Get Your Cliches from Hell Here!
Yesterday, I read this:
The Top Ten Storytelling Cliches that Need to Disappear Forever
Did you read it? Or did you skip to here? If you skipped, that’s okay. Who’s gonna know? But the rest of this post will make more sense if you click on the link and at least skim the list of cliches, m’kay?
Now: Here’s what I think about that post:
“I agree! And I’m dancing with glee!”
“Huh?” you say. “How can you agree that a writer shouldn’t use this list of cliches? For fuck’s sake, Hyperlink from Hell is loaded with them!”
To which I say: “You bet it is! It’s front-end loaded! It’s satire, remember? I can’t begin to say how thrilled I am to have hit the bullseye on 7 out of 10 of these!”
But listen: Hyperlink isn’t JUST satire. It isn’t just Pinocchio, poking his little (and sometimes not-so-little) nose into society’s blowhole to see where the bloated whale of our culture springs a leak. I took great pains to make sure he’s also a real boy — a real story about real(ish), crazy people. And I know some of you readers REALLY get that. And I love you for it.
But I’ve also realized that for other readers to get that, they need the other two books in the series, like, NOW. And they aren’t finished. So maybe I should have waited ’til they were done before publishing the first book, but live and learn — and I’ve learned so much from this last year and met so many wonderful readers and other writers, that I wouldn’t go back and change a thing…
Except one. I will soon be uploading a new version of the ebook, with a preview of the second book plopped on the end. Yes, you will soon learn if there’s a body in the tunnel! You won’t have to wait. And after I make those changes, I will make the book free for a while.
Then, after the troll anthology is out, I will write my fingers off to get those other two books out as soon as I can.
Now, about those cliches… Let’s have some fun with them!
1. Characters describing themselves in mirrors: Yes, Jimmie does, just once, stare at his face in the mirror and describe what he sees. But since his appearance keeps changing at Al’s Almighty whim, how else would he know what he looks like at any given time? It’s a win-win!
3. Blaming bad behavior on bad parenting: The whole book is a satirical look at this one. ‘Nuff said.
4. Too many inside jokes/references: All part of the satirical experience, at no extra charge.
5. The chosen one: Bullseye!
6. Countdown clocks: I am practically orgasmic that they included this one on the list!
7. Veiling your message in a dream: Or three! Weeeeeeee!!!
10. Knocking characters unconscious for plot convenience: Poor Jimmie! I did this countless times to him! And all on purpose! (I am a fucking genius!)
Now, I know what you’re thinking:
“What about numbers 2 (Broadcasting an upcoming plot twist), 8 (Using sex as wish fulfillment) and 9 (Magical Negroes and Noble Savages)?”
Well, I’ll do my best to squeeze 2 and 8 into books 2 and 3, but as for 9? No fucking way. I will simply have to admit defeat on that one — wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot Polish person — but you know, my own list of Cliches from Hell…
Is just getting started!
Grant E. Hamilton’s 1885 political cartoon for the “The Judge” magazine.
(Wikimedia Commons)
“STATE YOUR OCCUPATION!”
Just signed the tax forms. Where it said “occupation,” I put “writer,” but only because THIS wouldn’t fit:
“I take those stupid fb tests, you know, the ones where you’re supposed to find out which ’80s action hero you are (John McClane), or which Harry Potter character you are (Hermione, duh!), or which famous writer is your soulmate, even though she’s dead and you’re not a lesbian (Virginia Woolf) or which kick-ass character you are from a TV series (RIVER SONG, alias Melody Pond. I get to marry The Doctor, who, by the way, has also kissed me mum).”
You know what else wouldn’t fit under “Occupation”? This:
“I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.” (Phillip Roth)
Or this: “I do the hokey pokey and I turn the words around…”
Or this. “Yes, I AM a writer! I didn’t say it pays…”
Or this: “Stop laughing, IRS guy! I said, Stop laughing!”
