Last week, Creative Loafing published the winning stories from its fiction contest. I’d encourage you to go read them. The three winners did an excellent job, and I can definitely learn from what they did with the theme, which was “Space.” Each had a different approach, but I think they were all effective.
Of course, I was hoping I might be included in the issue. I submitted my own story to the contest back in November. Now, I wasn’t expecting in the slightest to win. I mean, that was the first piece of fiction I’d written in about 17 years, so it would have been a pretty big shock to win a damn thing for it. And, honestly, I don’t think winning one of these sorts of contests is even a coherent goal. All you know is, there are three judges who you don’t know, and you don’t know what their criteria are. All you can do is meet the guidelines, submit on time, and see what happens.
So, that’s what I did. And I saw what happened. And what happened was, I wasn’t good enough. Most of you probably already knew that, but it’s nice to have it confirmed by professional judges. For what it’s worth, the guidelines were that it needed to be a story of 3,000 or fewer words built around the keyword “Space.” You could interpret the word “space” as literally or figuratively as you wanted.
For my story, I wrote about a post-apocalyptic society in which a virus killed off a large majority of the world’s population. The survival camp I wrote about had formed into a small community with a benevolent dictator having seized control. He’s told the citizens that the virus spread through physical contact and, as a result, he requires all citizens to wear a steel cylinder around their waist at all times, which prevents people from coming into contact with each other. He has also outlawed all cohabitation, and all children are raised by trained, approved government employees. It’s called “Condemning Touch.”
I’d be interested to hear from anyone, in the comments here, on Twitter, Facebook, or you can call me and we can just gab for awhile. Would you read that story? Does that sound compelling? It’s entirely possible it’ll be expanded into my next novel, although I also have a couple of other ideas I’m batting around for that honor. Let me know what you think, one way or the other.
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