Past Mistakes

By N. WS. Jokela

31 stories, all written in July 2019, 31 flashback prompts from years gone by and a longer follow-up story for one of the collected stories (not written in July 2019) in addition to other extra things. Your journey into this collection will have you meet, among others, krakens who see humans as cryptids, a goddess of retribution in today's world and potentially unhealthy things.

• Language: English
• Publisher: N. WS. Jokela
• Release date: Jun 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005037673

N. WS. Jokela

N. WS. Jokela, more commonly known as WindySilver, is a Finnish IT student and a hobbyist artist fighting a war against procrastination on the losing side. When her free time is not taken up by things like reading, procrastination, video games, watching series or more procrastination, she mainly writes sci-fi fanfiction and original flash fiction of various genres. While she dabbles in a lot of things ranging from digital art to jewelry to plants to whatever catches her interest, writing is her persistent forte.You should not give her yet another crazy flash fiction challenge to take part in because she simply cannot say "no" to it.

Book preview

Introduction

Hello reader!

I'm glad to see that you have picked up this collection. 2019 was one of my best years of writing; I earned my first Daily Deviation – a site-wide showcase on DeviantArt – during that year (on the 13th of October, to be precise). As the story that earned me the DD, The Ultimate Prank, is a follow-up to one of my Flash Fiction Month 2019 stories, The Necromancer's Necklace, I decided to include it here. It's not flash fiction, but it is one of my best stories to date.

This year, after reading lots of excellent stories written during FFM 2018 throughout the time between the two events, I decided to work on honing my stories instead of just writing and posting them with hopes that I would do produce better stories. As the Ultimate Prank and the overall improved quality of stories (with a couple of exceptions) can prove, I ended up on the right track.

As had become the custom, I had a personal challenge for this year as well. This year, I challenged myself to use the day's Flashback prompt on each day, a challenge that I succeeded in. I also have a vague recollection that I also challenged myself not to write a single piece of fanfiction, but I did not locate any proof of that (at least anywhere where I should have put the notion about it). Regardless of whether or not I did that, this year I did not write a single piece of fanfiction, which means that there are no omitted stories this time around.

Please check Addendum out while reading as well; this time, in addition to long challenge descriptions, there is some advice related to a graph unique to this collection (unique at the time of publishing anyway) and a scrapped cover that I made in the beginning of working on this collection before I changed my mind about the titular story and switched it from Potentially Unhealthy to Past Mistakes.

1: Toasters are out to get us

Flashback prompt: A terrible fear of toasters by The-Inkling (Year 2013).

There's nothing as horrifying about visiting tech stores than the horrid toaster section. Even the overly enthusiastic salespeople are more tolerable but toasters? No.

Just no.

You're asking why I'm afraid of toasters? Really?!

Listen up, you little ignorant shit. When a toaster shoots black pieces of bread straight into your eyes and then sets the whole house on fire, you would rather die than have another one of those devil spawns anywhere near yourself too!

Believe me, kid, the machines are out to get us. And they have chosen the disguise of a toaster.

2: Stolen Bananas

Flashback prompt: Mist People by random-kumquats (Year 2011).

Challenge: Write an editorial story that takes the form of fake news, ask precisely three questions, answer one of them with an outright, dirty lie, don't answer at least one of the other two questions, incorporate an existing headline of some kind into the story and feature two of the listed items (A sudden disappearance, An ‘expert’ witness, A talk show host, The phrase off the record, A banana).

The headline I incorporated is Fake News.

The Climate Change Activists Have Stolen Our Bananas!

As all the locals know, the Mist People's bananas disappeared all of a sudden recently. Now, where are they? Why have they disappeared? And what can we do about it?

Well I tell you why they disappeared: The climate change activists have stolen them to prove that the climate change, a concoction of greedy corrupt capitalist scientists to make us pay more for everything to the already rich and even greedier capitalist bosses, is an actual thing and that it's out to destroy our precious bananas despite of being called out to be fake news!

If any of you greedy/gullible activists have any shame, return the bananas back