Bad Writer

The other day, while going through a box of photos my mother had saved,  I came across a story I had written when I was apparently seven or eight. Since it was printed—and I learned cursive writing in the third grade, I figure I must have been closer to seven when I penned—er, penciled—it.

I drew this when I was about the same age I wrote the story.

I'm not surprised I wrote a horse story. I've always loved horses. Unfortunately, I wrote this story back in the day before I'd learned much about horses. Or spelling. Or the basic principles of writing. So I'm not surprised that the story is really, really bad.

One of the things that I hate nowadays is stories that get horse information wrong. I've blogged about this before: the wrong gender for a particular historically well-known horse, a cover photo that doesn't match the horse's description, or descriptions of riding and/or horse care so dreadful as to be totally unbelievable.

Here's my story. (You can click the pictures to enlarge.) How many errors—both factual and stylistic—can you spot?

 

OK, Tom's almost four years old (and they let him play unattended by the corral!) but he's given a newborn foal that roams the range by itself (Arrrggghhh!) and is captured by Indians. But four-year-old Tom just happens to be out on the range (Alone!) and finds Spot and leads him away (The foal is already trained to stand tied and to lead?!), but the chief captures Tom (He ties up a four-year-old?!). Tom's siblings search for him on a clift—er, cliff—because goodness knows that's where four-year-olds are likely to go, doncha know. Too bad I didn't describe how Jack and Janet rode down the cliff—that scene would have been better than the scene from the 1982 movie, The Man From Snowy River, where actor Tom Berlinson rides down the mountainside. In case you missed the movie, here's the scene:

Can't you just see a couple of pre-teen kids doing that? Me neither.

With such a bad beginning, I suppose it was inevitable I grow up to become an internationally ranked bad writer. Winning two divisions of the notorious Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which celebrates the worst opening line of a novel that hasn't yet written, pretty well established my reputation.

You can read my dreadful Bulwer-Lytton entries (1999 "Worst Western" and 2008"Vile Pun") at the bottom of this page of my website:

 http://www.beckymushko.com/writingawards.htm.

Looks like I've been a bad writer for nigh onto sixty years! Is that bad, or what?

~

Get It Right When You Write

I hate it when authors don’t get details right. One of my crit partners gave me a book by a popular author (whose books are found in grocery stores and Wal-Mart) because she thought the author had, er, borrowed heavily from Earl Hamner, Jr., and wanted me to see if I agreed.

The book contains two separate “back-list” novels reissued in a special Christmas edition. I haven’t yet read as far as the part about the elderly ladies and “the recipe” that my crit partner found suspicious. That’s in the second story.

However, I did read a description of a rodeo scene (page 15) in which a former bull rider, now married with two kids, signs up for a bull riding competition, even though it causes his doctor-wife considerable stress:

When Cal’s name was announced, Jane didn’t want to look but couldn’t stop herself. Cal was inside the pen, sitting astride the bull, one end of a rope wrapped around the saddle horn and the other around his hand.

Granted, my English-teacher self is bothered by the misplaced participial phrase, “sitting astride the bull” which most definitely doesn’t modify pen (although a pen sitting astride a bull is certainly an interesting image). Plus, I believe the author meant chute instead of pen. At all the rodeos I’ve attended, the rider mounted the bull inside a chute. The bulls were kept in a pen before they went into the chute and returned to a pen after the ride.

Little words mean a lot. As Mark Twain once wrote, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

Those who write for publication, should use the right words. And they should do a bit of research. Bulls do not wear saddles during the bull-riding competitions at rodeos. There is no saddle horn because there is no saddle. (Perhaps the author was thinking of saddle bronc riding? But in saddle bronc riding, a rope still doesn’t go from the saddle horn.)

Those who edit books should be aware of correct terminology and basic grammar. Why did the editor let this error-laden passage slip by?

So, how would I rewrite the sentence? “In the chute, Cal straddled the bull and waited for the gate to open.” Since the scene is written from the wife’s viewpoint high in the stands, I probably wouldn’t describe how Cal’s hand was secured to the rigging. It’s unlikely that she could see it.

Will I ever buy any books from this popular author? I doubt it. I expect books—even fiction—to be accurate. Or at least believable.

~

Leftover Bad Writing

Now that my 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Vile Pun winner has popped up on numerous websites, a few folks have been curious about my other submissions that didn't make the cut.