You know what would fit, though? “Hello, Sweetie!”
Gone Hollywood? Or just Nuts?
Not blogging much lately, since I’m in the throes of editing the charity anTROLLogy. But here’s one other thing that’s been going on…
Among other things, he has some mysteries out. I liked them. A lot. I mean, what’s not to love about Richard Nixon as a private detective? That’s one Tricky private Dick! So I asked Casper to beta for me, saying I’d be happy to return the favor. After all, my alter-ego editor, Miss Prissy, is feared throughout the land — or at least throughout the Internet.
Throughout one small corner of the Internet.
Throughout…
OK, so she has ME hiding under the bed! (But who cares? I’m reading by Kindle-light down here.)
Casper the friendly author enjoyed my story, suggested a few tiny changes — but said they really were little things. He was happy that I’d loved his short mystery, The Case of the Pink Lady, and was gracious when Miss Prissy sent him her list of Pink Lady typos.
When Casper wrote to me, he mentioned that he was accustomed to writing for TV. So, since I now had his real name (no, I’m not tellin’), I looked him up. Turns out he wrote for several sitcoms that I’d loved. He also was an actor in a series (the name of which I won’t mention). He gave up series writing after 9/11. Now, among other things, he teaches scriptwriting.
Anyway — how cool is that? A Hollywood scriptwriter liked my story!
I got up the nerve to confess that I’d looked him up, and thanked him for years of enjoyment — and, by the way, would he like a paperback copy of my book, since it’s chock-full of TV references? (He’d already mentioned that he loved the cover. He brought it up, not me.)
He asked for a copy. I sent it. Sure hope he likes it.
At one point (in the shower, of all places), I realized that I’d offered to beta-read… for a Hollywood script-writer! And sent him a list of his typos! So embarrassing, right?
I was a pink naked lady.
My husband, hearing running water accompanied by hysterical laughter, might have thought I’d gone nuts….
But that ship sailed long ago.
The War of the Words… Has Begun!
First “misread” word of 2014:
Emma => enema.
First typo in 2014:
Updated => unpated.
Pretty sure I know what enema means.
Let’s say no more about it.
But what could “unpated” mean?
Since “pate” means the crown of the head, “unpated” must mean:
“One who has had the top of one’s head lopped off.”
I imagine it’s like cracking the top off a soft-boiled egg, in one deft thwack.
(If you’re thinking about “pâté” right now, don’t. Just… don’t.)
Let’s use “unpated” in a sentence, shall we? Perhaps in a hard-boiled detective novel. One which begins: “It was the best of crimes, it was the worst of crimes…” Here we go:
“The victim was unpated. Defenestrated.”
Now, let’s see what the Internet has to say about “unpated”:
- WordFind graciously provides an anagram: “unadept.” (Are they trying to tell me something?)
- Wiktionary kindly asks: “Do you mean ‘update’? (Yes, yes I do. And I should be getting on with it.)
- OmniiDict! chides: “The proper spelling of this word is “unpathed”. (How dare they?! It’s presumptuous to imply I have no idea where I’m going with this! Correct, but presumptuous.)
- But YouTube — precious YouTube! — suggests I go to war over it. (Thus, the bullets.)
It’s going to be a fun war.
Happy reading and fighting!
Let Ruth Harris Slay Your Writing Dragons
The following is reblogged from Anne R. Allen’s Blog. Go there. Read the Whole thing. Enjoy. Then get back to writing.
Still here? Not quite ready to commit to the click-through? Then here’s the dragon teaser:
6 Writing Dragons: How To Slay Them…and Realize Your Writing Dreams in 2014
Why Tough (Self-) Love (and Some Dragon-Slaying) Will Get You Where You Want To Be Next Year
- You’re tweeting instead of writing.
- You’re surfing the web instead of writing.
- You’re making coffee instead of writing.
- You’re answering emails instead of writing.
- You’re cleaning the bathroom instead of writing.
