The Story Behind the Story: “Blindsided”
A behind-the-scenes look at how this short fiction came to life.
Blindsided is available to read at Cosmic Daffodil Journal, first published in February 2024.
(CW: Sexually explicit content)
I wrote Blindsided as a response to a themed call for submissions by Cosmic Daffodil Journal. The theme was “The Seven Deadly Sins.” In this case, I chose Lust as the sin that I’d like to revolve my short story around.
I’ve had a few stories that I’ve written in response to a specific prompt or theme before, but the publications that had those themed issues ended up rejecting my work. Thankfully, my stories eventually found homes elsewhere.
So, this was the first time that the journal that I actually wrote a story for ended up accepting my piece, which was pretty darn nice, considering I had not sent this story to other publications. You could say Blindsided had a 100% batting average when it came to publishing, which honestly surprised me given the nature of the content.
I didn’t consider sending this story to more than 3 publications, and I would’ve been fine had it been rejected by all and stayed in my own personal archives. Yet here we are. This wasn’t the first time that the publishing industry had surprised me, so I probably should stop getting shocked when my unorthodox fiction pieces get accepted.
As an emerging writer of fiction, I haven’t landed on a particular genre, style, or niche that I want to double down on. I am still in this early phase where I’d like to take more creative risks and experiment more with form and material. Only through experimentation would I know what I like or don’t like, what’s genius or rubbish, and what type of story is energy-giving or energy-depleting.
Blindsided was another piece where I played with form. The piece reads like text or chat exchanges among the 3 main characters, Jessie, Luke, and Jackson. With a limit restriction of 650 words, I didn’t have much real estate to flesh out the story with fully developed characters, but I thought that through this form of “found fiction,” I was still able to control the pace of the story, magnify the conflicts, and provide glimpses of each character’s personalities (emojis and all) and how these personalities changed depending on whom they’re talking to.
In terms of content, I’ve had stories with themes of queerness, yearning, love, and heartbreak that have been published by other literary magazines and journals before, but none of them were sexual in nature. While Blindsided wasn’t the first story I had written with sexually explicit content, it was the first one that got published.
There were 7 deadly sins to choose from, and I deliberately chose Lust for the reason that I wanted to creatively challenge myself to write a story on a topic that was (is) not really my forte. I wanted to know for myself if I was capable of stretching my writing abilities further into uncharted territories.
It was important to me that this piece was not sexual for the sake of being sexual. I wasn’t in the business of writing about gratuitous sex. Though Lust was the core theme, I wanted the sexual language to serve the story and to act as a device for revealing the conflicts and the consciousness of the characters.
Again, due to my experimental approach in writing short fiction, where nothing is off-limits, I am learning a lot about myself. Through the experience of writing Blindsided, I’ve confirmed that writing sexual language and erotic scenes isn’t my cup of tea, though I am not opposed to writing sex if it moves the story in a meaningful way.
So, don’t expect me to be the next great erotica writer. If you need a little kink fix, you can go find it elsewhere.
So, Long Story Short (SLSS) is a Medium publication where I pull back the curtain on my original works of short fiction that have been published in literary magazines and journals.
I write about the why and the how, and I aim to post my thoughts within two weeks from the story’s first publication, while the story is still fresh on my mind.
By doing so, I hope to have written artifacts beyond the stories themselves and be reminded of my motivations, inspirations, and evolving writing process, as well as the state of the external world and my inner life in that moment in time.
Thanks for following along.
For more short fiction writing, consider subscribing to my Substack newsletter of the same name, So, Long Story Short.
I write drabbles and offer a behind-the-scenes look at my original works of short fiction published in literary magazines and journals.