Were these too good to be bad? Too bad to be bad? What? Anyhow, here they are:

“I’ve been dying to kiss you, Griselda,” Herman said as his heart went thumpity-thump, and—while locked in a passionate embrace with his beloved—he suddenly realized that getting his pacemaker from eBay (“one owner, only slightly used”) maybe wasn’t such a good deal after all, but at least his last words were appropriate.

Dumping her comatose husband’s soiled Depends into the trash and wishing that the staff at Happy Manor Nursing Home would take a more active role in the personal hygiene of stroke victims, Martha was interrupted by yet another phone call from her mother-in-law inquiring about her son’s progress, to which Martha replied, “Well, he’s a changed man.”

Double, double, toilet trouble,” muttered Anne, as she tried to keep the twins, Hamnet and Judith, on their respective potties until they’d produced something, while casting an eye at her husband Will, whose poised quill and inscrutable look told her that he was once again stuck on a line for his new play, though she’d nagged him to give up writing, get off his can, and get a job that produced a regular income, not that he ever listened to her.

“We’ll have more fun than a barrel of monkeys,” Milton’s blind date said when she called to confirm the time and place they’d meet, but Milton, a zoology buff, knew that monkeys are cantankerous little buggers with sharp teeth and a habit of flinging feces when they were angry, so he tucked a couple of emergency bananas and some moist towelettes into his pocket just in case.

Whenever I pass my childhood home, a mid-Victorian (or maybe it’s late Gothic) mansion still perched on the corner like an over-dressed but out-of-style hooker, I still hear the tinkle-tinkle of the doorbell (or perhaps it’s the leaky plumbing), see the ornate chandeliers (and remember what a bitch all those crystal prisms were to clean), recall secrets shared in the cellar (and the two or three servants still buried in the conservatory), marvel that the place is now assessed at over two million, and thus will never forgive my siblings for selling it for a mere hundred thousand, which meant I only got $14,285 before taxes, even though that seemed like a good deal at the time and the place was quite the fixer-upper.

“Lassie, help! I’ve fallen down the well!” yelled Timmy, but the brave dog, having already rescued the klutzy tyke from the well three times this week and concluding that Timmy’s removal from the gene pool was a good thing, didn’t heed the boy’s cries but instead speed-dialed his agent and begged for a new assignment, preferably one where a male collie didn’t have to pretend to be female, an act which had subjected him to ridicule from that scruffy Rin-Tin-Tin who considered himself the top dog because he saved the fort from Indians, no matter how politically incorrect that was nowadays.

OK, I can see where a few of these were a bit wordy. In the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, you venture past 60 words at your peril.

Some of the above losers were composed about the time I was writing the chapter in my middle-grade novel Stuck where two obnoxious twins fall through the floor in an old outhouse, so that no doubt accounts for three entries with poop references and one with a falling into something reference.

Note to my crit group: Yeah, I'm still revising Stuck.

I'm Bad—Again

Last night, I received this message from Scott Rice, the head honcho of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest:

Well, you've done it again. You are the winner of the Vile Puns Category of this year's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Be prepared for a media storm (or not).

This is my entry (which you probably won't get unless you're an English major, an English teacher, or a fan of a particular old movie starring Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood):

Vowing revenge on his English teacher for making him memorize Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality," Warren decided to pour sugar in her gas tank, but he inadvertently grabbed a sugar substitute so it was actually Splenda in the gas.

Anyhow, this win cements my reputation as an internationally ranked bad writer. I've mentioned before my 1996 "Worst Western" win. Meanwhile, if you want to read all the 2008 winners in various categories, here they are. (You have to scroll way down to find mine.)

So far, there hasn't been a media storm. Not even a media drizzle.

~

Literary Hoots (Unintentional)

Because I’ve self-pubbed in the past, I read a lot of other self-published writers’ books. A few are excellent. Some are pretty good. Some are—er, um, well, you know. Some are funny, though they probably weren’t supposed to be a hoot.

Because I write the occasional kid-lit piece, I sometimes read the Shelftalker blog on Publisher’s Weekly. A story from August 23, 2007, caught my eye. It was about a self-pubbed book (through Vantage, so it had to be pricey for the author to publish it) that was probably really meant to help kids back in 1990. Somehow, a lot of people now consider it a hoot.

