Caution: This Fiction Contains Pulp

'Gun Smoke Red' photo © 2010, Charles Knowles - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

My last post was about how writing prompts can spread some salsa on your keyboard to get your writing moving. In checking out some of the writing prompt sites, I found this prompt contest, which supplies 10 pages of writing prompts on varying subjects.

I chose one in the Action category, because the prompts made me think about writing a story beginning in a pulp-fiction like style. First prize wins $500, but hurry—contest ends at 11:59 CST Dec. 22. (You only need to write the beginning of a story, at least 500 words.) Below is my effort, which leans heavily on alliterative wordplay. It begins in media res.

Love at First Shot

I’d coated my fright about being caught for the crime—one I didn’t commit—with four bourbons, neat, but the pleasant hum in my head wouldn’t last: there was a knock at the door, and a knock in my knees.

It was Lucy Ligature. Former vamp turned viper—editorially speaking, that is. My colleague, my critic, my counterpart chaser of riveted readers. The editor of the Hearsay Herald, a rival rag run by Lucy, the delicious dish with the tire-squealing curves. Though now she only revved her engines for on-paper scandal scooping. This rendezvous called for the saucy sangfroid only a true cad could corral.

“Uh, well, Ms. Ligature, Lucy my dear. An unexpected pleasure. And I thought our boy Cal only spilled his soul for the pages of Hush-Hush. And now he’s spilled so much more. Shot in the tabloids—or by them, you might say. And now the cops are sure to think the shooter is me. But what’s this I hear about me being next in line for some lead?”

She slowly shaped her ripe-cherry lips into a smile that played leapfrog with a sneer. “Danny boy. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.” Since she was punctuating these pleasantries by waving a stainless-steel Smith and Wesson, my idea fountain at the time was distinctly dry.

“I’m afraid that any article about this incident is going to have to center on the sealed secret of the smoking gun, trite as that might be,” she said, with a smirk that crossed a gargoyle with a goddess. “I do fear you’ll accuse me of lacking imagination, but, silly as it may sound, it was an accident. An accident that’s never going to have my name attached to it.”

She slid her limber legginess onto what was left of a leather loveseat and let out a sibilant sigh. It was then that I notice the weathered wisp of paper in her other hand’s gunless grasp. She glanced at the lifeless lug, whose innards were swiftly becoming outtards on his reddened rug. “Cool Cat seems to have misplaced his meow,” she said. She settled a steely stare on me and said, “The ninth life is always the nastiest one, I’ve heard.”

“Look Lucy,” I said, “Cal’s never been a choirboy, and there’s many a man who’d like nothing better than to see him skewered. But what’s he ever done to you, besides only offering the Herald his leftovers, rather than any major meat?” I was trying to play it cool, but I was shiftily sliding back, hoping to get my hind to the hinterlands in a doorward dash.

Lucy languidly lounged on the loveseat, and gave me a lissome look. “Hey, I’m going to tell it to you straight, Daniel, if you have ears to hear. The main means of getting secrets is being able to keep them, and I’ve kept more than a couple out of your readers’ sour saliva. One is that I’m engaged to be married in two days. The other is that I stand to inherit two million dollars, but only on the condition that I marry before I turn 50.”

She stirred on the loveseat and waggled that winking weapon. “The last secret, and the one that’s going to be covered up as cleanly as Calhoun’s coffin, is that I’ll be 50 the day after my wedding.” She brandished the birth certificate and laughed. “You see, you pathetic peddler of fishrot, my fickle fiancé thinks I’m barely thirty-five! Cal was blackmailing me, being the only one who knew my real age, and with a copy of my birth certificate to prove it!”

She slapped the gun on the loveseat and my heart did a triple-flip. “Cool Kitty had no pity,” she said. “He knew that my fiancé would skip out as fast as those facts got out. So I came here to cop the cop’s certificate, and he showed up while I was rifling through his house. It’s probably the only wrestling match with a woman he’s ever lost. I didn’t mean to shoot him.”

I was flat-out flabbergasted. For a woman of a certain age, she was sensational—she’d always zinged my heartstrings. I’ve never considered quicker or scampered swifter in my love-lacking life. “Lucy, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” I said. I called my office on my digital phone, telling them that charming Cal had never opened his door to me. We did a swift scrub of Lucy’s paw prints and mine, and then made a beeline for the beach, where a shiny firearm was flung into the maw of mother ocean.

I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to manage to write a story that plucked me from the heart of the crime without implicating the honey that was making my heart melt (or yours tangentially truly), but hey, I’m good at improvising. And Lucy knew how to tango, so a twosome we shall be. As the old saying goes, keep your friends close but your enemies closer.

Action suggestions.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and no dangling participles to all!

Paranoid Bell Peppers and Other Writing Prompts

'July Collage 3' photo © 2010, Julie Jordan Scott - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
 
Writing prompts are small sparklers that can light up corners of your writing mind, corners that might remain dark without the nudge.

Prompts can be so completely off the wall—”Describe how your intestines would try to parallel-park a minivan”—that your conventional approach to storytelling is struck dumb—a new tongue can be induced to speak.

Writing in other voices, other colors and other textures is a way to unleash your imagination’s beast. Roar!

There are a number of sites on the Net that supply good writing prompts. If a character in one of your stories goes mute, or a plot point doesn’t seem to have a point, they can be a good way to get your writing threads unglued. Writing for five minutes on some fizzy subject could loosen whatever is reining you in on your bigger project.

