On "Shots" by Kim Chinquee (761 words) ***

Previously, I wrote about "Shot Girls" by Kim Chinquee (here). Here's another story with a variation on the same theme. Although I typically end up enjoying one story much more than another, I like it when authors write two versions of a story and share them both. It's simply interesting to watch the way in which a mind can go in different directions with the same idea--the meaning a given piece will take on and the emotions that piece will elicit. It's also interesting insofar as usually one piece is much longer than the other, more full bodied, less stream lined. Some authors, of course, only write a very few stories, over and over and over--Poe was one of those. Perhaps, all authors do that to an extent, but most are more subtle than presenting the same "buried alive" theme/plot device (one of Poe's favorites) again and again. Another author I enjoy who has written stories that closely parallel one another is Brock Clarke. Unfortunately, the two pairs of stories of his that I see as parallel are no longer available online. You can read Chinquee's "Shots" here at Willow Springs.

(Note: In an e-mail exchange with Kim herself, sometime after I read the story, I discovered that "Shots" and "Shot Girls" were written four years apart. So this was indeed a case of an author returning to fertile ground to explore the same setting and some of the same themes again, rather than a story taking two directions and both being written and published.)