Take a look at the cover and the title:


Need I say more? But I will. What’s really a hoot is the plethora of glowing reviews for this book on Amazon. (If you’ve checked out Amazon reviews for self-pubbed or vanity-pubbed books, you’ll see that many of these, uh, reviews fall into the glowing category. (Remember, anyone can post a review on Amazon regardless of whether or not the reviewer has read the book. Some “reviewers” even charge clueless authors money to post reviews on Amazon. Consequently, I do not trust Amazon reviews. But I’m digressing.) Read the Amazon reviews for this book. Are they a hoot, or what?

Check out a page from the book:


You can even read the whole book on the Pixie Stix Kids Pix blog (“Thoughts, Observations, and Ideas about Children’s Books”), a blog that writers and lovers of kiddie lit should bookmark.

While you’re reading the book, I’m going to slip out to the pasture and make sure the only grass my mares are involved with is the kind that grows underfoot.

Er, underhoof.

~

Another Savage Read

I just finished reading Savage Beloved, another Cassie Edwards’ romance filled with throbbing, thrusting, adverbs, and plagiarism. It was dreadful. I knew it would be. It was barely worth the 95¢ I paid for it—used.



In this variation on the Savage theme, Candy Creighton, a petite and sweet blue-eyed blonde, lives at a fort in the middle of Kansas with her despotic father, Colonel Creighton, who keeps the severed head of a Wichita chief under wraps in his study and has recently returned a tortured and dying Short Robe (sorry, no explanation about how he got his name) to his tribe since he wasn’t the one they wanted. They’re going to be leaving the fort soon, but Candy is worried something might happen.

And it does! Before they can leave, the Wichita, led by the hunkie young chief Two Eagles (his uncle’s head is in the jar), ride (they have saddles, just like the Indians in Savage Secrets) to attack the fort, but the Sioux just beat them to it. Only one survivor remains: Candy, who conveniently escapes through a secret tunnel, so Two Eagles grabs her up onto his steed (a word that is frequently repeated just as it was in Savage Secrets) takes her captive, and forces her to wear the bloody and dirty leg irons her now-deceased daddy had put on Short Robe. On the ride to the teepee, they naturally become attracted to each other—while at the same time hating each other (just like the pair in Savage Secrets). Candy, of course, thinks the Wichita killed everybody and burned the fort—which they were going to do if the Sioux hadn’t beaten them to it.

Candy’s blonde mother, like the blonde mother in Savage Secrets, has been gone for some time. Tired of fort life and her despotic husband, she took off a few years earlier to return to civilization and her former career as a dancer. (In Savage Secrets, the mother became an outlaw. There weren’t a lot of career options for women in the 1800s.)

Oh, I nearly forgot! Candy’s devoted pet wolf Shadow (in Savage Secrets, the heroine merely had a puppy) goes missing during the siege. Candy fears the worst. (But you just know—admit it, you do—that this critter Candy raised from a cub will show up.)

In the Wichita village is another blonde, Hawk Woman (formerly Sara—yes, without the h), who is jealous of the attention Candy gets and who wants to marry Two Eagles. You can see where this is going, can’t you? Anyhow, Hawk Woman was rescued from an abusive Mormon husband, Albert Cohen (funny—that name doesn’t sound Mormonish) who is still in the neighborhood with his numerous other wives and children instead of being with other Mormons in Utah or someplace more Morman-y. Anyhow, Cohen’s on the prowl both for Hawk Woman and for any other woman he can marry and force to begat his children. How he supports his big family is anybody’s guess.

Short Robe—before dying—tells Two Eagles about the kindness she bestowed upon him while he was being tortured, so TE removes her irons, invites her into his teepee, and her wolf shows up—slightly singed, but the shaman has an ointment that helps. Things are looking up for Candy, but Shadow, hearing the call of the wild—or at least of the local wolves, takes off from time to time. Plus Hawk Woman is a real pain (especially when she puts the ants in Candy’s bed, but that comes much later).

