We were in repose. Pierre sat on the edge of the couch as I reclined. He looked at me in his most surreptitiously worshipful manner and whispered, "How was your day, my darling?" He was a brawny diplomat from Paris with a PhD in astrophysics and 27 vital secrets: Dr. Rabnud.
I stretched my arms, catlike, whispering, "Terrible. I was tortured, tortured." I being the shapely, alluring, and sometimes brilliant undercover international superspy, Mae Wong.
Pierre thought I was an ordinary lingerie model. He cooed, "Ohh, doll, it's hell out there, isn't it? Let's just unwind, why don't we?" and reached to pull my cowgirl boots off. He struggled with them a minute or two, finally accomplished the task and dropped them behind the couch, pulled my dirty socks off and threw them after the boots, started massaging my feet while I closed my eyes and relaxed. Hot cool jazz was smoldering on the stereo.
We both tensed at a noise outside the door. Had they tracked us down already? There seemed to be no sanctuary for a pair such as us.
The door handle rattled. The feeble lock would not hold them out for long; we both knew how determined Mater Hari could be. "I fear our respite may be drawing to a close, my darling," Pierre whispered, his words a faint summer breeze.
The door opened. "So you are in here." It was a voice I knew well. "Pete, it's time you were going home. Mavis, come on, we need to put some more foot powder on your fungal infection."
I did not care for the way Pierre wiped his hands on his jeans. Way to blow a fantasy, mom.
Opening: Alice Melville.....Continuation: Anonymous
25 comments:
Unchosen continuations:
I felt my eyelids grow heavy as the stresses of the day's events began to fade away; but a noise behind me snapped me awake.
Solomon Gabrahim, ruthless Israeli businessman, a man at the center of a web of international financial transactions. He sneered at us and his eyes narrowed. "This has gone on long enough," he said. "It is true what they say, the customer is king at Sol's Sofa Shack; but if you ain't gonna buy that suite, I'd appreciate you getting dressed and taking your act someplace else."
--anon.
"So..." I said, and tried on my inscrutable smile. "What now, Doctor Rabnud?"
He looked up at me and his eyes twinkled like Christmas lights. "Well," he said, "the ingrown toenail is all cleared up, but you've got a real nasty fungal infection. I suggest you use this cream twice a day, wear clean socks, and consider bathing a little more often. You can pay Nurse Hollister on the way out."
The man was indeed a genius.
"Oh, and ask the nurse to turn the bloody Muzak down, would you?"
--anon.
Sounds like it's going to be a funny story. I would delete "Dr. Rabnud." If we must be told his last name in paragraph 1, call him Pierre Rabnud in the second sentence. It's probably better to just tell us later, however.
And if the fact that Rabnud is Dunbar in reverse is going to play a role, I'd come up with a better name than Rabnud. It has the sound of a name turned backwards.
An "ordinary lingerie model." Love it.
What EE said. Also, if Pierre is Erreip spelled backwards, then you've got real problems.
I liked the "Sol's Sofa Shack" continuation. Very nice.
Anon- your continuation is good, especially your punch line. And Mater Hari.
Rabnud/Dunbar - EE, your mind works in mysterious ways. Kinda scary. I never even think of these things. Oh well.
Anyway -- Alice, I kind of like your beginning as well. It's opening the door to lots of promise - is this for a short story or a novel? With this much tongue-in-proverbial-cheek, I'm wondering if the voice can carry through- that's my only reservation.
Mae Wong sounds familiar to me. Have we seen her in GTPs, by any chance?
Love the socks bit. Looking foward to finding out what happens to "vital secrets" boy.
I liked this, but it's such a strange juxtapositioning of romance and probably smelly feet! It's either going to be funny as heck or you are having us on.
I have to agree with EE on the name.
I'm not sure how long you could maintain this tone, but I'd have read on.
He struggled with them a minute or two, finally accomplished the task and dropped them behind the couch, pulled my dirty socks off and threw them after the boots, started massaging my feet while I closed my eyes and relaxed.
This sentence is a little long and the run-ons confused me, so I had to re-read. Consider separating into two or three sentences.
