fiction, humor

Weird Works Wanted in 2020

While the image for this post may be funny or offensive (or both), it also hints at possibilities for responding to a call for submissions of weird stories for Volume 3 of an annual anthology.  (Previously published work is OK if the author retained the rights.)  The deadline is 2020-03-31.
(BTW, the [Menu] button atop the vertical black bar reveals the widgets.)

Volumes 1 and 2 of The Rabbit Hole have many good stories and some gems.  Links to those volumes are in the call for submissions for Volume 3, which I will just call “RH-3” below.  Here is an excerpt:

This year marks a new departure, in which we explore how ‘weird’ fits into a genre.  And we’re kicking off with ‘romance’.  Do your aliens fall in love?  Is your young hero consumed, swallowed and digested by desire?  Does your ageing husband bring his passion back to life only to find it’s not what he thought it would be?  The possibilities are endless.

Perhaps you never read romance.  Perhaps you’ve never written it.  So much the better!  Who knows what lies outside the box?  • • •

I’ll stop there.  You’ve got the idea.  In fact I’m sure you’ve got plenty, and you don’t need me to give you more.  Simply bear in mind that ‘weird’ doesn’t always mean outlandish – it can be subtle, discreet, even furtive.  Witty too, or burlesque – we’re always open to humour.  Or even, at a stretch, humor.  We look forward to discovering whatever means you choose to warp, subvert, disfigure, disguise or otherwise befuddle the concept of romance.

AliceAmsterdam_482x525

Image cropped from meme as posted 2015-10-07 by TheAnswerWasAlwaysMoreLube

I know.  A red light district is a weird place to look for romance.  Maybe U can make it work for RH-3.  Maybe a closer look at the image will suggest something else to try.

The line formed by Alice’s straight spine meets the line formed by her legs somewhere under that flouncy skirt.  Nobody on Earth has such long thighs.  Hmmm.  Maybe Alice is a Martian spy, practicing her skills before trying to seduce Earthian leaders into betraying our planet.  (They already do that, but not in ways that would benefit Martian colonists.)  Maybe interplanetary espionage will be kerbolixed by interplanetary romance when Alice moves on to the corridors of power.

I can’t think of a good way to use the idea of Alice as a Martian spy with a conflict between love and duty.  (It would not suffice to write a hackneyed conflict story and tack on some extraneous weirdness about how an Earthian and a Martian get it on.)  It is unlikely that RH-3 will include anything by me.  That’s no great loss, but it gets worse.  The medium with a laptop turned out to be a fraud, so RH-3 is also unlikely to include Lewis Carroll’s posthumously written Alice in Amsterdam.  Unless U can step up.

 

2 thoughts on “Weird Works Wanted in 2020

  1. I suspect the Alice pictured is either a legless alien or an Earthian double amputee whose torso is strapped to the lamp from “A Christmas Story”.

    Like

Leave a Reply to Sue Ranscht Cancel reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.