become completely rubbed off as your sweaty hands keep fussing with the script as you completely destroy it while memorising your lines. Probably nowhere near accurately bound but it gives the vibes.

This was a delight to do, and (other than messing up the scene headers) they turned out exactly as I’d hoped and imagined. The covers were off-cuts from a photo backdrop! The perfect colour I think.

As I posted earlier, I did some pamphlet binds of short stories for family gifts this year. Pamphlet sewing is my comfort craft, tbh. It’s always satisfying, easy to play with form, just a delight up and down. If you missed the earlier post check it out here.

Which is good because I had to make a grip of them in a week (I put things off a touch). I had done a very niche bind in a set of three as more specific presents, then realised I should just indulge myself and do something similar for everyone. You can get a peek of what the initial bind was here, but it will get its own post.

All this talk of pamphlet binding and this first one isn’t that. It’s three signatures, with a soft cover. I selected three favourite trope-based stories and wrapped them in the brightest dang red I have tried to photograph. The illustrations for each section I drew myself based off of images found in Wikimedia Commons.

The stories are:

• Getaway by Nicole Kornher-Stace, time loop
• If We Survive the Night by Carlie St. George, final girl
• Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim – what it says on the tin

One of the fun things with this project was thinking about what story would make someone the happiest – what they’d read and loved or had never read and might love. For this friend, I couldn’t think of a better match than Pockets by Amal El–Mohtar. The images were sourced from Wikimedia Commons, coloured with watercolour pencil and gold pen.

This one I haven’t mailed yet because first: I always mess up this person’s address somehow and USPS will say they don’t know where that is. And second: because we are very close to one of the big LA County fires and our power has been out and schedules disarrayed. Elves in Illinois by Sarah J. Wu is a true delight and the length pushes the appropriateness of pamphlet sewing.

This searingly bright bind is a fanfic for a very specific ship, if you have AO3, def kudos All The Things You Are by bossbeth, this is just chapter one.

Okay, I’ll get to the bind that started it all next. These were such a joy to make, there’s something very magical about being able to hold something in your hands you otherwise can only access on your phone.

One of my favourite things about winter is making a bunch of gifts for my family (who I am related to only one of, but: family). I like to have a “party favours” energy to it often. For a while I rotated through folks with who got “big” things that required more build time, but the past couple of years have been tired ones so everybody gets something a little smaller instead now.

This year, I decided to indulge my love of pamphlet binding and make little gifts of short stories only available online, or as part of larger collections. Pamphlet binding is just a delightful way to transform something ephemeral/online into a physical object. And it’s one of the easiest ways to make a book, I think.

There’s one I did three copies of (two gifts, and one for me) that I’ll share later, but here’s the first half of the bunch!

Let’s start with the silliest one. RE: REQUEST FOR PROPHECIES AND QUEST FUNDING APPLICATION GUIDELINES by Sara Ryan. When you’re sending a gift to someone who also binds books you want to have a little more silliness. This amazing short story, done in the style of a grant application, I bound in a re-sized manilla folder, using brads to secure the pages. These brads, btw, were salvaged from an archive project and I love that they show their age.

I had a lot of fun both using foil and finding free-for-personal-use fonts to act as section delineators (there’s a word for them but its escaping me). For The Nalendar by Ann Leckie (also available in her AMAZING short story collection Lake of Souls) I used Nature Boho by Edy Wiyono.

For Velvet Man by Leone Ross, I loved Under by imagex. I also drew the spotch that I foiled for the cover.

I’ll share the next half in a new post, since this is getting a bit big!

I am very excited about this! This is my first year doing Yultide and I am going to be over the moon about anything you write for me. I am fine with all POVs, tenses, unusual formats and ratings. I tend to like short fic, but also I just like to read stories <3

My AO3 name is also bzedan, and I am always open to treats.

I love (and I don't even know how relevant these are to my requested fandoms, I'm just sharing vibes): found family, hurt-comfort, guard dog relationships, loyalty, praise-kink, epistolatory fiction or anything related (transcripts! snippets of archived materials!), queer characters, purple prose and excessive scene and food description, worldbuilding, goofy metaphors and similies, domestic cosiness, animals and nature, "one last job" or "we gotta save the barn!" situations, second chances, time loops, fingers in the mouth.

I'm totally fine with: canon-typical violence, gore, 'depressing' existential concepts, horror/creepiness, emotional loss, change-the-setting/time AUs.

General DNWs: pregnancy of any type or stage (one exception, which is noted in the relevant fandom), death of requested characters who don't die in canon, real-life current political figures, explicit non-con, beastiality, child/adult sex, fecal play,

Chronicles of Amicae - Mirah Bolender

Canon-specific DNW: Current enslavement, but passing mention of past enslavement okay

Listen, I know this is a hard series to get hold of. I'll take any domestic moment or fight scene or worldbuilding about any of the characters. I'm a big ol' sucker for how the main three (Laura Kramer, Clae Sinclair, Okane Sinclair) interact and the family they've created, but I also love basically everyone else in the series. Heck, if you feel wild enough to delve into the Hive-Mind, I'd love to see it.

