Face-Lift 454

Guess the Plot

Stellar

1. Venus decides the world needs enchanted lipstick, so she starts a makeup company: Stellar. But will FDA chief geek Bud Jones ever approve her products? Perhaps he will, once Cupid shoots him.

2. Dig Redden is perfectly happy with his job selling rotting vegetables, so when his family arranges an intervention he's afraid his life will collapse like a dying star--until he meets a stellar woman who teaches him to use a telescope.

3. For as long as anyone can remember, Aunt Marge has been telling jokes about a giant talking iguana that lives in the tree out back. But when she goes missing and Todd flies to Orlando to investigate, he discovers the beast is real. And so is the broken space ship in the barn.

4. Collum Muntz blows his savings on an '89 Hyundai Stellar GXL. But his days earning money on a premium rate chatline and his nights in the garage returning his dream car to factory condition take their mental toll and his relationship with seductive obsessive Stella the Stellar starts to raise questions, both in town and in the Journal of Psychiatric Medicine.

5. Abby Starr meant to give her crush, Robert, a thrill of passion but they had a little misunderstanding about time. When she crept naked into the appointed bedroom it was occupied by the wrong person -- Brenda, the screaming wife. Innovating wildly, Abby quickly declared her love for Brenda and was surprised with a thrill of passion. Should she carry on both affairs, secretly? Or just propose a threesome?

6. Stellar Hooch -- squeezed from the innards of stars, distilled with the essence of comets and smuggled throughout the galaxy in genuine oak barrels by Buck Turgidstan is implicated in the bathtub drowning of four Federation Council members. Now Buck is on the run and only Sister Mary Steubbing can save his neck from the noose.


Original Version

Dear Evil Editor:

Douglass “Dig” Redden doesn’t use drugs and seldom drinks. So why, he wonders, has his wife Molly secretly planned to make him the subject of an “intervention picnic”? [Also, he wonders how it is he's in on the "secret" plans.] He soon finds out as friends and family close in, and over the course of a single week leading up to the event, he is drawn into a bewildering engagement with life. My novel of mainstream fiction, “Stellar” (91,000), though tragic at times, contains a thread of dark humor throughout, similar in style and tone to the work of authors such as Gary Shteyngart and Richard Russo. I believe its themes of adaptation, immigration, and formulating a place in modern society [AKA adaptation] will appeal to a wide audience.

Dig Redden, the man, has decelerated. [The man? Is there another Dig Redden who's a cheetah?] In fact, with both heels burrowing into the details of his life, he has brought it to a wheezing stop. [Presumably this is an attempt to use the idiom "Dig in one's heels," which might literally be applied to a tug of war contest, in which the team being pulled digs in their heels to keep from being moved. I don't think "burrowing" works well, as it suggests actual digging of a hole. Even if we change it to "digging," the important point to know is not what he's digging his heels into, but what force is pulling him where. Also, has his life actually come to a wheezing stop? Do they call him Dig because of the way he digs in his heels? What I'm saying is, I think we can do without that sentence.] His marriage collapsing and career in ruins, his days are now reduced to selling rotting vegetables from a stand along the Delaware River – and he believes he has never been happier. [Fresh vegetables would probably sell better, but hey, if you can sell rotting vegetables, more power to you.] [ Out of curiosity, does a customer shopping at a Rotting Vegetables stand tend to choose the least rotten of the vegetables? Or, having gone there specifically for rotting vegetables, does he thus choose vegetables well on their way to complete rottenness?] But Dig finds that life is not kind to quitters, and the harder he struggles to extract himself from society, the deeper he is drawn in by the cast Molly has assembled. His mentally fading father, Archie, returns, nearly bringing a jetliner crashing down upon his arrival. [I can't get on an airliner with my quart bottle of wart remover, but they let the mentally fading board with shoulder-launched missiles?] Dig finds his [father's] quirks - turning to a retired racehorse for medical advice, a penchant for eating his own hair [He gets his medical advice from Dr. Fager and his hair cut by Barbaro.] - alternately repulsive and heartrending, but ultimately he is affected most by seeing in the man a Dickensian ghost of his own future. His friend and former co-worker, Royce, a man who suspiciously survived the office purge that Dig did not, is willing to help him get back on track. That is, if in return Dig will assist him with a small ‘federal matter’. [This paragraph is longer than some books I've read.] Amidst this turmoil (including several run-ins with the local police), Dig hires a young Princeton astronomy student, Hannah Cho, to instruct him in the use of an expensive telescope that has languished untouched in a corner since the previous Christmas. [Point that end at the sky. Look in this end. That'll be ninety dollars.] He finds himself drawn to the girl, sensing her superior grasp of modern life may be what saves him before his life collapses in upon itself completely like a dying star. While the antagonistic forces of family and friends pull at Dig, he finds his only relief in the time spent with Hannah, discussing the stellar sky as well as their own small worlds. As the two of them struggle to find a path for their respective futures, tragedy unfolds, altering it for both of them.

My first major short story publication, “Copperhead”, is forthcoming in the winter 2007 edition of Rosebud Magazine. I have two additional credits, ["Water Moccasin" and "Black Mamba"] “Under” in July 2005 edition of The City Writers Review, and “Rivers” in the August 2006 issue of You Essays on-line.

I am hard at work on my second novel, a story involving hippopotamus, blueberries, and self-delusion. [Stellar schmellar. I'll buy the hippo book sight-unseen.]

Thank you for you [your] consideration, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,


Notes

It's too long. What can we do without?

1. Gary Shteyngart and Richard Russo

2. Royce

3. The local police

4. Charles Dickens

5. Hippopotamus

That leaves us with our main character, down and out, yet somehow happy. His wife, Molly, arranges an intervention starring his friends and family. He arranges his own intervention starring a college babe, which, against all odds, goes much better than Molly's intervention. Then tragedy strikes, leaving everyone miserable, as required in literary fiction.