- You’re organizing your spices instead of writing.
Bottom line: You’re doing anything and everything you can think of except write.
2) The Interruption Dragon
- The phone.
- The kids.
- The dog.
- The cat.
- Your husband/wife/significant other.
- The Amazon drone delivering 3 pairs of gym socks you ordered half an hour ago.
- You lose your train of thought. If you were in the zone, you’re now out of the zone. If you weren’t in the zone, you’re now out in Siberia.
3) The What-Happens-Next? Dragon
- So now what happens?
- What does the MC do?
- What do the bad guys do?
- What does his/her husband/wife, cubicle mate, best friend, bridge partner, girl friend/boy friend, Pilates teacher, dog walker, nutty neighbor, favorite TV comedian or movie star do?
- Who says what? And to whom?
- You forgot why you’re writing the damn book and you hate every word anyway because you’re a no-talent nobody.
- You can’t figure out whether it’s a comedy, a thriller, urban fantasy, horror or romance.
- You can’t remember why you started the stupid thing in the first place.
- You have no idea what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how you got from there to here.
Excessive, much?
Not really.
***
For the rest of the dragon line-up and how to vanquish the beasts, read the post here. And have a happy, healthy, kick-ass-writing New Year!
(Illustration from Wikimedia Commons: Frontispiece to chapter 12 of 1905 edition of J. Allen St. John‘s The Face in the Pool, published 1905.)
Fantasy Evildoers are All Gay (says no study whatsoever)
Tis still the season to blog under the influence. So, Ho Ho Ho. There’s a study to explain why we writers should all go out and play more. It’s all about Vitamin D and hobbits and fantasy bad guys. My conclusion? (Remember, I am blogging under the influence. Don’t do this at home):
Fantasy Evildoers are All Gay (says no study whatsoever).
No, really. No study whatsoever has ever found that to be the case. So it MUST be true.
The only thing better about this (following) study would have been if the U.S. government had paid for it, and Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin had had a cow over it. And then Sarah Palin shot the cow. And then she and Michele ate it. And then Peta and Greenpeace got involved, somehow, perhaps meeting at (or on) a holiday ice-breaker, with Pussy Riot as the entertainment. And then Vladimir Putin came riding in, shirtless, on a reindeer…
Cuz, you know, Vitamin D cures gay people. Especially hobbits.
I have reprinted just the abstract of the study. You know, the study that doesn’t say Vitamin D cures gay hobbits. Cuz, you know, lawsuits.
Abstract for:
The hobbit — an unexpected deficiency
by
Joseph A Hopkinson and Nicholas S Hopkinson
Objective: Vitamin D has been proposed to have beneficial effects in a wide range of contexts. We investigate the hypothesis that vitamin D deficiency, caused by both aversion to sunlight and unwholesome diet, could also be a significant contributor to the triumph of good over evil in fantasy literature.
Design: Data on the dietary habits, moral attributes and martial prowess of various inhabitants of Middle Earth were systematically extracted from J R R Tolkien’s novel The hobbit.
Main outcome measures: Goodness and victoriousness of characters were scored with binary scales, and dietary intake and habitual sun exposure were used to calculate a vitamin D score (range, 0–4). Results: The vitamin D score was significantly higher among the good and victorious characters (mean, 3.4; SD, 0.5) than the evil and defeated ones (mean, 0.2; SD, 0.4; P < 0.001).
Conclusion: Further work is needed to see if these pilot results can be extrapolated to other fantastic situations and whether randomised intervention trials need to be imagined.
Read the rest of the post here! It’s fascinating. And there are hobbits!
(Why are you still here? I said read it! It’s not like you have anything else to do today.)
Merry Christmas!
Who Gives a Crap?
(Please bear with me; there’s a method to my “psychic shit” madness!)
Some of you know that I jokingly fancy myself a media psychic. That is, some strange, very specific things have happened on TV, online or on the radio not long after I thought or dreamed of them. Truth is, I’m almost 100% sure that they are coincidences — but they are freaky, nonetheless. I’m not claiming causation in either direction — just correlation.
