Cartoon 208

Caption: writtenwyrdd

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Demotivational Posters 2

WO

Paca (Photo: Homonihilis)

Dave


Judy

anon.

Kiersten


Buffy

EE (Photo: misscarrion)

New Beginning 548

Mary-Fitz stepped out of her room, her knitting bag in its accustomed place over her arm, ready to check on the preparations for the masquerade ball, only to be halted by the sight of the moles, drawn up in ranks before her door, gazing intently at the knitting bag.

She knew what they wanted. Her bag was full of bits and pieces ideally suited to making mole dress-up trappings. But it would take a much harder heart than hers to resist all those pleading beady little eyes. She opened the bag and removed her works in progress and everything irreplaceable. “Knock yourselves out,” she muttered as she tossed the bag to the floor, then watched in bemusement as it disappeared down the hall, borne aloft on a ripple of dark fur.

First she checked on the ballroom that had been opened for the first time in a long while. Cheerful hobbits with soft cloths strapped to the soles of their hairy feet skated about, enjoying their task of polishing the waxed floor to a high gloss. The chandelier had been lowered and shone with repeated applications of elbow grease; and each candelabrum held a brand-new white beeswax taper. Chairs had been arranged around the edge of the floor for the danced-out, interspersed with pots of assorted greenery freshening both the décor and the atmosphere. (Tal had barely stopped one inexperienced hobbit from trying to repot a Giant Carnivorous Murfling Fern, which would have livened up the proceedings considerably.)



"Umm, if I could stop you right there, Ms. . . . Fitz?"

"Yes?"

The agent tried to smile. "Are you related to Tolkien at all?"

"Who, me?" The author's eyes lit up. "Why no! Why do you ask?"

"Hobbits are the property of Tolkien's estate." The agent sighed. "Look, I've taken on the lawyers from Disney. I've taken on Rowling. Even Scientology. But there's no way in hell I'm tackling lawyers from the Tolkien estate. Those sharks will eat us alive. I'm sorry, but I can't represent this."

She nodded slowly and stood to go. All day at this writing conference, and everyone had told her the same thing. Still, she had to try. Tucking her hair behind her delicately pointed ears, she collected her knitting bag and made her way to the next agent available, a lady named Miss Snark. Maybe this time, she thought, I'll be lucky.


Opening: Tal.....Continuation: Khazar-khum

Cartoon 207

Caption: Anon.

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Demotivation Posters

Here's a half dozen of the posters. If I try to save them all I'll lose some. More tomorrow.

Dave

anon.

EE

Paca

ril

Kiersten

Face-Lift 561

Guess the Plot

Extra Lives

1. On the eve of the release of their latest video game, a company's chief game developer is murdered. Only Elliot Finch, game programmer, can solve the case--although some detective wants in on the glory. Also, a kid who speaks only in code.

2. He strangled, shot, stabbed, poisoned, ran over, drowned, burned, crushed, and hung the cat. But it was still alive because the witch next door had given it . . . extra lives.

3. Jason Liebenkrantz escapes his despair over mortality by playing video games day and night until his soul is drawn into his Xbox. The quality of life in there is pretty low, and the women are all 2D, but at least he gets plenty of . . . extra lives.

4. Computer games mean everything to Bob: escape from his nagging mother, and a chance to prove his father wrong about being a dumb nobody. When an anonymous contact offers Bob the code for unlimited lives in Roger Bopping IV, it could make Bob the world champion - or get him banned forever from competitive gaming.

5. Mortally wounded in a battle between Good and Evil, Morvin discovers he can recover and continue the fight by shoving two quarters up his ass. Can he defeat the spawn of Satan before running out of coins or developing piles?

6. Morris the Cat meets the zombies in this action packed thriller of kitty redemption. Does Morris have enough lives left to defeat the zombie master?


