Akana stretched in bed, relishing the cool spaces that her body hadn't warmed overnight, and tilting her face until the morning sun shone pink through her eyelids.
When I play guitar, I simply strum and strum and then I go to the piano and ta dum and ta dum before I go to my drum, and drum and drum, but sometimes I need to get up and sing and sing until I feel that ring in my ear drums so that I can ta dum da dum dum dum but I never succumb to being just a guitar.
“What a marvelous day!" Squeaky Squirrel said to himself as he skipped down
a tree branch, little realizing that the bark beetle he sidestepped was Hylurgopinus rufipes, a carrier of Ophiostoma ulmi, the dreaded Dutch Elm disease, first seen in the U.S. in 1928, and that the day, while marvelous for him (and for the beetle), was going to be rather sucky for the tree.
Call me--if you must, notwithstanding I probably don't know you, but in the spirit of sharing berths (separately) aboard the whaler Pequod for the next year or so, while I tell you about a captain who's a bit of a ding-a-ling, and a savage who shoots some wicked craps, yes, call me--Ishmael.Congratulations. Well deserved.
Eager to escape from her devilish Uncle who had just tried to rape her, Jasmine mounted her steed and made her getaway. Her burnt auburn hair billowedNice. Try adding a touch of unnecessary metaphor to the landscape.
behind her as she galloped through the dense vegetation of the very woods
where her brother had hanged himself the year before.
It was dark, like a king sized Hershey's Dark, and not at all like those chichi miniature milk chocolate jobs that come in the 9.2 ounce assorted bags that they sell at the grocery store and sometimes at Walgreen's; and it was friggin' stormy, too.Thank you.
Once upon a time there was a very good, and talented children’s book author who could not get the mean old book editors to publish her very fine stories for little children, even though she had been sending all these editors her wonderful manuscripts for twenty years (in packets that included a humbly phrased cover letter on pale pink scented stationary) and she of whom we speak had even offered to baby-sit the editors’ kitties and knit them leg warmers (the editors not the kitties), which is something these editors’ other authors would never have dreamed of doing, those ungrateful, already published authors who nitpicked at every comma and semi-colon in their contracts and kept asking for bigger and bigger advances and kept saying, "Me! Me! Me!" no, none of them would have done anything like this, and so it came as no surprise when our very good, and talented children’s book author, unappreciated and unloved, withdrew her manuscript (the one that featured tap dancing centipedes from the planet Zorg)This one gets an additional Restraining Order Commendation.
and........decided to self-publish.
Catherine Cute was not the kind of little girl to wet the bed, dismember her favorite teddy bear and stuff it down the toilet, set her Mommy's hair on fire with an acetylene torch, and talk back to her grandma, but on the eve of her fourth birthday she was mad as mad could be.
"Pa, where you goin' with that Uzi?" asked Ma questioningly, a hint of concern coloring her voice like a Day-Glo pink highlighter pen.
Mommy's little Snookums makes poo-poo in a pretty pink pot. Baby's little kitty-witty makes stinky in a pan that is not.
(Housebreaking Snookums and Kitty is a 6000 word pickture book exploring the joys and dispaires of potty training children and pets. My cat liked it alot!)
This is a fantastic example of the true awfulness that I honestly see in slush. I know, you wrote this line as a joke. But I kid you not--this is the slush that editors are trying to dig through without becoming sociopaths.
The mountain, old as the hills, loomed over them.
My mother is a fish, and I know heard her say "I'll glub you forever, I'll glub you for always!" as I flushed her into the New York City sewer, not knowing the adventures that awaited us both.With extra points for being so damn painful, and with the promise of more pain to come.
...and one imagines several more.
Can't wait to see what you come up with!
Donald owned a purple vulture, a green vulture, and a deep blue pillow-eating vulture.
No matter where she went her bubbles drew a crowd, but Molly always knew she was more than just bubbles.
My brother has a giant head. He keeps it in the closet.
My mom wanted to know how the cow got in my room. As if that was the strangest thing that happened all week.The second line could be a bit stronger, but I do want to know about the cow.
I kick at a rock on my way to Mrs. Viola Meyer’s house and tally up my life’s ten most troubling facts. 1. Lillian and I will attend the Winter Dance dressed as floral bookends.I hope number ten is really troubling.
In an old Italian villa near the cold Anchovy SeaI have a dread that this is going to a pizza-y place, but for now, a good start.
Lived two ordinary onions both as bitter as could be.
Like Moses, Meemaw had Ten Commandments.Don't you want to know what they were? I do. But they'd better deliver.
The smell of death drifted from the woods.Simple, but creepy. Note the combination of the foreboding 'smell of death' with the gentle 'drifted from the woods.'
A long, hairy leg poked through the hole in Ida’s window screen.The mind goes immediately to 'enormous spider,' something that's definitely icky. But then we get 'poked' instead of a creepier word, and 'Ida' rather than a more normal name. You can tell this is going to be creepy and silly.
Where's Papa going with that ax?
I come from a family with a lot of dead people.
In the great green room, there was a telephone and a red balloon.
One day my mama caught me paintin' pictures on the floor
and the ceiling
and the walls
and the curtains
and the door
and I heard my mama holler like I never did before--
"Ya ain't a-gonna paint no more!"