The Mechanic (2011)

My gift must feature one or more of my chosen character tags (giver's choice): Arthur Bishop, Steve McKenna

No canon-specific DNW

Love these boys, both alone and together. I'd be happy with anything from a grumpy morning over coffee to them pulling a wetworks job to an explicit scene of them fulfilling a different kind of (wet) job. The things that particularly endear me to them is the reluctance to acknowledge their mentor-protégé relationship that is almost knight/squire in depth.

I'm okay with Steve's death in canon (even though I'm also a fan of the alternate universe - canon divergence where he lives) and Arthur dealing with how he feels after that could be interesting!

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (TV)

My gift must feature all of my chosen character tags; or it may use exceptions I explain in the form: Keiko Miura, Leland "Lee" Shaw, William "Bill" J. Randa - my exception is if the story has only one or two of them actively/physically in the story, but the three of them are still romantically together.

Exception/Explanation for character tags: I would like everyone in the monster-hunting throuple

No canon-specific DNW

DNW Exception: If any of the kaiju/monsters/titans is gravid and it is approached in a not overly-biologically descriptive way, like how a farm handles livestock being pregnant or how people are when their cat is going to have kittens. I know that the very first entry in the Monsterverse showed some pretty gratuitous egg-laying, but in context really no weirder than Attenborough nature docs.

Listen, I am here for the monster-hunting throuple. I love them, I love their dynamic, both in the field and at home. I think about how possibly maybe they could still all be together even after the events of season one (even if one of them got eaten by a Skullcrawler). I think about how they have each had to mourn the loss of the other two pieces of their heart at different times. I love them!

We finished moving in June but finishing these comics got put off a couple months, thanks to the whole process of moving itself. I finished them though, and that’s what counts.

Originally published on Patreon in an early-release to patrons.

Mirrored from B.Zedan.

One of the most wonderful things about living in Los Angeles is the sheer variety of produce available at local supermarkets. Oregon was rich in berries and always had a good general selection, but seeing jackfruit, mangos and papaya just sitting next to bananas at Vons (the local version of a Safeway) is a special kind of experience.

The most exciting fruit so far—because I haven’t got the courage to try a jackfruit yet—has been the papaya. I’ve enjoyed papaya juice for a long time, thanks to an everlasting love of P.O.G., but hadn’t encountered the fruit in person. First, they’re huge, with a lot of the Mexican papayas weighing up to ten pounds. For an example, the much smaller papaya I recently picked up was enough for a snack, a smoothie the next day and well, a lot more than that. The big papayas offer about double the amount of fruit.

There’s a meatiness to papaya fruit that is reminiscent of a more sturdy melon and they’re juicier than you can imagine, which can lead to quite a delicious mess. Slicing off their rind feels a lot like fileting a chicken breast or taking the skin off a fish, with the same slippery worry that you’ll nick your hand.

Their flavour that ranges from peppery to musky, depending on the breed, which makes papayas amazing in everything from salads to smoothies—or just straight out of a bowl with a little Tajin. They’re better than any P.O.G. or Kerns Nectar could have prepared me for.

Papaya seeds are also a lot more intimidating and interesting than the little black specks on a juice bottle convey. The first papaya I picked up was packed with seeds, just cups of slightly squishy, alien-looking little things. I’d read they were edible, with a taste like mustard, black pepper and horseradish, which sparked my curiosity.

I ended up being a little overwhelmed by the idea of processing so many seeds and composted them, swearing the next papaya seeds would get dried and used. Imagine my surprise when I picked up the next papaya, a Hortus Gold, and found barely any seeds inside.

Even though I was disappointed after the previous seed bounty, for a first-time experience, it ended up being the perfect amount of seeds. As I learned a helpful post on Spruce Eats, the fleshy covering of the seeds should be removed before drying them. This is a sticky operation, but rubbing them between layers of paper towel first cuts down on the number of little seed skins that end up stuck to your hand as you pop them out of their skins.

The seeds themselves have tiny bristles and hooks and look less like alien things and more like the briars that stick to your socks in late summer.

Although there are a lot of blog posts out there saying papaya seeds can be dried in the oven “at low heat,” nobody really seems to be giving an exact time it takes. I’m sure it varies, but for a handful of seeds, I was able to get them dry enough to grind in about an hour at 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

The dried papaya seeds ground incredibly easily with a mortar and pestle, leaving me with about a teaspoon of softly peppery powder that will be a perfect topping with some crema on corn.

The drying and roasting process takes a lot of the mustard and horseradish flavour away from the seeds, which is a pity. I suppose I’ll need to hope the next papaya I pick up is more generous with its seeds because I can’t wait to try them raw.

Mirrored from B.Zedan.