Posted: August 7, 2011 | Author: M. | Filed under: Author's Note, Google Makes Me Giggle, Stories From Yesteryear, Weird |
Back when I was seventeen, I was a pretty shitty writer, even though I’d been writing since I was eight. But I hadn’t found my “voice” yet (and only have just recently) , and made poor reading choices (see previous post).
You know how they say you are what you eat? Well, you also write what you read. I read crap, so I wrote crap. Which is probably why I never really finished the novel I’d been trying to write since I was fifteen. My attempts at such a goal were plentiful but laughable, and lasted only one or two chapters.
But none were more laughable than the one I was writing my last year of high school. Unfortunately, I burned the thing ( and I reallllly wish I hadn’t so I could post it here), but I do remember that it was about a girl who was sleeping with her sister’s fiancé. (Totally original, right?) I don’t think it was more than two chapters, but the first one was pretty significant, because it involved the main character lying post-coitus in the arms of her forbidden flame. Which is funny since this was written by someone who despises romance novels. So she’s lying there describing how she feels being in his arms, the way his bedroom looks and other various innocuous bullshit. The prose was very trite and very purple, making for an unremarkable scene.
If it weren’t for the rotating nipple.
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Posted: November 23, 2010 | Author: M. | Filed under: Down With OPB, Fiction, Rant, Stories From Yesteryear |
Minnie Brandon has just been banned from Santa’s grotto – her fourth one. She goes down in a spectacular blaze of glory, dismantling the holiday display which causes an avalanche of presents to rain down on her fellow brats.
But this isn’t a one-off. She also mugs every female parishioner at her christening, dumping out the contents of each purse onto the altar; sticks a honey sandwich (EW!) in the tape player of a delivery truck; orders sixteen identical designer coats from eBay; and, thanks to mistaking it for a “dolly”, yanks down a store mannequin into her tight, unyielding embrace.
But forgive her Father, for she knows not what she does: she is only two years old.
Then, there’s Becky who:
- throws a tantrum in a toy store because she wants a toy pony, not the toy wagon
- wrestles with an elf employed in Santa’s grotto because she doesn’t want her Christmas wish read out loud
- purposefully smashes someone’s BlackBerry to bits
- throws another tantrum because she wants fire-eaters and jugglers at her party
- writes letters to financial institutions with ridiculous suggestions (i.e. barterting a minor member of the Royal Family to the U.S. in exchange f for J. Crew clothing) to aid the current financial crisis
- shoves an entire serving of carrots at once into her mouth to make it look like they’ve been eaten
- impersonates an art professor
- tries to get a diagnosis of “sleep-shopping” and the effects of having to stop shopping cold turkey (as she has been forbidden to shop in the face of said financial crisis)
- lies to and continually hides things from her parents
- uses phrases such as “sooo cool!”
Don’t forgive her Father, because Becky should know better: she’s twenty-nine years old and Minnie’s mother. And, apparently, has not grown up since the first installment of the Shopaholic series, even though this blatantly immature behaviour has gotten her in deep trouble every time. But then if she did learn her lesson, there wouldn’t be six books (and counting, judging from the open-ended ending – say that five times fast) or money in author Sophie Kinsella’s pocket. On the back of this book, People magazine refers to Becky as “plucky and funny”. Ha! More like a “fucked-up dummy.”
But why should Becky learn her lesson? Because in the end, things always work out. Tremendously. Even though she’s too stupid to live. She already affects the people around her (usually quite negatively) but now she’s inflicting her selfishness and childishness on her daughter, who also wants to buy whatever she sees and does whatever she wants, fuck the consequences. But instead of disciplining her child, she gets affronted when someone (actually, several people) have the sheer nerve to suggest that Minnie is spoiled. Ok then, lady. And if that isn’t bad enough, her husband is surgically attached to his BlackBerry – so I kinda don’t blame her for smashing it – and treats his family as an afterthought, because he is soooo consumed with work. I was expecting Becky to leave him at the end, but instead she throws him a surprise party (where she wanted the fire-eaters and jugglers), so now everything’s kosher, two thumbs up, Ebert and Roper. Yech.