Original Version

Mr. Ed:

Elliot Finch isn't a detective. [I'm hooked already. You don't know how sick I am of mysteries in which the main character is a detective. I mean, if Miss Marple can solve a murder, the average plumber or flight attendant or video game developer ought to be able to handle it.] He's a programmer for Advirture, a video game development company on the verge of releasing Talent, a major breakthrough. But the company's chief developer has been found dead in the back halls of E3, the largest video-game exposition in the country, and Finch is the only one with enough inside knowledge to unravel the tangle of back-office deals, lies and double-crosses surrounding the murder.

In the world of video games, one hit can make a company and one miss can destroy it. It's populated by [What's populated by? The world of videogames? A company? Or the book?] people like the thirteen-year-old prodigy who refuses to speak in anything but code, the CEO so afraid of other people that he's hired an actor for personal appearances, and the motion-capture model trying to hide her addiction to on-line role playing games. Each of them has a stake in the success or failure of Talent, and every company on the E3 floor has a motive for seeing Advirture collapse. [I would think that if they're on the verge of releasing the game, it must be in production, as they'd have to make huge numbers of them before they could release it. I don't see this murder stopping the game from coming out.]

Someone is willing to kill to either steal the new technology or prevent it from ever reaching the shelves. With the help of a veteran detective, Finch has to find out who is responsible before their plan to destroy Advirture requires the death of Finch himself.

Extra Lives is a 90,000 word mystery. My short fiction has appeared in X and Y.

Thank-you for your time.


Notes

You seem to have what you need for a mystery. A dead person, some suspects, and a detective. Unfortunately, your crime apparently will be solved by Finch, who is less likely than the detective to find new murders to solve in future books in the series. Just thinking ahead.

If everyone on the floor of the biggest video game exposition has a motive, I don't see how unraveling the tangle of deals, lies and double-crosses gets us anywhere. There's a reason most murder mysteries have five to eight suspects. 30,000 suspects is unwieldy.

Spoiler Alert: I think it would be an enlightening exercise to see how an experienced editor reads between the lines to solve a murder mystery. If you plan to read the book, stop reading now.

Okay, who are the suspects?

1. The 13-year-old kid.
2. The CEO.
3. The model.
4. The actor.
5. Finch.
6. The dead person's heir(s).
7. Lord Mountbatten.
8. Someone so insignificant he wasn't even worthy of being mentioned in the query because he barely appears in the book until it's revealed at the end that he had a long-standing grudge with the deceased.

We immediately eliminate Finch. Even though he isn't a detective, he might be needed for a sequel if the book takes off.

The kid is out. There'd be no satisfaction in having a kid get the chair. Plus, the final confession would be in code, so we wouldn't understand it.

The heirs are out. You don't set the book in a gaming expo if the spouse or kid did it. You set it in an English manor.

The actor is out. No motive unless he's fallen in love with the CEO. But the CEO is afraid of people, and probably hasn't even met the actor.

Already we've cut the field in half.

The CEO is too obvious. If it turns out to be the CEO everyone's gonna say, I knew it was the CEO. They'll be disappointed. If it's the CEO, I suggest you change the ending before sending the manuscript off. If this were your sixth Elliot Finch mystery, you could make it the CEO, because by now everyone trusts that you wouldn't make it the obvious person.

So we've narrowed it down to the motion capture model, the person who was never mentioned, and Lord Mountbatten. This is where it gets tough. We need to think about motive. The victim was a major player in the design of the game. The model wouldn't have had much contact with the victim unless they had something going on the side. A crime of passion? I don't buy it. I think the motive had something to do with the breakthrough technology. Also, being addicted to games, the model would want the game to be released so she could play it. Killing the developer just delays that.

Now you're thinking you see the brilliance of having included Lord Mountbatten on the list, because we can easily eliminate him on the grounds he died in 1979, when the video game industry was dominated by Ms. Pacman. But not so fast! For the insignificant character never mentioned in the query turns out to be . . . Lord Mountbatten Jr., international adventurer, video game executive, heir to the Mountbatten fortune, and . . . cold-blooded killer. An interesting twist, but . . . having had no trouble determining whodunnit, I of course wouldn't request this manuscript.

Cartoon 206

Caption: anon.

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Motivational Posters 1 & 2

Writtenwyrdd suggested that as a writing exercise we visit http://diy.despair.com/motivator.php and create motivational posters. I'm thinking this is the type of thing we should post one of each day, an ongoing exercise. Until the well starts running dry.