While TE is attending to funeral details, Candy goes off in search of Shadow, gets lost, and is rescued by Spotted Bear—a former Wichita warrior, who years earlier had the misfortune to be scalped in a battle with the Sioux and who was left for dead. Anyhow, he survived, and knowing that scalped people are considered ghosts, constructed a teepee (which no one has noticed all these years) and did pretty well, thanks to the wolves who looked after him—the same wolfpack that Shadow wants to join. Anyhow, Candy finds Shadow, realizes she is lost, is found by Spotted Bear, meets the rest of the wolves (including Shadow’s husband-to-be, White Wolf), spends the night in Spotted Bear’s dwelling (he sleeps outside) and is pointed the way back to the village the next morning. While she’s walking home, TW finds her. We knew he would.

Anyhow, there are passages of wild passionate love followed by discussions of Wichita customs (Candy and TE’s plagiarized discussion about three buffalo killing two bears during the “Moon of Strawberries” beats the heck out of the plagiarized ferret discussion in Shadow Bear, but not by much). Here’s an excerpt (two pages after a hot time in the ol’ teepee) that’s gotta be plagiarized:

He gestured toward the entranceway. “And the door of all homes of my people is placed on the east side so that the sun may look into the lodge as it rises, while the small circular opening overhead is placed there not only for smoke to escape through, but also so that the sun may look into the lodge at noon, and at night, the star gods are thought to pour down their strength into our homes.”

Then TE talks (in his excellent, albeit stilted, English—all the Wichita speak excellent, albeit stilted, English) about the fire pit, ending with “We Wichita people view our home as a miniature of the universe itself.”

This blog quotes other examples of the Savage Beloved plagiarism–and gives original sources.

Eventually, Spotted Bear rejoins the tribe (turns out he’s TE’s cousin!) after Shadow gets Candy to come help him because he has a fever, so she (Candy, not Shadow) makes a travois and drags him back to the village.

So, it looks like they’ll be happy, except for a few setbacks, like the plague of locusts (but fortunately they’d already harvested the corn a few days earlier). The horses, by the way, eat the locusts (!?) that fall into the corral, but the tribe burns the other locusts. Albert Cohen and his kids come begging right after that and he catches a glimpse of Candy and thinks she’s Sara (er, HW). Candy goes out to gather greens not long after the locust incident, and Hawk Woman—intending to give her a good thrust in the back with a knife—follows her but hides in the woods when Cohen appears and captures Candy. He takes Candy back to his camp where one of his wives turns out to be Candy’s mother (!!??) whom he’d captured years earlier.

Anyhow, Shadow (in the tradition of Rin-tin-tin and Lassie, who weren’t wolves but close enough) confronts HW, which allows TE to get the truth from her about what happened to Candy and to save her (Candy, not HW), which he does by breaking Cohen’s neck, but it’s really Cohen’s fault for squirming while TE had him by the neck.

HW steals a steed from the corral and gallops away in the dark while TE is off saving Candy. Candy’s mother, still fixated on the idea of becoming a dancer again—although she has some age on her now and might be pregnant, doesn’t come home with her daughter but continues on her quest for a civilized place with a dance hall.

Candy—er, she goes by Painted Wings now—and TE wed, have a couple of kids, Shadow has a couple of litters with the white wolf, etc. We never learn what the heck happened to Hawk Woman or Candy’s mom. By this time, we don’t really care.

If you are the sort of reader who enjoys stereotypical characters, contrived and unbelievable plots, improbable coincidences, stilted dialogue, a plethora of adjectives and adverbs, an inconsistent voice, and an incredibly happy ending, you’ll probably love this book.

In fact, you’ll probably love the whole Savage series, but this is the last Savage Anything romance I’ll ever read. I figure if you read one, you’ve read ’em all.

Plus I like to read fiction that rings true.

I’m still puzzling over the horses (er, steeds) eating the locusts. Ewww!

More Savage Secrets

I finished the book. It was dreadful! I expected it to be so.

According to my buddy ’Nita, “There is a formula to bodice rippers. Any hack can write them.”

Here’s the formula she sent me:

Literally there is nothing to writing them. The outline is exactly the same, you need only change a few details. . . .