Here’s one example: I had a nightmare, in which I was walking behind some friends in a supposedly haunted house. They were all spooked, but of course I was whining about not believing in ghosts and how stupid it all was, when I was grabbed by the clothes on the middle of my back — as if by a giant hand or maybe a grappling hook — and yanked backwards, twenty or thirty feet across the room. This scared the living shit out of me and I woke up.
That evening I was washing dishes and decided to turn the TV to a channel I never watched. I went back to the sink, but turned to look at a commercial — which was a scene from a new movie: the scene from my dream, exactly.
Oftentimes, I wake up with a strange word or sentence in my head, and that turns out to be meaningful during the day. Remember Quid Pro Ho? But these days, since I injured my arm and sleep with it in a sling, I wake up thinking “Careful… careful…careful.” Because, if I move just wrong trying to get out of bed, the pain is faintingly sharp.
This morning, my first thought after “Careful… careful…careful” was about toilet paper. That’s not so surprising; after all, what do you do first when you get up? Pee. But today, sitting there, I started pitying the forests of the world, and wondering if there was a really sensible alternative to toilet paper — one that wouldn’t use more precious resources, such as water, or cause worse environmental and public health problems. I wished Turkish plumbing was better, so we could flush toilet paper instead of it ending up in landfills. There, poor people are exposed to the unspeakable as they try to salvage something to sell to recyclers — thus spreading filth, and possibly disease, far and wide. So I started wondering if composting toilets compost the toilet paper, too, and next thing you know I’m off the john and online to look it up. “But first let’s just check facebook…”
where we find this, the original sit-in, for “Who Gives a Crap” toilet paper:
So, do I think these coincidences happen for a reason? No. Can I make them meaningful? Yes. For example, I can pledge to give all my 2014 profits from the paperback version of “Hyperlink from Hell” to the charity that “Who Gives a Crap” toilet paper supports with 50% of their profits: WaterAid. Their mission is to “promote and secure poor people’s rights and access to safe water, improved hygiene and sanitation”, worldwide. What better charity could my toilet-obsessed ghosts support? What other books have parts dedicated to poo? (remember Part Two: Shit with Wings?) I’ll also set it up so that anyone who buys the paperback in 2014 gets the ebook for a discount (for free, if I can manage that).
For those who don’t live in the US, here’s the global page for Wateraid, which will take you where you need to go, in case you’d like to make a direct deposit. For the holidays.
If you are lucky enough to live in Australia, you can do even more. You can really give a crap, because “Who Gives a Crap” toilet paper can be delivered to your door.
Quid Pro HoHoHo!
Secrets-of-the-Universe
John Collier’s
“Priestess of Delphi”
Question:
What does someone do with the time someone intended to spend putting up decorations, cooking, etc., when one has a bum arm and is forbidden to do any of the above? (Put up a tree? I can’t open a f&cking tuna can! I can’t yank the Band-aids off my own ass, the ones covering my two-a-day injection sites!)
Answer:
Someone finally joins Quora, and contemplates the secrets of the universe in question and answer form. (Someone also gets her husband to open the f&cking tuna. The tree? Ha ha ha ha ha… And the Band-aids will fall off eventually. Probably into the toilet. Clogging it up. You think Band-aids can’t clog up a toilet? We once had a plumber accuse us of flushing so much dental floss that it clogged the pipes. We did not flush dental floss. Not even a single strand. Someone did, though. But who? When? And did they cackle maniacally while they did so? Could they see the future, or know what damage that floss would wrought? We will never know.)
So, I probably won’t be asking or answering a lot of questions over at Quora, because this is the kind of question I want to ask:
“Who flushed all the f&cking dental floss, and why do I care that the plumber believes it was me?”