The voice in the third paragraph doesn't match the first two. There's not enough here to tell if that was intentional.
The first two seem just enough over the top to make fun reading. The third one comes across as rather ordinary. :\
(I've worked out how to log in from the comments page, yah, more commenting.)
He struggled with them a minute or two, finally accomplished the task and dropped them behind the couch, pulled my dirty socks off and threw them after the boots, started massaging my feet while I closed my eyes and relaxed.
This sentence is a little long and the run-ons confused me, so I had to re-read.
Dear dog, has attention-span ablation attained this pitiful point already, even among people who hope to become published writers?
Dear dog, has attention-span ablation attained this pitiful point already, even among people who hope to become published writers?
No. The sentence is badly constructed and out of balance.
But why would anyone bother even trying to be helpful? Good job there are other really smart people around to pick up the slack.
Oh, good. A disagreement. They make life interesting.
I think run-on sentences have their place, but then, as I write them and enjoy reading them, I would think this, wouldn't I?
So, what do you think, iago? Do you think they never have a place, that they simply indicate a poorly written piece?
Because I find that if they're done the way I enjoy them, they wrap me up in the story, give me an inner view of the world the narrator/writer is creating around me. I wouldn't want them coming at me without pause - without shorter sentences, without punctuation, so to speak. But I like them.
There have been several Mae Wong guess plots, yes. If you use the blog search thing you can read the facelifts in which they appeared.
robin, that sentence wouldn't be a run-on if a couple of words were changed. Run-ons are ungrammatical; but a long and complicated sentence is fine.
Oh, so Mae Wong is messing with us, is she? Or at least her author is. Or maybe she decided Mae could stand on her own two feet. It would be nice to know...
Hi WW - The thing is, though, I liked the stacked phrases of the snetence iago pointed out. They may not be technically correct, but they build well, in my opinion.
The sentence is a list of four actions taken by Pierre. Merely placing "and" where the last comma is would make it grammatically okay. However, this quote on Wikipedia under "comma splice" may be of interest:
"so many highly respected writers observe the splice comma that a rather unfair rule emerges on this one: only do it if you're famous."--Lynne Truss
She cites Samuel Beckett, E. M. Forster, and Somerset Maugham. "Done knowingly by an established writer, the comma splice is effective, poetic, dashing. Done equally knowingly by people who are not published writers, it can look weak or presumptuous. Done ignorantly by ignorant people, it is awful."
This may not technically be a comma splice, as the clauses aren't independent, but it's similar in using a comma where a conjunction would be correct.
I don't think it's any less dashing to replace the last comma with "and" and end the sentence at "feet." The next sentence might be: I closed my eyes and relaxed; hot cool jazz was smoldering on the stereo.
It's my understanding that the author is indeed working on a story starring Mae Wong.
*edits out all her spliced commas sadly*
I never knew they had a name.
I didn't know about that either, Sylvia. I would say "good to know", but I'm not sure yet. You know, if it's good to know or not.
Well yeah, I guess it is good to know - and then decide what you're gonna do with this information, once you know it.
I think I have a perfect right to have and to hold and to enjoy runs-ons, as they are kind of a story-telling tradition in my neck of the woods.
I'm glad to hear Mae Wong is coming out of her GTP closet.
There's a thin gray line between grammatical and ungrammatical. "A-grammatical," perhaps :o)? There are run-ons and frags that are clearly stylistic and appropriate, those that are clearly wrong, and those that fall into the gray.
I find this sentence rather gray. If the voice of the rest of this story repeats this pattern, I could forgive the structure, although I personally might not read through too many of these types of sentences. But that's subjective taste regarding style, not an objective indictment of the style. If, however, this is a one-off sentence, then, yeah, it could be fixed to flow better by either adding some transition within the sentence or breaking it up into a couple of sentences.
I do understand where some of the grammar cop mentality comes from. When I was a grad student, I taught freshman English. The department insisted we fail any essay that contained any combo of three or more comma splices, run-ons, and sentence frags. Didn't matter how they were used because, apparently, any use was incorrect. Each final exam essay was graded by two teachers, just to keep us more liberal-minded teachers honest. *shudder*
Now excuse me while I go back to editing a 40-page proposal and trying to convince techie guys who must have graduated from that same university that, yes, you CAN use a sentence fragment for emphasis. Man, do I love me some sentence frags!
