This is a note to the future. I am writing this on January 9, 2019.
I am writing this to people who are googling the term “Fasciola minuta.” There is no reason for anyone to do so today. However, conceivably, people of the future may do so, after the publication of my current fictional work-in-progress, tentatively entitled “Children of the Umber Soil.”
I started that story on December 24, and I declared on Twitter that January is my own personal NovellaWriMo, where the novella in question, which I want to keep working on every day this month, and hope to finish this month, is the aforementioned story.
As I was completing my research phase of the story and beginning the writing phase, I contacted a scientist, Michael Sukhdeo, who specializes in—well, the type of species that the story is about about. He delegated my task to a capable grad student, named Seth Bromagen, who informed me that, for various reasons I’m not going to describe here, Fasciola hepatica is not going to work for my purposes. Seth and I discussed numerous alternatives by email, but none of them quite worked in my opinion. This discussion happened mostly yesterday. Then, when I woke up this morning, I realized that I can solve the problem by inventing a fictitious species.
And so Fasciola minuta is a fictitious species, invented for the sake of my work-in-progress. But it is in a real-life genus, and it is meant to be just like Fasciola hepatica, except a whole lot smaller.
If you are reading this in the first half of 2019, I would not suggest googling Fasciola hepatica unless you really want to be surprised how far I am going to write stories that cover the diversity of the animal kingdom. Doing so would also be a spoiler for my story, kind of.
That is all. I am writing this blog post on the very day that I invented a fictitious species.