Skeleton Key to Flash Fiction Test Kitchen, by Robert Fuller

Intro to Flash Fiction Test Kitchen and its Skeleton Key, by Robert Fuller

Flash Fiction Test Kitchen is now my working title for the daily Flash Fiction project that I began in mid-February 2024. Originally, I was going to write at least one Flash Fiction piece per day for a full leap year (366 days, 2024 being of course a leap year), but then it went on and on, eventually to a total of 512 days straight, just a couple of weeks past my 63rd birthday.

What I am referring to as a "Skeleton Key" for this project is ultimately a guide to the interrelationships between the individual elements of this vast canvas of short fictions of one sort or another.

At the time of the present writing (9/30/2025), my best judgment informs me that the interrelationships between the various components of this project will be grouped into three different groupings: Themes/Motifs, Characters, and Settings.

This list of groupings may be added to at a later date, but for now, they will suffice.

My intent in adding this new feature is to expedite the reader's ability to find common threads among these disparate writings, and to allow the reader to cross-reference some of the themes, characters, and settings that occur within these incoherent ramblings of my addled mind.

But seriously, there are numerous threads and strands of varied nature that occur within this body of work, and I myself am still struggling to interpret the true nature of what I have written.

I must confess that I was most highly motivated to make this feature happen once I had read (reread, that is) the first two or three dozen Flash Fiction pieces that appear in this set. I have recently been posting translations of a select few Flash Fiction pieces in thirty-two languages above and beyond the main three (English, Spanish, and French), and once I began rereading those pieces, I realized more clearly what it was that was happening as this project unfolded over time.

Thus, there are themes and motifs, characters and settings that recur at whim in the 500+ Flash Fiction pieces in this set. And I figured that it might be of interest (of use, even) to readers of my work as to how all these pieces of this strange puzzle interconnect... How they live together, in some sense, within the same ecosystem of words and ideas and whatever else.

And they all connect in strange and wondrous ways in part because of all of these vastly different languages that they have been rendered into; each new language, each new translation, in my way of thinking, is not an imperfect replica of the original, but rather, an augmentation, an amplification, an intensification, of what the original was.

For every new instance of my original story, a new light is shed upon whatever it was that I originally wrote. This, in a nutshell, is how I view translations. Not as imperfect replicas, but as new insights into the original text.

I hope that someone out there may find this compendium of interrelationships between the many pieces of my Flash Fiction Test Kitchen puzzle to be somehow of use.