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    Beyond Dreams
    Beyond Dreams
    Beyond Dreams
    Ebook100 pages1 hour

    Beyond Dreams

    By G. Deyke

    ()

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    About this ebook

    One month.

    Thirty-one stories.

    Fourteen challenges.

    Sixteen fairy tales.

    Also, everyone in this collection is queer.

    From trans Cinderella to a polyamorous retelling of "The Firebird" in space, these 31 very short stories are full of the wonder, the enchantment, the darkness and the romance for which fairy tales are best known. Written entirely during July 2018 as a part of Flash Fiction Month.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherG. Deyke
    Release dateSep 15, 2018
    ISBN9780463222690
    Beyond Dreams
    Author

    G. Deyke

    G. Deyke is an indie author of games, novels, short stories, flash fiction, and the occasional poem. They will write anything from humor to horror to fairy tales, but have a particular penchant for speculative fiction: especially (though not exclusively) fantasy. They currently reside in a small village in southern Germany. Due to a tragic imbalance of their machismo-to-sense ratio, G. Deyke can never refuse a ridiculous challenge.

    Read more from G. Deyke

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      Book preview

      Beyond Dreams - G. Deyke

      Beyond Dreams

      by G. Deyke

      Copyright 2018 G. Deyke

      Smashwords Edition

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      Thank you for your download of this ebook. You may share it non-commercially as much as you like, provided it remains complete, unaltered, and properly attributed: gift it, copy it, give it out as a party favour at your wedding, wrap it in oilskin and pass it on to a child who shares their meal with you in the woods. It’s practically guaranteed to win them marriage to a princess somehow.

      If you enjoyed this book, and/or are blissfully content with your new princess wife, please consider taking a look at G. Deyke’s other work.

      Thank you for your support.

      Contents

      Introduction

      Beyond Dreams

      The Frog

      What Remains After Burning

      So It Comes When You Swear on the Unknown

      Mission Distracted

      Ashes

      From Dark to Dark

      All That Glitters

      The Drummer's Dreams

      Final Prayer

      The Thicket

      Captive Audience

      The Spirit of the Spring

      Smiles Full of Secrets

      The Dove in the Trees

      The Stardancer's Love

      Eighty-Seven Days Before the End

      Rituals

      The Dunwich Helper(s)

      Bearskin

      For a Night's Music

      Meltwater

      The Shepherd's Flute

      45 Minutes

      A Single Stolen Hour

      Secret Weapon

      Devotion

      In the Shadow of the Moon

      Twelve Lilies, Eleven Ravens

      Lingering

      Ripples

      Closing Words

      Fairy Tale Sources

      Find G. Deyke Online

      Introduction

      Most excellent reader: before you lies a collection of thirty-one stories, the gathered work of my fifth Flash Fiction Month. One story for each day of July, each fifty-five to one thousand words long, fourteen of them meeting additional challenge criteria –

      Scratch that.

      All of them meeting additional challenge criteria.

      Sometimes twice over. Sometimes thrice over. Sometimes quatrice… you get the idea.

      For the third time, I’ve crowdsourced an additional challenge across the entire month. This year’s winning challenge was contributed by Teague Drydan: At least half of the month needs to be fairy tale re-writes. Bonus if they aren't well-known fairy tales. As a result this collection is a good deal less varied than those of previous years, though in exchange for that it’s also turned out a good deal more cohesive, which seems like a fair trade.

      But that isn’t all. Acting on a whim, I kept rolling the dice until a second winner appeared. Contributed by an anonymous individual, this one read as follows: Every character must be queer. And so they are, though the shorter the story and the more minor the character the less likely they are to be explicitly so. As an added bonus, an effort to keep the representation positive has resulted in a surprising number of wholesome happy-ending stories.

      It was at this point that things got out of hand.

      A certain challenge, contributed by one Joseph Wright, had been extremely popular among up-voters, to the point where I was tempted to choose it on the principle of democracy despite having promised a degree of randomness. Initially, I avoided this temptation and kept to my promise. But after the winners had been announced, Joe got a hold of me and pleaded his case, appealing to both my vanity and my sense of justice, and by the end of the night I’d somehow agreed to take it on on top of the others. The challenge was this:

      The All-Star Challenge

      Over the course of FFM, your oeuvre must address the following items:

      Something somebody once told you (The Drummer’s Dreams)

      The sharpest tool (The Stardancer’s Love)

      A finger and a thumb (The Thicket)

      The shape of an L (Eighty-Seven Days Before the End)

      What does it mean to be ‘fed to the rules’? (Rituals)

      A smart brain and a dumb head (Mission Distracted)

      You'll never shine if you don't glow (From Dark to Dark)

      Definitive proof that all that glitters is in fact gold (All That Glitters)

      A shooting star that breaks the mould (What Remains After Burning)

      The meteor men, and the hole in the satellite picture (What Remains After Burning)

      Skating on thin ice (Meltwater)

      The world on fire (What Remains After Burning)

      Can you spare some change for gas? (Smiles Full of Secrets)

      An all-star, getting their game on, and going to play, or alternatively and perhaps easier, a rock star, getting the show on, and getting paid (For a Night’s Music)

      Shrek (Secret Weapon)

      And then, of course, there are the fourteen official FFM challenges.

      If this feels to you like nothing more than a pile of ill-fitting challenges quashed together into whatever shape that fits, don’t worry. What you have before you is nothing more or less than a collection of sixteen queered fairy tales, with a diverse assemblage of other (also queer) stories between them. They’re all these other things too, but that doesn’t mean that everything’s been shoehorned in.

      So settle in, relax, and picture yourself beside an old grandmother in a rocking chair. Her voice isn’t what it used to be, but her memory is long. As she knits, or rocks, or simply sits there, she tells you tales older than she is: once upon a time…

      I hope that you enjoy them.

      Beyond Dreams

      Challenge #1: write an adventure story centred around a character, a setting and a MacGuffin respectively provided by three other FFMers.

      (My character was provided by ilyilaice: A person who has survived a near-death experience and

      Enjoying the preview?
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