• Single, bosom-heaving heroine goes to new location, encounters manly man.
• New man enters Heroine’s sanctum sanctorium where manly men are unknown.
• Heroine is distressed by manly man's Manly-ness, runs from it.
• Manly man, is over come by Heroine's 'Womenliness' and pursues, minor romantic interlude before center of book.
• Heroine/manly man cannot be with Manly man/heroine for some stupid reason. (Insert stupid plot point here.)
• Insert stupid manly man's (usually) misunderstanding.
• Now clunk around for 80 pages of alleged plot development describing clothes, aching loins, whining loss of each other, and failure to see the obvious way around the reason they cannot be together.
• Fifty pages before the end they are 'Thrust' together, realize they cannot be apart, so they overcome the obstacle and ravish each other. . . .
• The last chunk of pages is the happily ever after wrap-up.

By Jove, I think she’s got it! This is exactly the plot of Savage Secrets:

Following her father’s death, Rebecca Veach goes to Wyoming to search for her long-lost brother Edward who supposedly died in the Civil War but Becky learns is a wanted outlaw, but he’s really searching for their mother, who abandoned them after Becky’s birth and ran off with an outlaw, although Becky doesn’t know this (although Edward does because he has Mom’s diary). When the train enters Wyoming, Chief Blazing Eagle and his homeboys—er, warriors—stop the train and have a little fun but don’t hurt anyone, although Mr. Eagle is immediately attracted to Miss Veach, who is attracted to him although she sort of hates him for kidnapping her, and he takes her with him back to his village. After hours of sharing the same saddle (an impossibility unless they’re both anorexic), she becomes attracted to him too, but she still kind of hates him for kidnapping her.

Anyhow, despite the mutual physical attraction, Brave Eagle gives Becky Veach a horse and sends her to Fort Laramie (hours away at a hard gallop) where she tells the major she wants to speculate in real estate and he takes her to a soddy that’s for sale. BV has assumed because BE has a son that he’s married (not any more; he’s divorced because his wife left him when their son was young to return to her village to take care of her elderly parents) so she tries to control her lust for him and concentrate on finding her brother. BV makes curtains for the soddy from one of her petticoats and adopts a puppy who just happens to be roaming around out in the middle of nowhere. She names the pup Pebbles.

Anyhow, she and BE cross paths a bunch of times and, while in town, she glimpses the back of the golden-haired outlaw who must be her brother but can’t catch him and BE appears to save her from all the shooting, galloping, etc. To make an interminably long story short, they eventually make love, get married, etc., but BE has issues. If they make wild passionate love and a thunderstorm comes up immediately afterwards, BE has flashbacks to a traumatic time in his life, and BV reminds him of another woman with golden hair who saved him when he was a child and his village was destroyed by outlaws who killed everyone else. (A chief of a neighboring clan adopted him as his own son). He then kicks her out, never wants to see her again, etc. When she’s back in the soddy, Edward visits her and explains that their mother is still alive and is the real golden-haired outlaw and he has her diary to prove it, so they go to the fort where he is arrested and the soldiers are going to attack BE’s village because a bunch of settlers were killed but it was actually the outlaw band which has disbanded following the death of BV & EV’s mother’s outlaw husband (but we don’t know this yet) so BV & EV take a short-cut to gallop to BE’s village to warn them, etc. Eventually, things work out OK—BE realizes that it was BV’s outlaw mother who was there when her husband’s outlaw gang wiped out his village, the mother turns herself in to save EV, who returns to St. Louis and becomes a successful businessman, and BE & BV prepare to move the village to Canada, even though she is three-months pregnant, when his ex-wife appears with the daughter that he didn’t know he had, but the ex is dying and wants him to have the kid, so they happily take her in and everyone lives happily ever after.

Sheesh! Every so often, the author interrupts the flow of the story (such as it is) to insert some factual info about the Cheyenne (which she plagiarized from George Bird Grinnell, The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Ways of Life, U. of Nebraska Press 1972. (Thanks to Wombat, who pointed this out in a comment about my original post.)

I thought I would never get through Savage Secrets. It is the worst book I’ve read in the last six months. Now I’ve got to read some good stuff to clear my brain. (Yesterday, I bought Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes. That ought to do it.)

The good thing about reading a dreadful book is that it makes you appreciate good writing even more.

Note: If you’d like to download a pdf that contains numerous documented instances of Cassie Edwards’ plagiarism, you can get it here.

Savage Secrets?

Warning: This post contains examples of bad writing.

