Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Face-Lift 199


Guess the Plot

Snitch

1. When little Tommy Mupler named his dog "Snitch" he didn't know the dog could talk. Now Susie next door is too embarrassed to go to school, Tommy's mother is on the warpath . . . and Snitch is in the doghouse.

2. After inmate Roy Smith admits in confession that he murdered someone, he warns the priest not to blab. Will the good Father keep quiet, or will he snitch . . . in order to reduce his own sentence?

3. Ratso Rizzo had a life before Midnight Cowboy. He's on the police payroll and the Family has found out.

4. Herbert Koober wants to be a cop, but he doesn't meet the height requirements. He does, however, have big ears and a big mouth.

5. A would-be young witch juggles middle school with the Middle Ages as she tries to find a spell to keep her from blurting out her best friends' secrets.

6. A reporter goes undercover at a maximum-security prison to try to befriend the inmates and pry out their secrets . . . and grabs the scoop of the century.


Original Version

Dear Evil Editor,

SNITCH: a nasty word. [Although not as nasty as "snatch."] So what does it have to do with an Old Catholic priest, the pastor of a California church? He sells his parsonage and buys a $102,000 dollar black BMW. He’s also married to one woman and engaged to another. When the authorities catch on to his money-laundering and pandering, our good priest [Good priest? Oh, you mean compared to all the other priests we've been reading about.] is arrested and tossed into jail. His life will change forever when he meets Roy G. Smith, twice convicted, high-risk pedophile presently being held for murder in one of California’s highest profile cases. [The pedophile isn't the priest? Nice twist.]

Roy, over the course of months, confesses the murder of a 45 year old woman to our unethical priest. [Over the course of months? How long does it take to say you killed a 45-year-old woman?

Week 1: There was this woman. She was 45.
Week 2: She's dead.
Week 3: Got any smokes?
Week 4: They found her with multiple stab wounds.
Week 5: What is it with the cooks in this place? Everything's too salty.
Week 6: I mean seriously, salt in fruit cocktail?
Week 7: You don't think I had anything to do with it?
Week 8: I see no way a wolf could blow down a house made of sticks.
Week 9: Okay, okay, I killed her. But she had it coming.]

When Roy realizes he has divulged too much, he warns the priest to keep the information on the low down – or else. [Week 10: By the way, that was all off the record.] Will the priest snitch, thus reducing his own sentence, or will he quietly go on with his jail time, and live with the knowledge of the murder, a weight on his mind which will eat away at him like a maggot feasting on garbage? [That's the kind of simile you use when you're mocking writers who use too many similes.]

The reader will explore the very timely topics of priesthood, jail (a prismatic subculture) [I think you mean a cultural prism.] and murder within a cocoon of murderers, [Huh?] chomos (child molesters) [Why isn't that chimos? Just asking.], homosexual prostitutes [promos)], [arson within a termite mound of] arsonists, supreme white power dudes (Pure Boys, Nazi-Low Riders, Nor-Cal Woods), [Are you under the impression that the stuff inside all these parentheses is making this more clear?] paranoid schizophrenics, and gang-bangers (Nortenos, Sorenos, Crips and Bloods). [Lists tend to get boring the longer they go on. Especially when most of the items being listed need explanations. It would be more interesting to choose a couple of the more important items on the list and elaborate on them.]

Snitch is a non-fiction, [Nonfiction? Why didn't you say so earlier? I wouldn't have mocked it for being preposterous if I'd known it was true.] true-crime memoir written by the author of The Sound of Meat, [The sequel to The Sound of Music, in which the von Trapp family all have jobs frying bacon.] an e-book published by Cool Publications of Great Britain, and the essay, Snitch, soon to be published by Hillary Carlip on Fresh Yarn. [The cool thing about publishing on fresh yarn is that after the reader is finished reading, she can knit a sweater. I'm not sure it's important that the yarn be fresh, actually.] At your request, I will send you a writing sample and a book proposal. [I thought this was a book proposal.] Please feel free to contact me at the address below.

Thank You,


Notes

It sounded like an interesting story when I thought it was a novel. I think you need to scrap it and come at it from a new angle, one that points out that it's the true story of whoever, and why his story is so interesting. Or make it a novel.

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't get it.

I thought "Mentos" was all one word and the singular would also be "Mentos", not "Mento".

Wonderwood said...

The first comment in the query is awesome, had me lauging out loud. Snatch.

It sounds like it's not sure if it wants to be a memoir or a thriller. It definitely opens with an interesting premise. If it's a memoir, I'd be interested to know whose POV, Roy or the priest? Might want to make that clear in the query.

Anonymous said...

EE, you were on a roll. From snatch to the week-by-week tally, you had me laughing.

So if this is true, I take it the priest tells all? Kind of takes away the suspense.

And parsonage sounds protestant, not catholic (for catholics, its a rectory or parish--depending exactly on what parsonage means).

And is he still a priest when he buys the car and gets married? I don't think so. So "ex-priest" might be better.

And then why would a prisoner confess to him, when he could see a real priest who would be bound by a vow of silence?

I'm thinking there are a lot of things that don't add up.

Anonymous said...

Why wouldn't the priest snitch? There's no reason I see for him not to, since as an ex-priest he is no longer bound by the rules of Confession, which don't apply if the confessor isn't truly repenting and willing to do penance (i.e. pray, confess his crime--thus negating the whole book) anyway.

