BRANDON: Everyone give a warm welcome to Mary Robinette. CLASS: (applause) MARY ROBINETTE: Thanks. Brandon invited me here to talk to you about short stories, because he is good at many things . . . that are not short stories. I know, it's shocking. I write a lot of short stories. But the thing that you should understand is that writing is fractal. Once you understand how something works at one length, you can actually apply it to other lengths, as long as you understand the principles that are involved. If it's something that works in a paragraph level, you can scale it down to sentence, up to chapter, scene, or five-volume monstrosity. What is a short story? Now, I'm not talking about the market definition, but about the reader experience. Short stories are about delivering a specific emotional punch. It's a specific experience. Novels are about immersion. This is an important distinction to understand, that when readers pick up a piece of fiction, they're picking it up because they want to effect a change in their brain. They want to have an emotional experience, and they want a specific ride. So novel readers, the analogy that I use is that it's like two different modes of watching the Olympics. You can watch the Olympics, like WATCH the Olympics. You watch the pre-show stuff. You watch all of the Road to the Olympics with the fancy music and people running in the background, the heartfelt things about someone's mom and how they drove them in the dark to whatever it is. You watch all of the different athletes in whatever competition it is that you are totally invested in. Even if there's one gymnast that you are there for, you watch the competition, because you want to know. Then your gymnast goes out and they do their flippy flippy routine, and it's amazing, and they stick the landing. Then there's the hugging with the coach, and then there's the medals ceremony. And then there's the post-show interview, which is the denouement, and you have watched the Olympics. That's a novel. A short story is, someone has forwarded you a YouTube clip of the gymnast doing the flippy flippy routine, and you watch it, and it begins right before they flip, and it ends when they stick the landing. You have watched the Olympics. Very different experiences. But you're reading them, or watching them, for different things. In one case, you just want that punch, that excitement of watching someone stick the landing and doing something exceptional. In the other you want this long, immersive thing. With a short story, it's that quick fix, and that's an important thing to understand. Now we get to some structure. Ready? We have the MICE Quotient. Whee! Okay. The MICE Quotient is an organizational theory that explains pretty much every story, fiction and nonfiction. I'm going to talk about this through a lens of fiction, but I'll let you know that if you have to write an essay it works for nonfiction too. Now stories are made up of, click, four elements: milieu, inquiry, character, and event, mixed in different proportions. These elements can help you determine where a story starts and stops, and the kind of conflicts that your characters face. Click. A milieu story begins when your character enters a place, and it ends with your character exits the place. These are things like Gulliver's Travels, Around the World in 80 Days, classic examples. Click. Knowing where milieu stories end, this also tells you the kind of conflicts that go in the middle, because your job as a writer is to figure out what your character needs to do, and then systematically prevent them from reaching the goal. The moment that goal is reached; the story is over. So you are just mean. Click. Milieu conflict, if it ends when you exit a place, all of the stuff in the middle is about difficulty with navigating that space. It's people getting confused about finding the exit. It's trouble surviving in the place. It's attempting to navigate. Anything around place is going to be milieu, anything where you're struggling with the space you're in. Inquiry stories, click. Inquiry stories are driven by questions. They begin when a character has a question. "Huh?" And they end when they answer it. "Aha!" These are, it's a super complicated structure. But it's things like Sherlock Holmes, murder mysteries. These are classic inquiry stories. Click. For an inquiry conflict, your goal is to keep your character from finding the answer. They're lied to. They can't understand the answer. The answer leads to a dead end. Those are what red herrings are. Click. Character stories. Character stories are driven by angst. "Oh, my life is so hard!" In the simplest form, they begin when a character is unhappy with themselves, and they end when they're happy. "Ah, I'll never be popular." "Now I'm popular!" But really they begin with an identify shift, a shift in how the character self-defines, and they end when the character's self-definition solidifies, when they have a new understanding of self. So these are coming-of-age stories, romances. Those are classic character stories. Click. Your character is trying to change. Stop them. Don't let them break out of their role. Fill them with self-loathing. Have the change backfire. Those are character stories. Now event stories, click, are driven by action. These begin when the status quo, or the sense of normal, is disrupted, and they're restored when there's a new status quo. And by the way, yes, "everyone dies" does count as a new status quo. But it is very much an external threat. Character is internal. This is