After reading a couple of good books, I decided to read some trash—er, some less than excellent writing. At Goodwill, I found Savage Secrets, by Cassie Edwards, now known as the historical romance plagiarist. I figured, since her recent notoriety, that a book by her might have some collectible value in the future. Besides, 75¢ wasn’t too bad a price for the used copy. And it’s good for a laugh. Or several laughs.


This particular book (in a series of innumerable Savage books) is about Rebecca Veach, who is alone in the world (or at least in St. Louis) since her father died and her brother never returned from the Civil War. She returns home (via horse and buggy) from her father’s funeral to find her mansion gutted of all furniture except for her chiffarobe that contained all her clothes. (The funeral must have lasted a long time for the robbers to get all that furniture and not be seen by anyone!) Oh, but the robbers didn’t find the money hidden under the floorboards of the heavy desk they took from her father’s study. Apparently, though wealthy, the Veaches didn’t have any servants. Why she left the horse and buggy out front is anybody’s guess. With no servants, she should have driven to the barn and unhitched. (p. 24: “Becky stepped from the buggy and wound the reins around a hitching rail.” Uh, aren’t the reins kinda long and don’t they run through some rings on the harness?)

Anyhow, determined to report the crime, she decides to ride to town (Why not take the buggy?), she changes from her black silk mourning dress into a riding skirt. In fact, she hurries (p. 29):

Becky hurried into a riding skirt and white cotton blouse. After tying her long golden hair back with a ribbon, she hurried down the stairs.

Whew! Kinda leaves you breathless. And I’ll bet you’d already guessed that she had “long golden hair.” After all, the best of romance heroines do—plus the cover illustration shows it. Anyhow, the next paragraph puzzles me:

She ran past the horse and buggy to the stable and grabbed a horse from a stall. She led it outside, then quickly saddled it.

“Let’s go, boy,” Becky said as she swung herself into the saddle. She nudged the steed’s flanks with her heels and urged the horse into a gallop up the long, narrow drive.

So why didn’t she use the buggy that was ready and waiting? Why didn’t she at least unhitch the poor buggy horse? How did she run in that long riding skirt? How did she “grab” the horse? She saddled it but never bridled it, so how could she control it? How could she swing herself into the saddle with the long skirt—especially if she happened to be riding sidesaddle? I assume she was riding sidesaddle, as most young ladies did in 1869. And doncha love it when they call a horse a “steed”? (Blazing’s Eagle’s horse was called a steed in Chapter 1) I’ve only read as far as page 68, but I’ve found at least three more instances of “swung into the saddle.”

Anyhow, she gallops to town. Once in town she goes to the sheriff, who once again proposes to her, and she notices on the jail wall a wanted poster of her brother. Seems he’s a big outlaw in Wyoming. Turning down the sheriff’s proposal, she grabs the poster and decides to go to Wyoming.

She travels by train, wears “a pale blue silk dress,” her golden hair cascades, a traveler flirts with her but she doesn’t flirt back, she watches the scenery, etc.

Meanwhile, Chief Blazing Eagle and a couple of his buddies decide to have a little fun by tearing up a portion of the railroad tracks. When they see the train coming, they decide to have even more fun, so they chase it. Of course the train stops, the passengers disembark, Blazing Eagle notices Becky and grabs her by the hair . . .yada, yada, yada . . . they have a brief conversation (yes, he does speak English), after which (on p. 63), “he swung himself into the saddle,” and “his loins ached with a passion. . . . “ (Anyone who rides in a saddle while wearing only a breech clout and moccasins is probably gonna get a bad rash, too, in addition to the achy loins.) Also from p. 63:

Lifting his reins, Blazing Eagle wheeled his horse around to ride away, then swung his steed back in Becky’s direction. He rode toward her, stretched out an arm, and swept her onto his lap, then positioned her in the saddle in front of him.

I don’t know about y’all, but I’m having a difficult time wrapping my mind around the above image. The poor horse—all that wheeling and swinging, and it probably hasn’t recovered from the galloping a few pages back. Also, when you’re mounted on a horse, there’s no lap. Laps only happen to people in sitting positions. Plus, wouldn’t the horse (identified elsewhere as a sorrel or a steed) get spooked by having a girl in a big skirt suddenly dragged onto his back. I once tried to pick up a raincoat (which wasn’t even screaming or flapping around) while mounted on my mare Melody, and she took off bucking and running. As for the positioning her in front of him on the saddle, the saddle would only have space for one. I figure it must have been a cavalry saddle, which has a large solid pommel. It would really hurt to sit there, especially if galloping is involved (which it will be). If it were a saddle with a horn—well, I won’t go there.

