{"id":1412,"date":"2013-02-04T01:31:50","date_gmt":"2013-02-04T08:31:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lindacollison.com\/?p=1412"},"modified":"2013-02-04T01:44:19","modified_gmt":"2013-02-04T08:44:19","slug":"friday-night-knife-gun-club-short-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/friday-night-knife-gun-club-short-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday Night Knife and Gun Club — a short story"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0I love this cover art created by graphic designer and re-enactor\u00a0Albert Roberts.\u00a0 He’s totally captured the kitch\u00a0and the\u00a0drama I had in mind for the cover art for my new short story, just published on Kindle.\u00a0 I’m having the cover art made into a poster to hang on my wall to inspire me to finish the collection of short stories and speculative memoir about nurses that I’ve been working on for, well, decades.<\/p>\n

The nurses in Friday Night Knife and Gun Club<\/em> aren’t ordinary nurses.\u00a0 They live and work in a dystopian near-future, in an unnamed city in the American West (actually, it’s Denver, where I lived and worked for many years) where nearly everybody\u00a0carries a gun to protect themselves from the loonies.\u00a0 Yep — it’s the wild Wild West.\u00a0 And yes, my tongue is in my cheek.<\/p>\n

There’s nothing nautical about this story.\u00a0 And although it’s fiction, I didn’t have to make very much up.\u00a0 A lot of it comes from my own life.<\/p>\n

I was compelled to write it after the shooting that took place at a hospital in Alabama in December.\u00a0 Which took place just after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut, which took place after a random mall shooting in Oregon, which took place a\u00a0few months after the theater shooting in Colorado.\u00a0 Not to mention the Gabby Giffords shooting in Arizona, the Columbine school shooting in Colorado, the\u00a0Virginia Tech shooting… and the beat goes on. And on.\u00a0 And on.<\/p>\n

I am not against guns.\u00a0 I am against the easy availability of firearms and large magazines.\u00a0 I am against the idea that the way to fight violence is with more violence.\u00a0 All those years I worked in the hospital — in emergency and ICU and psychiatrics and oncology — I\u00a0sometimes thought about what would happen if some angry sociopath\u00a0came in with a gun and started shooting us up.\u00a0\u00a0 In this dystopian short story I’ve re-imagined that horror.\u00a0\u00a0But I’ve given it an ironic twist.\u00a0 I’ve given the nurses\u00a0guns.\u00a0 It’s lurid drama, it’s urban fiction, yet it’s all too real.<\/p>\n

Friday Night Knife and Gun Club is available on Kindle<\/a>\u00a0for 99 cents — and I’m offering it free this week.\u00a0 I’m hoping to have the entire collection of short stories completed by the end of 2013 and ready for publication, both in print and electronic format.\u00a0 Meanwhile, I hope you’ll find this short piece provocative.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0I love this cover art created by graphic designer and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[235,234],"tags":[238,237,239,236],"class_list":["post-1412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cover-art","category-short-fiction","tag-dystopian-fiction","tag-guns","tag-literary-fiction","tag-nurses"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1412"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1422,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1412\/revisions\/1422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}