Penning and publishing short stories about the ordinary being turned upside down by the extraordinary (meaning, demons) has been a wonderful journey in writing.
Mind you, I didn’t set out for all three of my short stories featured in my new collection “Inner Demons” to become this eventual thing. But it’s not bad that it happened this way at all😉😄
It all started 2017 with a series of anthologies that Battle Goddess Productions made submission calls for, with the running theme being “demonic”. To write stories specifically for Volumes 2 and 3, “Demonic Households” and “Demonic Carnival” was a lot of fun!
For both projects (and all other volumes in the series), authors who want to participate is asked to claim an item that they want to write about. That way, there will be no duplicates of the same concept. For “Demonic Households,” I chose book; and for “Demonic Carnival,” it was Tunnel of Love.
For “Demonic Household,” it just came to my mind to write a story about a woman whose famous father recently died and comes across a book that influenced her dad to become a best-selling author: “The Lucky Devlins.” Catherine Devlin is a young woman who didn’t live up to her overly critical father’s expectations. But now that he’s gone, she can put her past behind her. Right?
For “Demonic Carnival,” I didn’t want to incorporate the usual “Tunnel of Love” found at carnivals. Yes, there’s a carnival in “The Seventh Time is Worth a Try,” but it’s more of in the background and being referenced instead of the characters going to that carnival. My version of the Tunnel of Love is an underground tunnel, where one of the main characters, Xavier, keeps memories from his relationship with Jasmine in lucite bottles and exhibits them to her. As for who the characters, Xavier and Jasmine, are based on … are they inspired by anyone I know in real life? Especially Xavier, the ex-boyfriend who is really a demon? Hmmm, I won’t say … 😂 #artimitateslife
Then came another author with another anthology idea. The theme was stories with a notable twist in them that turn the stories on their head. For that anthology submission call, I wrote a contribution that eventually became the third installment of “Inner Demons”: “Save the Date: Prophecy Foretold.” This never got into the anthology because the publisher, due to exact reasons unknown, discontinued the whole project.
“Save the Date: Prophecy Foretold” is about a woman, a stereotypical “pillar of the community” with one caveat about her: she’s a demon. Now, granted, she is human, but over time, with her desire to “help her community” (read: exert unyielding control over it), she basically sells her soul and morphs into a demon on the inside until that fateful day when she is summoned to seek out and destroy “The Called Upon.” It’s at this time that her inner demon is unleashed. Bonus points for the fact that the main character is the wife of a mayor😁
Meanwhile, I thought about compiling my short story collection. I already published several short story ebooks, but many of them don’t share a common theme. So I had reservations about gathering those into one collection. Yet with a handful of demon-themed stories, I eventually said “yes” to making that a collection.
I started gathering the demon-themed stories and editing them at least in early 2020. The worldwide pandemic eventually threw my working vibe off course, but I stayed the course.
Now “Inner Demons” is available on Amazon Kindle. It’s doing well, with dozens of units having been downloaded so far. I’m proud of the long journey it took in creating this book.
Teresa Edmond-Sargeant is an award-winning journalist and author living in Orlando, FL. In her spare time she enjoys reading, shopping, traveling, working out, volunteering, and filling her mind with useless factoids worthy of pop culture trivia games.