external. So by this point you understand the drill. Click. Don't let your character restore the status quo. You have fight scenes. You have chase scenes. You have explosions. You have mor disruptions to status quo. Again, you're just mean. That is your job. Click. Super easy to confuse character and event. Character story is interior. I'll never be popular. Event story is external. Asteroid coming at the earth. If the asteroid is thinking "I'll never be popular," the asteroid is having a character story. OK. Click. So that's what individual MICE elements look like, but you almost never see a single thread story. Most stories are made up of multiple threads, because single thread stories are really boring. Click. How do you do it? Now, for a lot of people in the room, this will explain how you do it. For those of you who do not do computers, let me give you a different analogy. This is nesting code. If you open milieu, and then you open inquiry, you have to close the inquiry before you can close the milieu. If you think about it as getting a box, and the box is labeled "Milieu" on the outside of it, and you open it up and there are a bunch of milieu toys, and then inside is a smaller box filled with inquiry toys. And you open that up and you pull out those inquiry toys, and then you play with all of them while you're telling your story. And then at the end of the day you have to put them back in the box. So you want to put the inquiry ones back into that smaller box so it will fit inside the larger box of the milieu. It's kind of like trying to return something to Ikea after you've-- if you don't get it all back in the box, you wind up with that extra piece, and why are there so many Allen wrenches? To use a concrete example, click, Wizard of Oz is a beautifully nested story. It begins as a character story. Click. Dorothy is dissatisfied with her role as a Kansas farm girl. Then we open the event. Tornado! Then we open the milieu. "Welcome to Oz." And then we open the inquiry. "What do the ruby slippers do?" Click. At the end of the story, Glenda arrives and says, "Oh, the ruby slippers will carry you home. Oh." Which, honestly, she could have said at the beginning. It would have saved everybody a lot of time. But it does close the inquiry. Then we close the milieu by Dorothy leaving Oz. And then we close the event by arriving back in Kansas, where the status quo has been restored. And then Dorothy says, "I didn't need to go looking any farther for adventure than my own backyard," closing the character. When you have stories, click, that feel like they end, and then end again, and then end again, not thinking of any films in particular, it's often because that ending sequence is out of sync. One of the things that actually happens to this one is it is closing out things in a faithful order, to a film that you haven't seen in quite some time. That's one of the reasons it feels out of sync. The other thing that will happen is, you remember those boxes? If you think about it instead as actual thread, or a piece of elastic, the longer I'm stretching that piece of elastic, the more tension it's under, so when I release it it's releasing more energy. That piece of thread, that elastic thread, is your reader's attention. So the longer that attention has been under stress, the more the cathartic release you're going to get at the end. If you release something early, you don't actually have enough time to get another piece of thread up to that same tension, because you aren't spending as much time with it, which is why sometimes a story will feel like it just fizzles out. That's the end of the PowerPoint. All right, so, we're going to write a story, in class, today. OK. You're like, "Wait. Wait. I didn't sign up for-- I signed up for a lecture class." OK. We're going to write a 250, approximate, approximately 250-word piece of flash fiction. And the reason I'm having you do this is that, again, once you understand how this works, you can unpack it. But I often find that the easiest way to understand something is to just put it into effect. Brandon, I want you to try this too. BRANDON: I just sat down with my laptop. MARY ROBINETTE: Perfect. OK. So the opening. The opening is where we meet our character and make promises for our readers. I'm going to talk about the things that you need to establish. But the order in which you need to establish it is up to you. The key here is that your reader wants to be oriented. In your first three sentences, who, where, genre. That's it. Who, where, and genre. Now, there's a bunch of different types of opening. I will be clear that the type that we're doing right now is something that's called an action-driven opening. Speaking of action. To make things simple, I'm going to wind up assigning you some things. I'm going to assign you a character, I'm going to assign you an object, and I'm going to go ahead and give you a genre, just to make it so that you don't have to pick quite so many things in this moment. But if you want to do something else, that's also fair game. The things that you're going to be doing is that you are going to be using, your genre is science fiction. Your character is a jockey. Is it like a horse? Possible. It could be a disc jockey. It could be karaoke jockey. This is where you get your freedom, is you get to define what jockey means in this context. And coaster. Could be a coaster that set a beverage on. It could be a roller coaster. It could be-- you know, so any of those things. Science fiction, jockey, coaster. OK? Now, before