Even in the Old Catholic church, I still don't believe priests own their own parsonages (not a Catholic term, btw, but Old Catholicism is different so I guess you could be right). That belongs to the church, it's not the priest's to sell. Have you found that they do?

When you subbed this to the Crapometer, we all asked these same questions.

Whose true story is this based on? Wouldn't you need to put that in the query, because this sounds like it was made up--you might want to provide real names/dates/places upfront so an agent or editor can check on them.

And I sincerely hope you changed the first line of the book. Really.

I love true crime, but this doesn't even sound like true crime. It's just about some crazy ex-priest who hears about a crime and wonders if he should tell. You don't even have the "sacrament of Confession" hook so popular in the 80s. Where's the police investigations, the interrogations, the forensic evidence, the psychological profiles of the criminals? That's the good part of true crime. I couldn't care less about this cheating priest and his inexplicable desire to protect a murdering pedophile. If I were him, I'd do my own form of repenting and kill the scumbag myself.

Anonymous said...

[i]and live with the knowledge of the murder, a weight on his mind which will eat away at him like a maggot feasting on garbage?[/i]

One thing about Catholic priests, the confessional is sacrosanct. Utterly and completely confidential, between the confessor, the priest and God.

If this priest still even slightly believes, the immoral choice would NOT be keeping the murder to himself, but snitching and shattering the sanctity of confession. The way this is worded, it suggests it's the other way round.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I don't see why an unethical former priest wouldn't snitch unless he's fearing for his own skin. No suspense at all if you ask me...and no one ever does.

Anonymous said...

With the author of this story having written The Sound of Meat, the POV could be the priest or the pedophile. Is that redundant?

Anonymous said...

Ah. Amazing what a little Google search will turn up. Buddy, if you're going to change the religion you were part of, learn something about the religion you're pretending to be--especially if you're going to pretend to be Catholic, since it's very different from Congregational.

The sacrament of confession wouldn't apply in this situation. You'll have to come up with some other reason why we would feel any sympathy at all for a man who embezzled, cheated, stole, and betrayed the people he was supposed to be leading, and then has a problem with helping to put a child molesting murderer away for life.

You can't whitewash your actions by trying to pretend you're Catholic and hide behind some of that church's recent troubles. That's pretty sleazy.

That also makes this book fall well into James Frey territory.

Nancy Beck said...

Non-fiction? I thought it was a novel. A bit over the top, maybe (Old Catholic - what the heck is that?), and, as EE said, the words inside the parentheses in your query doesn't help me in the slightest - except the one where you mention the Crips and Bloods (gangs, obviously).

Maybe you should consider making it into a novel instead.

Just my 2 cents - good luck!

~JerseyGirl

Anonymous said...

EE was definitely in the zone with this one.

I agree the the story has too many inconsistancies. -JTC

Anonymous said...

I can see that several people are confused by the "Old Catholic Church" bit. The Old Catholic Church is a splinter group that broke off from the regular Catholic church in the 1870s. Wikipedia has an article on it.

I wouldn't of heard about it either except that real-life vampire hunter Sean Manchester is a Bishop in it.

Kate Thornton said...

This needs to be a novel - then you can fictionalize it into consistency and flow, with some credible parts thrown in.

If you are constrained by a non-fiction piece, then you have to tell it straight, and not make up stuff. But I can't see an interesting story here unless it is fiction and can be changed around.

Anonymous said...

"In the zone" is an understatement! This is EE's best work in months! How many gems? My favorites were

1) "Week 8: I see no way a wolf could blow down a house made of sticks.

and 2)"[Are you under the impression that the stuff inside the parentheses is making this more clear?]"

About the story -- if this is based on something that really happened, I doubt if anybody even knows it because it isn't very noteworthy. I'd just call it fiction, giving the author the freedom to beat it around a little.

I'm not really sure I see a hook. Is it that the priest knows a secret? Not really that interesting, and it isn't as much of a twist as the author thinks. And I don't think there's any legal clause anywhere that says you get time knocked off your own sentence if you rat out a fellow inmate.

Anonymous said...

If you sell this book, are you going to reimburse your former church members?

Google is interesting, ain't it?

Dave Fragments said...

I once said to a good friend who is now an Episcopal priest that the College of Cardinals would never elect Ratso Rizzo as pope.

I was so wrong.

Anonymous said...

I checked out the blurb for Sound of Meat. I think the blurb writer meant 'salacious' rather than 'salubrious'. 'Salubrious and innocent at the same time' is not a contradiction, although it's written as one of a series of contradictions.
If Snitch is non-fiction, why change the details? Wouldn't that make it fiction?

Dave Fragments said...

On a very serious note, the general rule about confessions in the English and American common law is: "a clergyman or priest shall not be compellable to give evidence as to any confession made to him in his professional character" ...

go read here at the Catholic Encyclopedia
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13649b.htm

The legal privelege traces itself back to 950 AD in England. In the USA it traces itself back to Commonwealth v. Drake [(1818) 15 Mass., 154]

Obviously, Canon and protestant church law says that a priest or minister cannot reveal what was said in confession. The great moral struggle comes, as the story reveals, when the priest may benefit from revealing the confession or (and I suggest this is the greater temptation) to give comfort to the family of the dead.

Now before y'all ask "what about a kidnapping where the life of the victim depends on the priest breaking the silence of the confessional, the answer is I don't know.

Anonymous said...

real-life vampire hunter

That's right up there with real-life bigfoot hunter or real-life smurf squeezer.

Anonymous said...

Anon at 5:53 AM--great comments. I second all of them (how boring, I know).