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Guess the Plot

A Girl and Her Octopus

1. Come on. Do I HAVE to explain what this book is about?

2. Tiffany spent her entire summer vacation coaxing the octopus to emerge from that tide pool. But now Dad won't let her bring him home. If she pretends to obediently flush the gastropod, can she sneak her new pet back to Kansas in her suitcase?

3. Every time Nemo Jones tries to complete his speech for the documentary about his undersea miracle of post-modern living, that damn girl swims to the window and makes silly faces at the camera while her octopus sullies the glass with its arm-slime. Where does this pesky wench come from, and how can he be rid of her?

4. In 2487, Earth depends on the asteroid miners for raw minerals. Miner Jax Subit is one of the youngest, driving her eight-armed mining droid in the outer belt to support her family Earthside. When war leaves half of Earth a smoking hulk, Jax realizes that she can finally afford those implants, since she doesn't have to send money home anymore.

5. Sheila's cool with the prune look, the suction cup hickies and scarecrow hair from all the salt. Octi makes it all worthwhile, bringing her pretty shells and bits of coral from the deep. But when Octi brings her a doubloon, greedy eyes take interest and the hunt is on.

6. Ever since an octopus saved Octavia from drowning, the two have been inseparable friends. But when she falls in love with Otto, who is allergic to gastropods, Octavia must decide if she can give her octopus up, and be content with a man with only two tentacles…er, arms.

7. After the hurricane, Tina does her best to hide her new pet, but at story time three suckered tentacles grab Mom by the ankle and pull her under the bed, where she is summarily devoured by a monster that will quickly grow to enormous proportions and devour everything that moves in Orlando.

8. Michelle is the richest girl in the universe, but she won't be happy unless she and her octopus guardian Soangdu can break her Aunt Lisa out of the mental institution. Fortunately they have help from a doctor, if they can just get him to focus on the mission instead of his quest for the Twinkies recipe.


Original Version

Dear Evil Editor,

A generation after spaceflight begins, humans have spread to hundreds of planets and haven’t found other sentient life forms; right? [Wrong. Space flight began a couple generations ago, and humans haven't reached any planets.] For ten years after her mother’s kidnapping and murder, twelve-year-old Michelle Gulden, the richest girl in the universe, has lived in her father’s lab on a small planet. Now she must get her aunt, Lisa, from a mental hospital before her father dies, an adventure she’s always wanted. [This is the plot of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, except set on Pluto.]

She has the help of her two guardians, Chirpizadon and Soangdu, but her guardians must be passed off as pets. Chirpizadon, who was bred in her father’s lab and has a genius I.Q., as a furball. [Was that a sentence?] Soangdu, is an octopus that hates people and hates being thought a pet. [No comma needed in that sentence.] When they discover that her mother’s murder was only part of a conspiracy trying to take over; [Take over what? Whatever. Change semicolon to comma.] they must try to destroy the whole conspiracy with the help of a pet-shop owner who seems to know too much and is close to the leader [Leader of what?] and a doctor on a quest for [a] mythical recipe for Twinkies.

My 60,000 word young adult book, “A Girl and Her Octopus: It’s a Beautiful Thing”, is a science-fiction story that plays with ideas about what is “human”.

Sincerely,


Notes

It's safe to assume that if this were a real query for a real book it wouldn't have "It's a Beautiful Thing" tacked onto the title. Even A Girl and Her Octopus is a title so ridiculous it could be applied only to bad fan fiction about Spiderman's nemesis, Dr. Octopus.