you start, let me give you just a little bit more to help you out. I said that you need to establish where. This is your location. Your reader wants to be grounded about where they are. For the location, I want you to link to a sensory detail. Rather than, "She stood in the battleship's engine room," which does tell me the location, you're going for something more like, "The thrum of the battleship's engines resonated through her feet." Does that make sense? For your location, I want a sensory detail. For your character you're going to be wanting to use point of view, how the character sees and interacts with the world. One of the easy things you can do kind of in your own brain is to define a shorthand for the character. It could be something like, sexist boss, spunky pirate, angsty teenage jockey. Although, let's be honest, when we're teenagers it's just angsty all the time, so I could have just said teenage jockey there. But something that gives you an idea of what their attitude is. That's the piece you're looking for. I've already defined that you've got jockey. You get to put the adjective that defines their attitude in front of that for yourself. Does that make sense? The way you're going to explain that to me with the who is that you're going to give me their action. What are they doing? What is the thing that they're doing? What is the action that they're taking? Does that make sense? Then the genre, you want to get in a genre-specific detail as fast as you can. This is going to be something specific and unique. "Thrum of battleship's engines," sounds specific, not unique. If I said, "The thrum of the battleship's warp core drive," that gives you a much more specific thing. "The thrum of the battleship's steam engine through its iron-clad walls," gives you a different specific, unique detail. Does that make sense? OK. So you have three sentences to do this. Bonus points if you can do it in one. And this does not mean long sentences. This means specific sentences. You have three minutes. That's a minute per sentence, which is a luxury. All right, time is up. It's okay. I know that some of you are going to keep writing while I'm lecturing. I am comfortable with this. My example-- You're all looking at the math equation that I put on the board with fear. I know. I'll explain it in a second. So here's my example. Two sentences, because I was going for the bonus points. "Hydraulic fluid dripped out of the roller coaster’s AI straight onto Chelsea's jockey I.D. Where the heck was that leak?" So, what do we have? We have roller coaster, "roller coaster's AI," so that's my genre-specific detail. "Straight onto Chelsea's jockey badge." So she's underneath it. So you've got location and character. And "Where the heck was that leak" tells you a little bit about what she's trying to do, which is to fix the leak. But it also is giving you a little bit of her attitude, that she's cranky. Make sense? OK. In three sentences, you shouldn't have had room to get into trouble, yet, with this other thing that happens with short stories, which is that you try to put too much in. For our purposes, you are going to be allowed two characters and one location. No more than two characters. Let me explain why through this magical thing. Terrifying. The length of your story is equal to the number of characters, plus the number of stages, or scenes, scenic locations, times 750 words, times the number of MICE threads you have, divided by 1.5. Why is it like that? Let me explain. Each character or location you add has the potential to add, on average, 500 to 1,000 words to your scene or story. You can do it with less, but this danger is there. Every time you put a character in, they cost something from your word budget. Every time you put in a scenic location, it costs something from your word budget, because you have to spend words to describe them. So since it's 500 to 1,000, 750 is the average of that. So this is, you add up the number of characters and the number of stages or scenic locations, and then you multiply it by 750 words. Each MICE Quotient thread has the potential to make your story half again as long. Yeah. The reason is because you have to keep it alive every single time, all the way through that story. When you multiply it by MICE, the number of MICE threads you have, let's say you have three MICE threads, you'd multiply it by three. This dividing by 1.5 does the mathematical trick of making it half again as long instead of three times as long. Does that make sense? In theory? This is useful as a diagnostic tool. It's useful as a predictor, a rough predictor. Like, if I have a story and I'm like, "This is a story about eight brothers who are on a quest across America, stopping at five different theme parks," That is not a 250-word story. It makes it super easy to spot. It is not perfect. It's a rough rule-of-thumb predictor, but it's a useful thing. For ours, because we're going to try to keep it to 250 words, you have a maximum of two characters and one location. You see how you're already in danger if you have two characters? So try to keep it short. Your next sentence is going to be about-- we're going to introduce our conflict. Conflicts are all about your character trying to achieve a goal and failing to achieve the goal. This is why it's called a try-fail cycle. Try. Fail. In a short story, and sometimes a novel too, I would normally ask you to give me that first conflict within the first 13 lines. But in a piece of flash fiction, for our purposes of this exercise, you get