Visit the site. Read their sample posters. They're funny. Creating your own is easy, but if you have trouble, let me know. Unlike the samples, all of ours should have something to do with Evil Editor or the writing/publishing professions. I've placed one of each type below.

Use your own photograph or one you have permisssion to use. Or tell me what you want in the photo and I'll find one for you. Don't just take a photo off the web.

I'm posting just the best one I have available each day. That probably means some will never get posted, so make them good. You'll note that one of the options after you see your poster is to edit it, so get it looking good before saving it to your computer (by right-clicking on the finished poster) and then submitting it here.

New Beginning 547

On that first day I woke up to arguing between some of my brothers and sisters. For some reason I'd been sleeping on the floor in the middle of my bedroom. Plants surrounded me in a large ring. Wrapping around each other slowly growing more and more intertwined, they formed a deathly wreath of red poppies, belladonna, and purple irises. My hand was outstretched to the wreath's edge, and there clasping it was my brother Bran, who lay on the floor just outside the ring. Eyes watering, he smiled at me and his voice filled my thoughts.

Welcome back.

Bran and I shared the same empathic powers, and more often than not we communicated with our thoughts, feelings, and emotions rather than spoken words. His body rang with joy, and he sent me his ebullience through our clasping hands.

Our siblings must have noticed the change in his mood because their bickering ceased, and they all came to stand around the wreath. Even though they held smiles on their faces, an underlying sense of doubt emanated from them all except Bran. His was the only true smile.

We called him "Bran" because he, like I, was a vegetarian. The others, clearly with mixed feelings on my revival, were resigning themselves to another night of macaroni.


Opening: Xiexie.....Continuation: Anon.

Cartoon 205

Caption: Gypsum

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New Beginning 546

Mike picked up Charlotte and held her tenderly in his arms. He looked into her eyes and felt a love deeper than any he could ever have imagined. Even though 6 months had passed, the pain of her arrival still haunted him. As much as he loved her, she had cost him dearly.

His wife, the love of his life, Suzie was lost forever and it was all because of Charlotte, little Charlie. You can’t think like that Mike told himself. After all, despite the heartache and loss Charlie’s birth had caused, he wouldn’t give her up to get his old life back. After all she was his daughter. He just wished Suzie could be here as well.

Charlie wrapped her hand around the end of Mike’s pinky and giggled. The sound of it ripped at his heart; her mother used to laugh exactly the same way. Don’t think about her, Mike told himself. The only way he could get through the days was to suppress any thoughts of Suzie.



Sweet Jesus, Evil Editor thought. This is like a suicide looking for a depression. Is this the start of a new death culture?" He let the page fall to his desk like it was cursed. Three chapters on the death of his wife in childbirth and now the father is contemplating murder? If I publish this, the police will come at me for starting a new wave of euthanasia. He pulled on rubber gloves to handle the pages, shoved them into a bio-hazard bag and dropped them in the nearest "burn-before-reading" bin.

Opening: Shell I.....Continuation: Dave F.

Cartoon 204

Caption: R. Watson/EE

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Bad Analogies, Final Batch

He was on her like a hobo on a ham sandwich. --Robin Jr.

She looked like a run-on sentence type of girl, like someone who never knew that even compound sentences lose their effect when used too often, and that you really can use too many commas, because even if you have discovered the glory of the semi-colon, people can only focus on one sentence for so long before losing interest; it's too much to ask for them to keep up with the stream of thoughts, and that was exactly the kind of thing you expected when she opened her mouth: it would be exhausting, and you would be left unsure of what she had even said, or how she managed to say it all in a single breath. --Kiersten

She felt used and forgotten, like the last sliver of soap that falls into the corner of the shower, except she didn't have someone else's pubes stuck to her, at least not at the moment. --blogless

Cut the end off a bean burrito, and then squeeze the middle really hard so the beans spurt out the open end, and you'll have an idea what it was like when Max Lugar had the runs. --EE

