In 2011, I wrote “Routine Physical” as my entry into a Prose that Blows writing contest.  You can only fit so much into 750 words, and I didn’t have room to explore what sort of medical condition requires someone to be inflated periodically.  The idea stuck with me, and in 2012 I started writing a story about a college-age woman learning for the first time that she had the same medical condition.  It wasn’t necessarily the same nameless character as in the original story, but it could’ve been a prequel.

Another layer to this is my desire to follow a permanently inflated character throughout her life.  The truth is that it’s really hard to make that stay interesting, and my Google Drive is littered with multiple unfinished attempts.  I eventually figured out how to make it work by building the story out of short vignettes, each designed to describe a different aspect of the characters’ lives or an altogether different stage of their lives.  But such a story can’t be all inflation-sexy-time all the time; it has to feature the exciting and the mundane, it has to be sexy and witty and complicated and sometimes a little sad, and it has to make you care about the characters, dammit.

These ideas and a borderline fanatical emphasis on character and dialogue converged into a story that is either a prequel or sequel, or both, or neither, I can’t quite decide.  Martha is the woman in “Routine Physical”, the events of which take place sometime before her first pregnancy.  Robbie is the husband Eric (I simply preferred the name Robbie for this story; he goes by Eric in professional settings).  It’s a mostly positive tale with characters that are objectively “good” (sometimes chaotically so), some mild kink here and there, and a happy ending, but the characters do experience some adversity and complicated feelings.  The story also doesn’t get bogged down in too much unimportant minutiae: the kids themselves, who babysits them while adults are adulting, how Robbie makes enough money to support the family while helping Martha with literally everything, how Martha gets transported from place to place, etc.  With only around 30 very brief glimpses into Martha’s life over a period of 30 years, many of these questions are best left unanswered.

Is it a great or even good inflation story?  Probably not.  But I’m terribly proud of it anyway, and while reading I hope you care about the characters as much as I did while writing them.