two sentences, and those are your next two sentences. Your next two sentences are, what is your character trying to do and why? That's the setup of your try-fail cycle. That's the thing they are trying to do. And then, once we know what they're trying to do, what is stopping them? What is stopping them? Now for flash fiction, one of the tricks that you can do is to have several of the try-fail cycles be implied as happening before the scene starts. I will give you an example of mine, and then I will let you dive in and try your own. "Where the heck was that leak? If she didn't manage to get the coaster back online before the race," this is what she's trying to do, get the coaster back online, "she'd have to forfeit her entry money." There is the why. And I'm at BYU. "Not a gosh darn suggestion from the trouble shooter on her heads-up display had isolated the problem." Which implies that she has already done some trouble shooting before it starts. Do you understand what I mean about the implication, which is useful in flash fiction? You are, again, you're going to write me two sentences. Any questions about the sentences that you're writing? What is your character trying to do and why? What is the barrier? What is stopping them from doing that thing? All right? Once again, two sentences, a minute per sentence. You can do it. Luxury. Now we're going to start throwing conflicts at them. What I want you to do is look at what you've got on the page, and I want you to identify the MICE Quotient element. Are they trying to escape from something? Are they trying to navigate in a place? If they are, then you've got a milieu. How many people have a milieu going on? OK, cool. Are they trying to answer a question? If they are, then you've got an inquiry story going on. How many people are trying to answer a question? OK. Are they unhappy with themselves, angsty? Then you have a character story. How many character story people? Yep. And are they trying to change the status quo or sense of normal, change the world. Event stories. OK. I'm unsurprised. That means you know what kind of conflict to throw at them. If it's a milieu story, for those of you that have it, stop them from getting to wherever it is that they're trying to go, whether that's getting out of a thing, or getting into a thing. Stop them from that. Stop them from crossing that threshold. If it's an inquiry, block them from answering their questions. Character, make them unhappier. An event story, more things go wrong. Here's the trick. When something fails, they try a different approach. That's what the try-fail cycle is. Again, your job as the author is to knock the character down and pick them up again. I'll just note that asking a question and getting snubbed, it doesn't have to be a big try-fail cycle, just an asking and getting snubbed is a try-fail cycle. Each action that your character takes should have a consequence. We usually describe this as yes, but/no, and. "Yes, but" means that they made progress towards their goal, but they were pushed back from it. "No, and" means they did not make progress towards their goal, and they were pushed farther back from it. What we do here is we-- let me use an example. In Star Wars, rescuing the princess is a milieu thread, while being chased by Vader, or the Storm Troopers, being chased, they jump into the-- it's like, are they going to get out. That's the basic question. Are they going to get off the ship? What's the first thing they try? Jumping down a chute. Does that work? Yes, but it's a garbage chute. So what's the next thing they try? Blaster. Does shooting a blaster at the walls work. No, and it wakes up a creature underneath the-- the water thingies. Are they able to deal with the creature? Yes, but only because the walls of the trash compacter start coming in. So you understand what I'm talking about here? What you're going to be looking for here is a try-fail cycle for your character. Try to just give them one, where they try something and it fails, and things are a little bit worse. You can have it succeed and things still get worse. But try for a failure, a straight-up failure, and "and things get worse." Does that make sense? OK. For this one, whoa! I'm giving you five whole sentences and five minutes. Again, luxury. All right. Here's how mine shook out. And again, I know some of you will contrast writing while I read. I'm comfortable with that. So she had the heads-up display in our previous thing, when I established the problem. She was trying to find the thing. "Fine. It was time to improvise." So that's the thing she's trying. She's improvising. "Chelsea stuck her hand into the AI's guts and traced the slippery fluid up as far as she could go. The interior of the roller coaster was still cold from sitting overnight in the cryo bay. Condensation clung to the walls and mixed with the hydraulic fluid coating her fingers. She closed her eyes, trying to imagine," I'm being very blatant here. "She closed her eyes, trying to imagine the interior, as she ran past the junction box, AND sudden heat stung her fingers. Chelsea jerked back, cracking her head on the toolbox behind her. 