Lighten up, folks ;o)
The story is an excerpt from an old trunk novel: a zillion words of angst! melodrama! murder! sex! written before I had any clue about structure. On the whole it suffers from fatal plot creep and had a wandering formless narrative line. Alas. But there were a few amusing episodes I decided might work for Mae Wong -- if I spliced them together and turned the outrageous dial up.
Re: that sentence under discussion -- It has been rewritten maybe a hundred times. What I like about the current version is that the sentence begins with the characters in disharmony and through a series of simple movements they achieve the opposite position -- harmony. All in one sentence.
It wasn't until after I started writing like this that editors started taking the work. Does it need the usual "and" at the end or not? I decided grammar schmammar, stop putting those in. Pointless words. I use this sentence structure a lot and the ands get repetitive. If I don't need them for rhythm effects, they get cut.
And EE, yes, either you are a genius or you have already rejected this in some other life. The plot does have a cheap stupid Rabnud/Dunbar joke at the end. Which I guess I'll have to ditch and rewrite.
Thanks all,
Alice
A "then" would save the sentence, too :).
So, what do you think, iago? Do you think they never have a place, that they simply indicate a poorly written piece?
Oh, I definitely think they have a place, and used well can make the writing flow quite poetically. But they do have to be used well, and in all the sentence still needs to have balance.
This particular sentence, for me as I read it, was not balanced. I read from the first word to the last, in order, assembling the sentence as I go. I'm first expecting the sentence to end at "couch" -- a completed action with a major and subordinate clause in balance. But it doesn't there's a comma there, so it's a list of actions. Pulled off the boots, pulled off the socks, started massaging the feet -- and I'm expecting something else because there's been no conjunction to warn me the list is coming to an end, so the period after "relaxed" is jarring and the sentence feels out of balance, so I go back and re-read, thinking I've missed something, because it doesn't feel right.
A conjunction could fix this; a semi-colon and a repeated pronoun could fix this. The sentence could be balanced and still have the narrative flow that the author wants.
That's all in my opinion, based on how I read the sentence. Your milegage may vary. That's why alternative points of view are actually a good thing, usually.
One other point, being equally cursed with the love of a long sentence in my own writing: The author has written, rewritten, read and re-read the setence numerous times and knows what it is supposed to say and how to read it to make it feel "right". Any structural mistake may have become invisible. The reader, however, doesn't have that advantage and needs to be able to "get it" the first time through. That doesn't mean no sentence can be longer than four words; it does mean the structure has to help the reader get through the completed idea in one pass.
In my opinion.
EE - did you eat my earlier comment? I think you did. Hmmpph.
Alice- I see what you're saying about your sentence, and now I like it even more (than I already did).
Phoenix likes frags - that should tell you nonbelievers something - because she's as honest as the day is long- even when you don't wanna know something- she tells you anyway. (BTW, phoenix, in the spring, are you up for doing some beta reading?)
Anyway - the point for me is that the style, the rhythm, and the flow work well in this sentence, and the rules can screw themselves. I knew all the rules at one time. The nuns saw to that.
For a while. But they're boring as shit- (rules and nuns) and so is writing that follows rules to the exclusion of the kind of inner rhythm that a writer hears, if he or she is lucky (and not shizoid. That not-being-schizoid would also be good.)
...kind of inner rhythm that a writer hears...
It only works if both writer and reader can hear it. That's why good writers can get away with bending the rules, and less experienced -- or bad -- writers can't.
Dammit, iago. The way you put it makes sense.
And I do agree that varying points of view are good, in that they force one to think.
"That doesn't mean no sentence can be longer than four words; it does mean the structure has to help the reader get through the completed idea in one pass." OK-fair enough- when my opening comes up - let me know what you think, please.
I suspect the neglect of rhythm is a significant reason why so much apparently decent writing is dull--or reads like doggerel.
Hey buff - I suspect you are absolutely right.
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