My knowledge of distinctions between analogies, metaphors and similes is comparable to my wife’s understanding of north, south, east and west. --luke

The man guarding the door looked like an ox — only with two legs rather than four, considerably less hair, a broadly vertical posture, feet and hands instead of hooves, just the one stomach, eyes that looked broadly forwards, no tail, no hope of producing offspring via sexual encounters with a female ox, no experience of pulling carts or farmyard machinery through the mud with ropes yoked to his back and a culinary repertoire embracing a more diverse range of subsistence foods than grass, dried protein pellets and the occasional turd consumed in error. --Whirl

The bird flew across the sky, occasionally diving like a plane full of people stuck in turbulence. --Shell I

Understanding women is like opening a can of lima bean soup; you're not sure you want to. --Bill H.

He was lost, like an organ grinder's monkey whose organ grinder is passed out drunk in the gutter. --stick and move

Like the pang in the belly that tells you that the cancer has recurred; like the dagger in your best friend’s hand as he approaches you in the Forum; like the kiss of betrayal—that’s what it’s like to see your New Beginning on Evil Editor’s blog. --tal

Bad Analogies, Batch 4

After she kissed him, she smiled and gazed deeply into his eyes like she was looking for his hippocampus. --blogless

Life is short, nasty and often bloody, like a hard-core wrestling midget. --D Jason Cooper

The hero of the story turned from a tasty hunky hero into a mere slip of the tongue, a hackneyed turn of phrase, a horny goof pointing what once was his steely rod throbbing with power and now was visualized as spasmodic vulgarity and faltering vigor. For indeed, even as anti-hero he lacked forward drift, purposeful concomitant and actionable thought as much as mud flung into the sky only just knows where it is to land and not what will be the bull's eye smackdown. --Dave F.

He stomped down the street, like a ballerina with a broken leg. --Shell I

Understanding women is like opening a can of French onion soup; c'est la vie. --Bill H.

Suzie was blind as a bat, but compensated for it by smelling like a dog. --Whirl

He felt queasy but somehow triumphant, like a zombie that had just eaten his own brain and found that it disagreed with him. --tal

Like a chain-reaction accident on the freeway spread across multiple lanes in its path of destruction, so hideously garish was her make-up, from the frosted pink lips to the rainbow-hued eyes, that I could not look away. --Meri

Her legs quivered like the mucousy blobs of jellyfish that sometimes washed up on the beach, only not quite that disgusting. Except she had spider veins, and they didn't. So maybe quite that disgusting. --Kiersten

Belcher's name brought forth a chuckle no matter how often he was introduced, like a joke about Uranus. --EE

Bad Analogies, Batch 3

He kissed her, expecting her lips to suck at his own like a vacuum cleaner, but when they enveloped his entire torso, and her invading tongue licked around inside him till the capillaries in his toes swelled with the squelch of slugs pumped full of jelly, he knew he should have left it till they reached the decompression chamber. --Whirl

The girl was young and pretty, the way her nanna was once young and pretty all those years ago during the war and all the soldiers who visited thought she was young and pretty and asked her to marry them but she didn't want to get married when she was so young and pretty so she turned them all down until she met the girl's grandfather and she married him. --Shell I

Understanding women is like opening a can of soup; contents should be heated and stirred. --Bill H.

She was alone and abandoned, like a meerkat that had gotten on an interurban bus by mistake and found itself in Minneapolis. --tal

As Mary Sue landed on her butt, she thought that the dance floor was slicker than the greased piglet at the country fair and much less comfortable. --Dave F.

Eating with chopsticks is like writing with your left hand . . . unless you're left-handed. --EE

His attitudes were as passé as text messaging will probably be some day when everybody carries around little two-way audio/video devices, maybe wearing them on their wrists, sort of like Dick Tracy, if anybody still remembers him. --Paul Penna

Her boyfriend was about as useful as a crocheted tractor. --Robin Jr.