Godspeed, li’l Minnie.
And now that I have finished shitting all over someone else’s work, I confess that I am a big fat hypocrite. After reading this series, and trying but failing to read Twilight (it bored me so, and I’m just not into fantasy fic or whatevs it’s supposed to be) I threw away my goal of being a SRS literary writer and thought that I could make money writing something as stupid as these books. Really, these things take no brain power to read. I finished Mini Shopaholic and Gossip Girl: It Had To Be You in two days, Lauren Conrad’s second novel, Sweet Little Lies in one. And they are best sellers. So in my moment of temporary insanity, I decided that integrity was overrated.
I must warn you: this shit is bad. I got up to 95 pages ’cause I could feel my soul (what’s left of it) ebbing away bit by bit. I’m gonna post the first chapter after the jump. But I’m not gonna tell you how long ago this was written, because it’s embarrassing.
Disclaimer: not responsible for loss of brain cells or will to live.
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Posted: November 11, 2010 | Author: M. | Filed under: Fiction, Stories From Yesteryear |
I wrote this one back in high school. Unlike the other stories here, which lean on the humorous/sarcastic side, this is dark and contains sensitive subject matter. Particularly: sexual abuse. Thankfully, I’ve never been sexually abused, so the depictions in this story are most likely highly inaccurate. I was only 17 at the time, too. However, my teacher at the time didn’t seem to have a problem with it as she gave me a 10/10.
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Posted: October 26, 2010 | Author: M. | Filed under: Fiction, Stories From Yesteryear |
Another old story, this time from my final year of university. The assignment was to make a sombre situation – such as a funeral – funny. Ironically, when I wrote this, I had been crying quite a bit thanks to having had a bad day, but by the time I’d finished I was laughing. Yes, at my own jokes. But once again, it was proof that comedic writing, (at least in my opinion) was my forte. I just didn’t realize it at the time. But my teacher at the time, Shyam Selvdurai, did: I got an A+!
And I am totally NOT stalling working on new stuff by posting yet another old story. Which by the way, introduces yet another segment, as you can see in the title: Stories From Yesteryear, which is pretty self-explanatory.
***
Grandma died watching “Paternity Tests Part 2: Are You My Baby’s Daddy?” on The Maury Povich Show. She was wearing her Save Water, Drink Beer T-shirt underneath a maroon cigarette burn studded bathrobe, gray socks (actually, they were supposed to be white but they looked grey) and an L.A. Kings baseball cap. She was a quarter of the way into a bottle of raspberry Pucker and had a wrestling magazine on her lap.
“Bombaclot!” was her last word, according to Aunt Bonita, her caretaker, who at the time was in the kitchen slicing tomatoes for dinner that evening. Bonita assumed that she was yelling at the television – because Gammy does this often – and chuckled to herself. But when Bonita did not hear the frequent emissions of gas coming from the living room, she knew something was wrong, and ran in there.
Actually, she slipped on the hardwood floor that she’d just polished with lemon Pledge, and caught her hip on the hallway table, activating one of its musical figurines. So before Bonita discovered the 300-pound corpse that was Gammy, she lay on the floor, holding her side and writhing to the tune of “Love is a Many Splendored Thing.”
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Posted: October 24, 2010 | Author: M. | Filed under: Fiction, Stories From Yesteryear, Writer's Unblock |
[Remember, I was 17 when I wrote this. I got an A++ on it, btw!]
Seventeen-year old Taylor Lane was sitting outside her white sandstone mansion on a chaise lounge by the Olympic-sized pool. Flicking a lock of silky black hair from her perfectly featured face, she felt the California sun beating warmly on her. [Where exactly in California, genius? Way to be specific!]
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Prose Nylund 