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The story behind the story: The 133rd Live Podcast of the Gourmando Resistance

In this week’s Futures story, Beth Cato plunges us into the secret world of the Gourmando Resistance. As well as cooking up guerrilla podcasts, Beth is the author of The Clockwork Dagger duology and Blood of Earth trilogy. You can find out more about her writing (and her baking) at her website or by following her on Twitter. Here, she reveals the recipe for her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing The 133rd Live Podcast of the Gourmando Resistance

This story arose from two great joys of life: a Codex flash-fiction contest and churros.

Codex is a forum for neo-pro writers that hosts regular contests for its members. As novels have taken over my life in recent years, I’ve been producing fewer short stories. Codex’s contests inspire me to keep writing short works and keep them on submission.

In this particular contest, five prompts went out on a Friday, with a 1,000-word maximum story due the following Tuesday. Two of the prompts resonated with me: to write about a hunter, and to write about one thing in the world I want to change that could go horribly wrong.

So, naturally, my brain went to hunting down new food sensations as part of a future resistance movement. (My brain is weird like that.)

I’m an unabashed foodie. I maintain a weekly food blog called Bready or Not through BethCato.com. Many of my novels and stories explore the emotional and cultural importance of food; my past Nature story Bread of Life is probably one of my best examples of that.

My foremost issue was picking the food to centre my story around. The dish needed to be prepared quickly for the sake of the flash-fiction format, and I wanted something with cultural significance. Churros — those scrumptious doughy sticks coated with cinnamon and sugar — immediately came to mind. A few years ago, I was part of a foodie-writer group blog effort called the Holy Taco Church, wherein my official title was High Priestess of Churromancy. As part of my duties, I developed a series of churro-inspired recipes.

Writing this story gave me an opportunity to wield my High Priestess powers again and examine churros in a new and rebellious way.

Read more Futures stories by Beth:

Powers of observationExcerpts from the 100-day food diary of Angela MeyerThe human is late to feed the catBread of lifePost-apocalyptic conversations with a sidewalkCanopy of skulls

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