Anyhow, the train guys fix the track and the train leaves without her, while Blazing Eagle takes her to his village—a long ride which involves galloping—where his lodge is the biggest. From p. 67:

She was impressed. She had learned enough in her studies of Indian to know that the size of a lodge was determined by the number of horses possessed by the lodge owner, by the owner’s wealth and position in the community. If a man had but a few horses, his lodge was small. Becky recalled having read also that one hundred elk teeth were worth one good horse.*

She noticed, as her studies had taught her, that all lodges were set up to face the rising sun each morning, the west wind always at their backs. At the top, two flaps served as windbreaks. From the fires in the center of the teepee. . . .

Sheesh. I can’t finish this digression! Anybody wanna bet she plagiarized the above passage? My gosh, if you’ve just been kidnapped and taken to a strange place and have no idea what might happen to you next, you don’t admire the village and notice how it’s just like what you studied.

Eventually, I’ll read more of Blazing Secrets. But not for a while. I can only take so much bad writing at one time.


*She probably read about the elk teeth/horse thing online: here.

So Bad

Today I finally received my copy of It Was A Dark And Stormy Night (The Very Worse Opening Lines in Fiction).




The hardbound tome is a compilation of the best or the worst (or maybe that’s worst of the best?) entries in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, sponsored annually by San Jose State College and named for 19th century novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose novel Paul Clifford contains the infamous opening line: “It was a dark and stormy night.”

According to the Bulwer-Lytton site, the contest is, according to SJSC professor Scott Rice, “a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.”

Whimsical. Almost as good as quirky. (And some of the entries are pretty quirky, too.)

Through the years of the contest, I’d won a “Worst Western” division and had gotten a “Miscellaneous Dishonorable Mention.” A fellow Valley Writer, Dick Raymond, had also received some dishonorable mentions. (Hmmm. Since we’re both officers in Valley Writers, does that make Valley Writers the worst writers club in the USA?)

It Was A Dark And Stormy Night originally came out in September, but it was published in the UK by The Friday Project, so it wasn’t for sale in American bookstores, though it was available on amazon.uk. Finally amazon.com offered it, and I ordered my copy (which was considerably cheaper when I ordered than it is now) in early November. It took seven weeks to arrive.

The contest originated in 1982 with three entries. Now, tens of thousands of entries from all over the world pour in every year. I’ve been poring over the poor excuses for opening lines for the last hour. I knew that my 1996 “Worst Western” winner would be in it. I found it on page 103:

Following the unfortunate bucking of his horse when it was startled by the posse's shots, Tex—who now lay in a disheveled heap in the sagebrush—pushed back his sweat-stained Stetson from one deep-set eye, spat a stream of tobacco juice at the nearest cactus, and reflected momentarily that the men approaching him with ropes probably weren't just out for a skip, and—if they were—his freshly broken ankle would have to cause him to decline any entreaties to join them.

On page 23, I found my 1999 “Miscellaneous Dishonorable Mention”:

“Well, Mummy,” replied little Felicity in response to her mother's chiding, “I know for a fact you are lying to me and that I was not left on the doorstep by gypsies, as you are fond of telling me, for gypsies are not in the habit of abandoning infants on the twentieth floor of New York apartment houses, and furthermore there is absolutely no room on the street for them to park their horse and wagon, so—when you are old and in need of custodial care—we shall then see who has the last laugh as I abandon you in a substandard adult care facility.”

I found Dick’s entry on page 37 in the “Vile Puns” chapter. What surprised me, though, was that three more of my entries were included (pp. 11, 84, and 126)—three that didn't even get dishonorable mentions; I can't figure why they were included.

Mind you, I’m not complaining that I got more than I expected.


After all, I’m no Shakespeare—just a nationally-ranked really bad writer.

~

Dark, Stormy, & Pricey

On August 17, 2007, the Friday Project in the UK releases It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: The Second Coming. My 1996 “Worst Western” sentence will among the other dreadful one-liners included in the book's 160 pages.

Speaking of dreadful, at £9.99, the book is rather pricey—about $20 in American money. Acckkkk!