This year, I am trying to be more on top of my revisions and get out those nice, shiny ebooks with all the finished stories that have been piling up in the past few years. The start makes one of the short stories from the collection „Sons of Nature“: „The First Cherry Blossom of Spring“. I recently hit the publish button over on Amazon KDP and Smashwords so I figured that this was the perfect time to talk a little more about my inspiration behind the story and the choices I made while writing and revising it.

The Inspirational Journey

Originally, this story was planned as an entry for a spring-themed anthology. While trying to come up with an idea, I thought about what the seasons in general and spring specifically meant to me. My earliest ideas were circling around the weather changes throughout the year but just writing a story set in spring seemed a bit wrong, although that was certainly going to be part of it.

Thinking a bit longer and also focusing on gay romance as my preferred genre, I thought of spring-related sayings and terms: There is spring fever (or if I were to literally translate the German term, ‘spring feelings’, which sounds a little nicer), a type of euphoria that is related to the more abundant sunshine that causes our brains to release more serotonin and endorphin. Also, yes, men produce more testosterone at this time which seemed to fit in with the bl angle. Apart from that, I thought of „second spring“ which, in German, means an older person falling in love again.

The latter intrigued me but any stories I could think of would have gotten much too long for an anthology entry. The idea of a second spring got me thinking about what a first spring would entail though. Surely, this should be a first love and a significant one at that which had me eying the possibility of childhood sweethearts and set the tone of the story as an innocent tale with lots of sunshine (you know, for the serotonin boost).

At the same time, I was starting to map the time of the year with the stages of life and the progress of relationships: In such a model, spring should be akin to birth and first love, summer should be one’s youth and an established relationship, and so on. This later became the foundation of the Sons of Nature collection but looking at spring in this context, I also gained new ideas for how this story should be shaped: I wanted something new like a new beginning for the main character(s), a budding love, and – since I already was on the path of abusing plant-based puns and metaphors anyway – something as closer to nature as possible. Thus, I ended up with a fairy having to move and finding love in their new home.

In the end, my approach to the theme of spring was multi-layered: There was the setting of the actual season, shown in the weather and a garden slowly starting to bloom, two young fairies falling in love for the first time in a sweet and innocent manner, and also a new beginning in terms of having to move and starting over in a new location.

The Magic of Revision

When it comes to anthologies, they all have a certain length a story has to reach or can’t exceed to be eligible as an entry. I tend to write longer stories so creating a short story is always a challenge for me and with an added word count limit on top, I struggle a lot. As a result, I had to pick and choose what I wanted to include at all costs and what I could do without. In the end, I wrote a little less than six thousand words.

Now, obviously, this short story never ended up where it was originally supposed to go or I wouldn’t be publishing it on my own. That gave me the opportunity to add more of what I would have included if there hadn’t been any constraints on the word count. Overall, there are roughly three areas I added to: The characterization of the fairies as a race and the specific fairies appearing in the story, the thoughts of our MCs on romance and relationships, and finally, a bit of gardening.

The former was the most important to me. By the time I revised this story, I had already written the summer, autumn, and winter stories for SoN which all had MCs from different races. These were all longer than the spring story and were able to showcase much better what made a plant spirit a plant spirit or how it is to live as a witch. I wanted the same for The First Cherry Blossom of Spring so I added in details whenever the opportunity arose. Since I am publishing this as an ebook, I also added a short foreword that is something akin to an encyclopedic entry about fairies.

Characterizing the individual fairies in the story better needed a lot of space. In the original version, our MC Ying Tao is introduced to everyone in short succession. I liked the whirlwind feeling this gave but not how all of the fairies kind of blended together. In the new version, I picked and chose a few fairies (and actually added some) that got at least a few more lines whether that was in terms of their outward description, a short greeting they exchanged with the MC, or maybe a question they asked. I also compared them more because I think it is important that the fairies are both represented as a race and also as the individuals they are.

Adding more ‘meat’ to the fairies made it easy to slip in some mentions of romance. I didn’t focus much on that part because I didn’t feel that the issue was as egregious as the other issues but I shoehorned a fairy couple in there and gave an existing fairy the important task of helping our MC make sense of what that meant who then taught his understanding to our other MC. I also adjusted the already existing conversation they had about this so that it’d make more sense in context and I feel like it flows much better now.

The gardening bit was … pretty much my oversight before. I am admittedly not a gardening person and solely know when some things are in season because I like to cook and try to buy locally. I didn’t think about that at all while writing the original version though so if you go and read that, you might wonder “Why … are there pumpkins in early spring?” I can tell you: It’s because I threw in the plants I thought were fun to have fairies of and didn’t think about whether it made sense. I’ll own that one.

Now, I clearly realized that this was not the way to go so I checked some gardening websites and adjusted the story to the best of my knowledge and research. (Admittedly, you might still find inaccuracies because I can’t be sure I caught all of it. If you do, I apologize!) I filled in some additional details about the planting of our MC’s cherry tree, cut out mentions of the plants that weren’t supposed to be in season and added blank space to the field instead, and finally even added an argument between two fairies whose herbs shouldn’t be planted next to each other because that seemed fun. I am especially pleased with the last one, although I am not sure it is super noticeable in the story itself.

Overall, the story ballooned up until it was a little more than twice as long as its original version. I do feel that it is a lot clearer now and has some additional depth even though it is still only a short story. I am very happy with how it turned out and if you decide to get a copy for yourself, I hope that you will like it too! Later this year, I will also revise the other three stories from the SoN collection and report back on how that went.