 |
 |
|
 (just the) "SFWA" Entries "Shooting Dogs for Fun and Profit" free at ChiZine October 9, 2007 My story "Shooting Dogs for Fun and Profit" is up at ChiZine/Chiaroscuro. As a comedy piece, it should be a bit more amusing than the story behind it, below: I don't give a lot of thought to genre when I'm writing. Or if I do, it's more comedy vs drama rather than science fiction vs mystery vs non-genre or anything. There've been times I've written an entire story specifically for a market only to discover that, in the process of turning an idea into what I think is a workable story, I'd taken out the very element that would have made it appropriate for that particular market (no speculative element for an SF publication, no pirates for a pirate anthology). Even after years of writing and reading genre fiction, I spent the first half of Clarion failing to figure out the expectations of genre, and the second half failing to figure out my expectations of genre. I've never made it any further than the addage: good stories are good stories. So I've come to haphazardly put works into categories only after the fact, which probably contributes to my difficulty in placing my favorite work, and is probably why regular readers of non-genre fiction enjoyed "Outgoing" so much more than regular readers of science fiction or fantasy did (and why it's no great gamble to recommend "Shotting Dogs" to people who don't typically like horror; it's the horror fans who'll be wondering what the hell they're reading...). "Shooting Dogs for Fun and Profit" was a ten-minute play I submitted in 2005 to the Actor's Theatre of Louisville's National Ten Minute Play competition, which I try to enter every year. It didn't place, but this summer I dug it up because a filmmaker friend was looking for pieces we could shoot in a weekend. I realized there were still things I liked about it. So I'd meant to send it to another short play competition, but misread a deadline as "postmarked by" instead of "received by" because I'm silly like that. At the same time, I was trying to come up with a story for James Van Pelt's Hardboiled Horror, a crime-horror crossgenre anthology. It occurred to me (two years after I wrote it, of course) that "Shooting Dogs" had elements of both crime and horror, but I'd never thought of it as anything other than a comedy. So I kept most of the dialogue, and filled in some gaps, completely Hemingwaying it at times with... "DIALOGUE, DIALOGUE." He stood. His eyeballs itched. "DIALOGUE, DIALOGUE." ...an example which thankfully didn't make it into the submitted draft. So I felt like a hack. But prose can take many forms, and some stories are all about the dialogue. Why try to make "Shooting Dogs" something that it's not? I finished the prose version of the story at the end of June, plenty of time before the anthology deadline, which meant plenty of time to sit on it, work on other things, and come back to it with fresh eyes (which might mean a completely different thing in horror than it does in writing in general; I'll have to be careful). But the ChiZine/Chiaroscuro short fiction contest closed in a few days, so I figured why not let it sit in their slush pile instead of on my hard drive? And I forgot about it, except to wince when the Michael Vick/dogfighting allegations were dominating the news in the months between the ChiZine deadline closing and the announcement of the winners. I thought: okay, there goes the chance in hell I had of placing in the contest, and I'll need to change the title (which is figurative--no dogs even appear in the story) before I send it out to Hardboiled. But I never got the chance. It won third place in the contest and became my second SFWA-qualifying sale. And, for what it's worth, I offered it up to Mr. Van Pelt as a reprint, but it wasn't a good fit for the anthology in the first place, alas. Ah well. I've got nothing to complain about, and clearly I've demonstrated that I'm not the best judge for where mys tuff belongs. Now of course, I'm wondering whether we can really film it on a weekend...
 The SFWA Walk of Shame July 2, 2007 I debated joining the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America so early. With only one SFWA-eligible novelette sale, I could only join as a non-voting, non-nominating Associate member at this point. But I've been incorrectly confident for over a year now that my next two eligible sales were imminent, and those would allow me to become a full-fledge Active Member. So I figured I'd join in January and by the end of 2007 I'd renew as an Active after a hard-fought battle with the slushpile. But it wasn't to be! Yes, I joined. But my pro-rated membership was for only six months. All SFWA memberships are renewed mid-year. But that did not deter me; no, it did not. I signed up anyway! Because surely I could make two little SFWA-eligible sales in six whole months! I may not dedicate _all_ my writing time to genre stories, nor do I submit exclusively to SFWA-eligible markets, but what does that matter? I'm on the cusp of a career! But here we are, time to renew, and in order to do so I still have to check that Associate box. I feel like such a poseur. And I'm still wearing last night's clothes. But that's just how I roll.
|
|
Alex Wilson writes fiction and comics in Carrboro, NC. His work has appeared/will appear in Asimov's Science Fiction, The Rambler, Weird Tales, The Florida Review, Futurismic, Shimmer, ChiZine, FutureQuake, Pif, and Dragon. Locus Magazine has called him a "promising new writer," and Publishers Weekly also has nice things to say. Alex runs the audiobook project/podcast Telltale Weekly and the writer wiki Guidevines. He publishes the minicomic/zine Inconsequential Art. He is a 2006 Clarion graduate. Blog Archives 2008 - Clever Label TBA 2007 - BadYearNoCookie 2006 - Clarion! 1st Pro Sale! 2005 - Peers and Peerless 2004 - Telltale Launch 2003 - Dog bites, acting out 2002 - In my mind, I'm going... 2001 - Marriage, Macs, 1st Cons 2000 - Setback, Milestones 1999 - Engaged, Graduated 1998 - Creative Independence    Powered by MT 3.35 MySpace Profile Technorati Profile |
 |
|
|
|
Thank you for dining with Alex Wilson Studios LLC.