Here are some sites:

StoryWonk
Creative Writing Prompts
Writer’s Digest Prompts
Creative Writing Solutions
One Minute Writer
Sunday Scribblings
On Twitter: @writingprompts

And for fun, here are a couple of my pieces I just zipped off, a few minutes per. One was to put myself in the mind of a vegetable (not too hard in my case) and another in the mind of a metal. Both of them appear to have some self-esteem problems.

It’s Not Easy Being Green

“Uhh, something’s not right,” the bell pepper said aloud. I feel something damp right at my feet, she thought. No, not quite damp, no, more like mossy, yes mossy.

She strained to see her tiny feet, but being a bell pepper, could do nothing more than glimpse a bit of the soft green swell of her belly. It’s itchy too, she thought.

Then with an abrupt tightening of her shoulders (which being a bell pepper, didn’t tighten all that much), she realized it: she was moldy! Moldy, her, and not even two weeks old. She stifled a sob, and then groaned. She sensed the nearby celery shrinking back from her.

Iron’s Bluff Is Called

Nothing’s nobler than Iron, Iron Eddy thought. All those other pretenders, magnesium, sulphur, silicate—hah! Losers, pathetic wannabes. I alone am iron-hearted, iron willed. He looked quickly around and then said under his breath, “But I’ve been hearing some rumors, ugly rumors. It got back to me that my mother wasn’t pure!” He bestirred his tight neck and raised his voice: “Nonsense! Just look at me, red-blooded in every way!” But he cast his eyes down, to the ore of his soul, and murmured, “But what about those striations of blue. Surely no one can see their vile shadows …”

Get Prompted, Get Productive

I know I know, works of genius, aren’t they? But fun! Check out those prompt sites and fling some sentences into the universe. They might orbit around in your head long enough to spur you on write something with more gravity.

Poking the Eyes Out (At Least One) of the Green-Eyed Writing Monster

'Jealousy' photo (c) 2011, William Shannon - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

 Yes, I know—it’s his face that’s green.  But go with it.

I occasionally guest-post over at Writer Unboxed, the fine writer’s site that has daily posts on all aspects of writing craft, the publishing world, and the business of fiction. Its regular roster includes many traditionally and self-published authors, premier agents and book doctors, and writers who haven’t experienced a lot of commercial success, but who are working religiously on their skills.

I was slotted for another post in early 2014, and my topic was going to be writing jealousy. Specifically, jealousy at the success of other writers. More specifically, MY jealousy of other writers’ successes. If you’ve read a sampling of my posts, you might have noticed that I can be a wise guy on my topics, throwing in a joke here and jibe there. I intended that for the green-eyed writing monster post (and will be guilty of it here), but since I can speak for pretty much every one of the 143,345,981 writers in the world, trust me—it can be a problem.

But some other treacherous writer at Unboxed just wrote a post on jealousy, that underhanded fiend, so I’ll roll with the topic here.

It All Started in Catholic School

For me, I think the problem started in Catholic school. (When in doubt, blame the nuns.) You see, they had us learning the 10 Commandments in first or second grade, glazed-eyed reciting by gathered tykes on an almost daily basis. Consider: If you were a seven-year-old, and you were told not to covet your neighbor’s wife, what would you think? I hadn’t even known if I had any talent at this coveting thing, and now I was being told not to do it. I immediately went back home and checked out the local wives to see if they were up to some covert coveting. But I wasn’t so busy with that that I couldn’t covet my neighbor’s house as well. Covet, covet, covet.

I am only an amateur psychologist (though I will accept money for my analyses), but I got the sense that my Catholic brethren were priming the pump for us on the sin thing. You know, telling us what not to do, so its fascination impelled us into that forbidden, coveted quest. But back then, I had the mercy of confession to hose off my juvenile sins. However, since I am a lapsed Catholic, I suppose this blog post is my confession.

Pathetic Wastes of Time and Other Jolly Pursuits

This I know: being jealous of your fellow writers’ triumphs is a mighty pathetic waste of time. As Carrie Fisher said, “Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. ” Too often I’ve squirmed and twitched when I’ve read about the incredible contracts given to contemporary authors, soaring sales figures, critical acclaim, while I’m still grubbing about trying to get an agent to spend 15 minutes with my manuscript. As I commented on the Writer Unboxed post, “It’s not that I want successful writers to die; perhaps just have gangrene. Still working on it.”

So I am working on it. It’s my pre-New Year’s resolution. It might sound like pabulum, but I am going to remind myself to congratulate those who do well, and to try and work all the harder on my own writing. So somebody can be jealous of me. No, I don’t mean that. Well, not all that much.

Is it OK if I still covet my neighbor’s iPad mini, though?

Copyblogger Essay Contest Deadline

I guess the first thing I’ll do that other writers will be jealous of is win Copyblogger’s essay contest. Who cares if a zillion other socially climbing copywriters have entered? Anyway, Copyblogger is one of the best sites on the Interwebz for useful advice on copywriting and content marketing. These guys and gals are so damn smart it smarts. (That doesn’t have any trace of jealousy, does it?) Those smarty-pantsers have an essay contest happening now, with great prizes, and the deadline is December 4 at 5pm PST. Click below to get the details. Take your shot!

Copyblogger Essay Contest Participant

Enter the contest or get more content marketing tips from Copyblogger.