'Gosh darn it all to heck!'" CLASS: (laughter) MARY ROBINETTE: But you see what I did there? There's a thing she tried, and it failed, and things have now gotten a little bit worse, because she has shocked herself and hit her head. Does that make sense? So you understand also proportionally what has happened to your story is that the beginning is, at this point, about the first third. You've got your set-up right there proportionally. Then we've spent more words on that try-fail cycle than we did on the set-up. Does that make sense? You can see the proportions starting to take place there. Now we start into the end of the middle. The try-fail cycle is the middle. The end of the middle is where we're coming out of this. It's about the two-third or three-quarter mark in most things. You ask questions. You open up problems. You make things worse. Then you start to resolve them. You start to close those story questions. This is why you always bog down, by the way, at the two-third/three-quarter mark, because you're changing mode. Interestingly, there is a phenomenon in psychology called the three-quarter effect, that when someone is doing something, at about the three-quarter point is when it seems like they can't possibly finish it. Part of what's going on apparently, mentally, is that you assume you have that much longer to go, instead of realizing you only have a quarter of the time to go. That's some of what's happening. But most of it is that you're changing mode from starting things to ending things. So how do you do that? The conflicts, yes, but/no. The resolutions . . . are going to be in blue, and very large. The resolutions are . . . faint. Yes, and. Because that's a movement towards the goal and a continuation towards the goal. And represents continuing in the same direction in many ways. Excuse me, yes, that. This marker is terrible. Can she write on the board? I have no comments at all on that, because I know whose guest room I'm staying in. No, but. That means there's been a reversal that they didn't do the thing, but they still get something towards the goal. That would be something like, a "yes, and" would be, are they able to-- someone is hungry. Are they able to buy lunch? Yes, and it came with an extra order of churros. "No, but" would be something like, they're trying to diffuse the bomb. Are they able to? No, but when it explodes it goes out the window and lands on the bad guy. Thank you. I mean, those are terrible examples, but you understand what I mean. So you're going to switch to closing mode. This means that the next try-fail cycle that your character does is going to be a try-succeed. Whatever it is that they do is going to solve the problem. Now in a story, or a novel that's more than 250-ish words, you would do multiples of those iterations, getting them closer to the goal each time you would iterate it. In our case, because we're doing a piece of flash fiction, we're going to solve the problem right now. Does that make sense? And again, you get about five sentences to solve this sucker. OK? If you can do it in less, that's great. So I'm giving you another five minutes. Here's how mine plays out. She has cracked her head on the toolbox behind her. "Gosh darn it all to heck! Shaking her hand, she glowered at the roller coaster. 'You know, if I have to forfeit this entry money, I'm going to have to sell you just to pay rent, and you'll probably wind up in scrap.' She reached into the chassis again. 'Please, please let me find the leak.' Her heads-up display lit up with what looked like a diagnostic message, from the AI that was supposedly offline. 'The leak is from the thermal coupler in my right braking mechanism, but fluid dynamics make it appear to come from the manifold.' Chelsea's mouth dropped open. 'If you knew that all along--?'" OK. So you see what I did? I just-- the next thing she tried worked. So now we have to end it, because that's not an ending, right? The problem is solved, but it's not satisfying yet. In the ending, we aim towards closing out the MICE elements we opened. We're talking about big elements. You open lots of small ones in there as well. But you want to nest them, the way we were talking about. If you've got multiple threads going on, you want to make sure that you close them out so that they all fit neatly back into their box. You're mirroring the ending, which also means that you're going to mirror those-- if you think about it as mirroring those last three sentences, that you actually need the same things. We need to know who, where, and genre or mood. Things have shifted over the course of the story. So you want to ground the reader by making sure that they understand what has shifted, that you kind of draw a line under it. Hitting those points again will help us see the change. For the who, we're going to again use an action or reflection, the character actively thinking about something specific. For the where, often a sensory detail. Again, if you look at the beginning, sometimes pulling a sensory detail from there is useful. And genre, something specific. In this case when I say genre, I'm really thinking more about the mood, because often the tone has changed. Like, if the character starts in a very happy place and you're writing a tragedy, and it ends in a tragic place, which is why it's called a tragedy, you would want the mood to be different at the end than it is at the beginning. So you want to express that with the words and the language structure that you use. I'm going to read you my example, and then I'm going to give you three sentences to wrap up your story. "Chelsea's mouth dropped. 