His hands roamed the area between her breasts and thighs with the stealthy diligence of a moonshiner in the woods on his way to the still. --Meri

The receptionist was useless and irritating, like a handful of iron filings in your underwear. --blogless

Bad Analogies, Batch 2

He had tried to act more sophisticated than he was, like a New Yorker (sic) pretending to be a Buffalonian (sic). --D Jason Cooper

Henry Higgins once said "oozing charm from every pore, he oiled his way across the floor," but that was too good for the mayoral candidate. More apt was "buzzwords squealing from every orifice like zits on a juvenescent schnozola, the mayor drooled pre-arrogant jingo and oppo-research epithets." --Dave F.

What are moles like? Like a wind in the trees that softly whispers your name; like the sweet scent of a wood fire on a frosty night; like the trembling touch of a lover’s hand on your cheek—that’s what moles are like. Or not. --tal

Understanding women are like a can of Navy bean soup; the contents are comfort food. --Bill H.

Her teeth were like planks on a yellow fence, and her eyes blinked curiously, like a dairy cow confronted with a singularly difficult question: to eat or not to eat. --stick and move

The man was strong, like a baby isn't. --Shell I

He seemed oddly distracted, like a guy watching a play and knowing John Wilkes Booth is sitting right behind him. --EE

Gingerly, the redhead slipped off her knickers. --Whirl

Harold was as self-effacing as some guy you just kicked in the nuts. --Paul Penna

His odd head looked like a puckered up swim cap left out in the sun. --Robin

So disproportionate in size was her butt to the rest of her body, it appeared as though she had stuffed an entire beanbag chair into the backside of her pants, one bean at a time. --Meri

Bad Analogies, Batch 1

His voice was soft and sad, like sitting in lemon spread. --D Jason Cooper

It was an unorthodox choice, like spending one’s life translating Caesar’s COMMENTARIES into Latin. --tal

Writing exercises are like work, except you get paid in yucks instead of bucks. --Bill H.

She was talented but frustrated, with all the pent up ambition of a one-armed juggler. --stick and move

When the doctor told him he had six months to live, Kenkleman felt like a guy who'd just gotten a rejection slip from God. --EE

Convincing the jury my client wasn't a murderer would be difficult, like trying to relieve your constipation while Gilbert Gottfried sings Ava Maria in the next stall. --blogless

The man let out a terrifying scream, like a thousand parrots trapped in a particle accelerator with Englebert Humperdinck. --Whirl

The water was cold, like coffee left on the bench for too long. --Shell I

There are levels of bullshit. The childlike extravagance of my dad can beat up your dad. The elementally defensive commentary that blue or green does not make her butt look fat. The enriching blather that each child is equally creative, athletic and maybe even gifted in all ways. The newsy equivalence of opposing views comparing apples, dates and road cakes with peaches, pearls and whale turds, after all, lists of three items are undeniably logical making them incomparable and unquestionably accurate. Then there is the glorification of a lie, a set of words so false that truth pales and trembles - its crotch wet with fear and its anus quivering in horror; Lies so barren of truth that real men feel pain upon hearing and even cowards draw back, enamored of the audaciousness, enthralled by the spunky, odiferous stench that fills the ears, offends the eyes. Bullshit so fertile and fecund that it makes bold men dumb and righteous men howl tears and words of anguish rarely heard. --Dave F.

The tone and volume of her voice dipped and looped back upon itself, like a butterfly in flight, briefly resting on a word or phrase before taking off again as she expounded her theories on ex-presidents. --Meri

As I looked back on it, I saw that our love affair had been like eating a three day-old taco: hot at the start, uncertain in the middle, then a ferocious mutual rejection, leaving a mess no one wanted to clean up. --Paul Penna

Saturday Film Series

Those big-name Hollywood stars with their tired sequels and mile-wide plot holes just can't compare with the kind of entertainment you find every week in Evil Editor's Shorts.

Cartoon 203

Caption: anon.

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Writing Exercise

A couple people have mentioned doing another bad analogy exercise. Why not? We've done two before. You'll find some of the better ones in Novel Deviations 3, or you can check out all of them in the archives July 20-21 2007 and the last couple days of October, 2007.

I'm limiting you to 5 per person, but if one is all you care to submit, that's fine.

Deadline Sunday at 10 AM eastern.