Tuesday, September 9, 2025

This is the eighty-first installment of West Wind, your weekly drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season. As Summer draws to a close, I’ll be showcasing one of my published stories each day, because there are getting to be quite a few! This is the second installment, check out yesterday’s if you missed it.

That’s right, today I’m featuring that weird little contest-winning short story that could, and which ended up becoming my first practice with adding music to a narration. “End Quotes Save Lives, also known as EQSL, is one of my favorite short stories, and like all of them, one that I wish I could have written to be quite a bit longer. But, word count limits are a thing, so here we are.

I’ve already talked a bit about the background of the story in the other few posts about it, both the main story post and the West Wind for the release of the narrated version. So today I thought I would talk instead about one of the most fun parts of the tale: letter removal.

In the middle of a heated battle, Rutheny removes the letters from parts of the dragon that they’re fighting, which gives them an advantage. Since the world they are in is composed of text, this makes sense. But I can’t take credit for the idea of removing letters from the name of an object to affect the object itself. That was inspired by the interactive fiction writer Emily Short, and her wildly creative work Counterfeit Monkey. (Use the Play Online button unless you’re super cool and know what to do with gblorb files)

In the game, you have a letter remover, which lets you do just that, changing objects around by removing (and later adding) letters from their names. For example, you need to drive to another location, and in a nearby garden is a plot of chard. By h-removing the chard, you get a card, and by d-removing that, you now have a set of wheels. The game does talk about how manufacturing and the economy are completely disrupted by technology that allows turning vegetables into automobiles, and the main plot of the story is about people who want to make the closely-guarded technology available to other countries. There are a lot of other great puzzles and awesome jokes throughout the game, especially once you get the homonym paddle, which lets you turn mixed drinks into tools (screwdriver) and the venerable anagram gun, which transforms the “polling charts” into a “strolling chap” that follows you around casually.

When planning out the powers of each of the characters in EQSL, letter removal seemed like a good fit for Rutheny’s unpredictable, whimsical skillset. Another nod I wanted to include was the symbols in her dialogue. The music notes and hearts that she “says” are meant to evoke the dialogue boxes of old Playstation-era RPGs, before voice acting became commonplace. Tone and inflection were sometimes conveyed with symbols in the character set like stars and such. It’s meant to imply that her words might be floating above her head for anyone nearby to read.

And, if you need a downloadable copy or just like collecting things in your BookFunnel library, I haven’t left you out. You can either get it through the CSL Subscription, which includes a high-quality MP3 of the audio, or through the main BookFunnel story page, which is just the text.

If you’ve read and/or listened to the story, please let me know! Reply or leave a comment and let me know what you think. Or, if you’ve played Counterfeit Monkey or just think it sounds interesting, I’d love to know that too. Until tomorrow, when I hear we’re going to head out towards the garden for a bit…