'If you knew that all along--' She closed her eyes, cursing her own stupidity. Three years as an AI jockey and you'd think that she would remember that even in a roller coaster, the temperamental things needed the magic word. Next time she'd say please sooner." OK. Now it feels like it's over, right? It's that mirroring that I'm doing. So, you've got three sentences to wrap that up. Make sure that I know where my character is now, emotionally. If they have changed place, if you're in a milieu, make sure that I know where that new place is. Give me a little bit of mood and that genre-specific detail, with the thing that makes it feel specific to the story. Three sentences, three minutes. All right. The rules that I was giving you about three sentences, five sentences, those are rules of thumb. That's an easy goal for you to hit. In the real world it's going to be more flexible than that. But it's something that's achievable. How many people have something that now has a beginning, middle, and an end? Great. Ah ha! Did you actually write a 250-word short story? BRANDON: It's 650. CLASS: (laughter) MARY ROBINETTE: Still-- I take great pride in the fact that that is probably the shortest story you've ever written. BRANDON: Yeah. MARY ROBINETTE: But you can see how you can take the principles from doing this exercise and apply them at a longer length, the proportional idea of what these stories look like, what each of those pieces are doing. You can probably see how, if you put another piece of MICE element in there that you would then have to establish two problems at the beginning, rather than just one, or you'd establish one problem, then a little bit later you'd introduce the other one, and that that's, again, going to make the story proportionally longer when you do that. We now have six minutes for questions. Any questions? About-- Yes. STUDENT: I guess, how do you-- I guess, the model of, like, opening and closing with, like, the same conflicts works really well. But I guess I'm curious about, what if your story, like, changes direction. Like, say, the characters start out to do something, and then realize something about themselves or something about the nature of the conflict that causes their goal to change, and what they're trying to accomplish is different from what it was at the beginning? MARY ROBINETTE: So what happens when the goal changes part way through the story? One of the things is that you would actually want to sign post that a little bit to the readers that this might happen. I do that by basically having something that is thematically linked to the goal that they will eventually solve. If my character is-- the end of the story is going to be my character saving the world, but the beginning of the story is them trying to become comfortable with themselves, I would still start with some disruption to their life, some external disruption, to indicate that there are going to be events-- that there's a status quo disruption, a larger one coming. Does that make sense? That's one thing that you would do. The other thing is that as they're going through, make sure that whatever that initial one that they started with was, that you still do close it out. For instance, if I start and my character is like, "Why is this dead body on the floor? My husband has been killed. Oh, my tragedy as a widow and the death of my husband." The detective comes in and they're working together to solve this crime. Then the detective and widow fall in love, and she wasn't looking for love, but now she's found it and they get married and live happily ever after. And we don't know who killed that man? OK. You understand the problems? STUDENT: Yes. MARY ROBINETTE: OK, great. Anybody else? Yes. STUDENT: I don't know if there's a hard and fast rule for this. With longer short fiction, would you still try to establish, like, genre within the first three sentences? MARY ROBINETTE: The question was, in longer form, would I still try to establish it within the first three sentences? I do. The reason is because, when the reader starts, they have no information at all. So they need-- the longer it takes to ground them, the slower the story is going to feel, and the longer it's going to take-- the more likely they are to put it down if they're confused. So I do try to get it within the first three sentences. But I don't try to-- don't feel like you have to be super specific. Like, if you're doing a cryptocurrency noir murder mystery on an interplanetary cruise ship, I don't need to know all of that in the first three sentences. I just need to know, "Oh, it looks like we're into the future thing-ish." OK? Yeah. STUDENT: If it's urban fantasy, what's a good way to do [inaudible]. MARY ROBINETTE: Urban fantasy is a good question. One of the tricky things with magic, in urban fantasy in particular, is that often when you introduce magic, people will think it's in the past, and if you introduce techy, people will think magic isn't going to happen. So trying to do both at the same time, if you can, in the three sentences, is great. However, often with urban fantasy, you're dealing with a character who is unaware of the fantastical world. So that gets a little harder. That's one of those places where you are, to some degree, relying on where you're shelved in the bookstore. But you would still want to establish, this is-- you'd still want people to know what time they're in, so that there's only one of those two things that's going to be a surprise when it changes. Does that make sense? All right. One minute. I'm going to turn it back to Brandon. BRANDON: I'm just going to say thank you to Mary Robinette. CLASS: (applause) MARY ROBINETTE: (inaudible) BRANDON: We will have this on the YouTube channel if you want to watch through it again. But good job, guys. I expect you all to sell flash fiction pieces now. CLASS: (laughter)