Mostly, I will be skulking around Quora like a one-armed, Band-aid-buttocked Bandit. It is my way. But I wonder how the inhabitants of planet Quora would answer Jimmie’s Secrets-of-the-universe questions, in Hyperlink from Hell. Remember this? It’s Jimmie’s lament that, given the opportunity to ask God anything he wanted, he’d wasted that golden moment:
I’d blown my chance to ask Al some gritty, secrets-of-the-universe type questions, like “Why do flies always buzz around the center of a room?” or “How can blind people tell when they’re done wiping?”
Well, You can’t just ask them, can You?
I’m deadly serious. Wipe that smile off your face. And while you’re at it, I could use some help in the bathroom.
No, no; not that.
It’s just…
I can’t floss my f&cking teeth.
Exclusive: Questions and Answers with John L. Monk
Giving thanks to the universe for all my writer friends. Here’s one with:
Humility. Hilarity. Humongous Head. Full of tiny beavers.
People bug me all the time for advice, information, or just to see what I’m up to. I don’t normally give interviews (for security reasons), and so the world has been robbed of a lot of my insight. When I wrote Kick, for the first time ever my ideas were made available to the masses. But could I have done more?
Recently I agreed to do an interview, but stipulated that it only be published here, on my blog, and that the interviewer receive zero monetary benefit or notoriety. I didn’t want them tainting the purity of the interview process. To their credit, they agreed.
Questions:
Q: John L. Monk, where do you get your ideas?
JLM: sometimes they come to me in dreams. Sometimes I get my ideas from the many facets of a single snowflake, descending to the Earth like a crystallized platter, as if thrown from…
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The Masses need Glasses
Dear Universe,
This post was meant to be about author J.A. Konrath.
Well, not about J.A. Konrath, himself, more about this blog post of his, called “Zen and the Art of Bitching“, which reminded me of this part in Hyperlink from Hell where God starts bitching about all the lazy, ungrateful humans who sit on their asses and blame Him for their troubles. That is: they want Him to do everything; they won’t take responsibility for their lives. You know, like people who won’t wear seatbelts and blame Him for not deploying the airbag, as they sail through the windshield and into Intensive Care. If they’re lucky.
So, naturally, I ended up on YouTube watching this apologetic book trailer for Blinders Keepers, a book I’d never heard of by an author I’d never heard of, either. (I may be the last in the universe. I usually am. Damn You, Universe!)
I checked out the book’s blurb, on Amazon:
Collapse, chaos, confusion, rioting, looting. And that’s the good news!
America is coming apart and the President can do nothing to stop it. But 23-year-old Noah Tass has his own problems. Stuck his entire life in the hayseed capital of the Bible Belt after his father abandoned him 18 years ago, he has no future, all his friends are losers, his job is a dead end, his mother is stark raving mad, and his sister is a meth head stripper.
It was time to bail! Time to strike out a new path, to discover America, and kick start his life. Noah leaves Missouri and for a year truly experiences the adventure of a lifetime. But the country is one big loony bin and he ends up in the sock puppet theater of contemporary American life, inhabited by a deranged blundering president, brutal agents of the ATF, FBI and NSA — men who kill first and ask questions later — and an underground of wild and wacky but endearing freaks who are trying to overthrow the existing order.
Blinders Keepers is social-political satire in the tradition of Jonathan Swift, Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, but revved up and spit-shined to take on the historic new levels of absurdity and dysfunction of the 21st Century. It is one young man’s laugh-out-loud struggle to survive the epic disintegration of the American Dream.
Next, I downloaded the sample to My Precious (Kindle), because I can’t afford to buy any new books until, like, 2045, and I started reading it. And that’s when I realized the title (Blinders Keepers) had special meaning to me. Because when I read this sentence:
“As I stand before this great body and look at the faces of those who have dedicated themselves…”
I saw this, instead:
“As I stand before this great body and look at the feces of those who have defecated themselves…”
So this post is about needing glasses.
Now… who can I blame for that?
Belly-up! 
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