Flash Fiction - For easy reading

 These are two pieces of flash fiction I'd originally written for submission. Since it's well past the point where it'd be considered, I've decided to put them down here. They're both in the single theme of 'gun'. Enjoy!

***

The Disrupted Denouement

“And so I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that the murderer is–”

The report of a rifle outside the window, instantly followed by the smashing of glass, cut off the detective’s monologue. He was thrown back, a hole in his chest, to fall against the hearth with a sickening crash. Everyone gathered in the room – the two policemen, Lord and Lady Stool, Miss Amelia Straight, the Honourable Sebastian Cole, two maids, the butler, and a rather vague vicar – looked on in astonishment as the clever detective lay bleeding out onto the hearthrug. Then the Honourable Sebastian let out a falsetto scream, and the house was in uproar.

Over the next several weeks, all the grounds were searched. No trace was found of where the sniper had fired from. The detective’s last words were a string of gargled gibberish no-one could decipher. The notebook in which he had recorded all his findings was in indecipherable code. Each member of the household was arrested and released in turn, bar one. The papers were full of the mystery, almost to the exclusion of the murder the detective had investigated.

They never found the sniper. Or the murderer. They did execute someone for the crime, but does that really count?

***

The Bullet

I was fired from a .50 Calibre weapon at someone. I don’t know who, and frankly I didn’t care. It wasn’t my job to care, only be accurate. The snap of sound as I rushed from the barrel filled my world, and the dusty environment surrounding me masked my flight. I travelled approximately three metres, and in that time saw some very interesting things.

I saw two soldiers from one side advancing slowly on an enemy position. In another area I saw two enemy soldiers shouting some nonsense about their cause. I didn’t care about that. I was a bullet, what did it matter to me why I was fired? Well, I tell a lie there. I was fired by one side against another, to hit the target chosen by the soldier who fired me. That is an inviolate truth.

As I entered the body of my target, I briefly saw their uniform. I must admit to being puzzled. Either I’d been fired by an enemy, or the soldier firing me had hit one of his own. Well well. That wouldn’t go down well back home. If I could have smiled, I would. But then, how can I? I’m a bullet. At least I hit my target.

Proofing challenges

 Proofing a book before you send it to your publisher can be the devil and all. You know that at the other end, you've got a dev editor and copy editors waiting to get their hands on it, and you feel like you don't want to produce anything too riddled with mistakes. Of course, everyone can make mistakes. It's almost unnatural for someone not to make mistakes, even with Grammerly shouting at you from every other advertisement that they can remove all mistakes. Yeah, I tried Grammerly, and when it attempted to turn a particularly moving scene into a scientific dissection, I wasn't impressed.

There are a number of things to do when proofing. First, check that you haven't don anything silly like leaving a sentence unfinished. That's happened a few times. Once, I even forgot to complete half a paragraph. It's a little troublesome when you're doing a scan read and you get an impression like when a record or CD skips. The issue when scanning is that your mind tends to naturally fill in gaps, so unless it's a really glaring issue, your mind can smooth over it.

Second, obviously, is little problems like duplicate words or sentences, in the order of "the the" or "and and". Or, worse, spaces put in by accident and the spell checker not picking it up as the single letters have some kind of language usage. I've done it more times than I can remember, in my writing and on this blog. They can really screw up the proofing, as it it can be difficult to spot them. See what I did there? For first-person narratives, it can be especially tedious. You need to filter through the idiosyncrasies to find the actual mistakes.

Third, and most obvious, are spelling mistakes. For standard words, these aren't a biggy. If you don't pick them up as you're writing, you can pick them up later with a spellcheck, which I usually do when I've completed the first runthrough after the manuscript is complete as a narrative. But for invented names, or unusual spellings, it can be a nightmare. For instance, one of my characters has the use name "Sedna", but due to fast typing stuff I can end up typing "Senda" by mistake, which can be passed over by accident but completely throw off the reader if it isn't caught.

There's also a fourth category that's worse, but also trickier to spot on a micro level. It's plot threads you've forgotten about. I've talked about note-taking before now, but even then it can slip. If you've had something inserted in an earlier chapter that references part of the subplot or overall theme, then forget to resolve it later, it just leaves a loose thread hanging in mid-air. No reader likes that kind of thing. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth upon completing the book, even if they don't consciously register it.

Oh well, that's my feelings on the matter. It's something to do, and it's necessary people should know writing isn't just a picnic. It's real work, with challenges and brick walls and deadlines to face. But at the end of the day, for someone who really enjoys it, there's nothing like finishing that sentence and sending off the manuscript to the next stage. Nothing in the world.