  Short Stories
This week: Dead Bodies? Edited by: Leger~  
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This week's Short Story Editor
Leger~ |
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Can I Put the Dead Body in a Glad® Trash Bag?
It's getting harder and harder these days to find places to hide your dead bodies. In the garden and under the front porch are full of skeletons and the back of the closet is reserved for Uncle Buddy. Not everyone can drive out to the Pinelands like we can in New Jersey, so we'll need to find another way to dispose of them. A Waste Management dumpster? Hmmm.
The question arises; can we use name brands in our writing? The short answer is yes. The qualifiers to go with that yes are you can't defame or tarnish that product's good name. You're not allowed to confuse your readers with similar fake names and water down the goodwill of that product. So instead of using a brand name garbage bag for your dead body, you'll have to just say garbage bag or make up a product brand for the dirty deed. But if your character is admiring a lovely lady in a Camaro, you can leave the brand in. If you do decide to use a brand name, be sure to spell it properly. Kleenex is a facial tissue, not a kleenex.
Don't waste a lovely afternoon of pecking away at the keyboard on researching a brand name instead of writing a few chapters of your story. But when you have the time for research during edit, do be sure to check spelling and infringement error. So BoneyBoy Pinelli can drop the carpet-rolled Chucky Three-Fingers Malone in a DumpStar container behind the Lucky Casino. Be creative and try something unexpected with your corpse. It will always make for good reading.
This month's question: Where do you hide your bodies? The dead ones, I mean.
 Send in your answer below!  Editors love feedback!
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Excerpt: Into darkness they dropped. Alerted by the splash, something scruffy scurried over. As it sniffed at an open palm, the fingers closed and squeezed.
Excerpt: I hated hunting in the rain. I was drenched, cold, and empty handed. The plan was to sleep in the truck for a few hours and start again. Still, I couldn’t ignore the vibrating phone. The paycheques that came with private callers never disappointed me. “We have an undead issue,” she snapped.
Excerpt: On day sixty-seven since the arrival of the Beast of Lozére, Jackie “The Huntsman” Red took a short break from hunting. He was discouraged by how the day was going. He had only seen two wolves drinking at Lac de Villefort- he had been watching them through his rifle scope from fifty meters away, lying across an outcropping of boulders on the hill. They were both grey with a black streak running across their backs. Rare twins, probably. Blood crusted their jowls but it was from a rabbit the larger one had killed. The carcass was mostly just a spinal column, half buried under the roots of a tree on the shore.
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Excerpt: Distinct shouting and the clashing of swords rang in my ears, smoldering ruins of once human dwellings now infested the air with the scent of blood and burning flesh. Peering from the mountainside, on the outskirts of the battlefield, the Bandits fell back steps at a time.
"Commander!, the bandit horde is dwindling, this is our chance to push them back out of the territory." Looking to the sergeant as he stood bloodied and battered, "No, they still pose a threat."
Pointing toward the south edge of the village he turned in awe.
A creature of legend lets out a furious roar as it's wheeled toward us, caged and screeching with hunger it growled in anticipation. Head of a lion, tail of a snake, eyes of crimson glaring, enough to crumble even the mightiest resolve.
Excerpt: Gary, hunched over the restrained participant, Lenny, cuffed into a chair that looked so archaic in design that it resembled an old-fashioned electric chair from a B-Horror Vincent Price flick. Crowned with a metal strip on Lenny’s head, from which wires snaked to other machines, to others it may seem that they were engaging in a homebrew execution of sorts. That was far from it.
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Excerpt: The cascades of flowers surrounding my husband’s flag-draped coffin scented the air, as Sergeant John Burns described what happened that fateful day.
“There was nothing anyone could do,” John said. “The IED exploded directly under his vehicle. It was over in an instant—Mike didn’t suffer.”
Knowing Michael hadn’t suffered provided some comfort, but my husband was gone—forever—and I would always feel that pain. I grasped my wedding ring that now hung from a gold chain around my neck, as my gaze wandered to the silver-framed photograph resting on a table next to the coffin.
Michael stared out at me, his blue eyes filled with life, his arm resting over his best friend’s shoulders. Bradley’s alert eyes peered at the camera, his tan and white coat brushed and shiny, his floppy ears framing his face. I bit my lower lip and quickly turned away.
Excerpt: "Now, let me tell you what really happened."
He looked the police officer in the eye and sighed.
Was he telling the truth? the officer thought while looking inquisitively at the man in front of him. What felt off about this one? Was it his sloppy appearance, his twitching eyelids or his attempt to manipulate his audience by looking him straight in the eyes as if telling him, look I am trustworthy? Careful, careful.
“I came home and found Pat, with the dog hovering over her body.”
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This month's question: Where do you hide your bodies? The dead ones, I mean.
Send in your answer below! Editors love feedback!
Last month's question: What tips do you have for trimming adjectives from writing?
dragonwoman  replied: I tend to write it as it flows, then go back and look at the adjectives. If there are too many or they are too flowery, I cut them!
gingerlyme responded: I do love my adjectives! I've come to see them a bit like salt. A sprinkle will season to perfection while too much can ruin a good thing.
In my own work, I need distance before I can even see them clearly. Once the story spends a little time away from me it is much easier to trim.
Angus  sent: Hi, Leger! Great Newsletter! I'm somewhat the opposite; I need to use MORE adjectives in my story. Either that or start using more metaphors and similes. For some reason those don't come easily to me. It's like they're oil and my brain is water. (See? Even when I try to use a simile it stinks!)
PS-Loved YOUR simile about adjectives being like makeup on a woman!
J. Lynn Lindsay  answered: I have been on WDC for almost two years now. With many great reviewers helping me to see how to describe without overuse of adjectives. In the beginning I used a lot of "LY" adjectives. I still like them, but have learned to use other methods. Also. I avoid all "LY" words that are difficult to say. Such as "peculiarly" or "spazmodically" these I am told are tedious to the reader and slow the story down. I think this may be true, especially now in our day where lazy reading is the norm. I say that because, as I read prose and even poetry from centuries past, I see writers and readers unafraid of using adjectives in abundance. "most heartily, with vehement incredulity" and other sentence bytes like it, are quite common. No one today, it seems wants to wade through the meanings, and understandings, of all those "LY" adjectives. I do believe it is part of our fast paced life of sound bites, op/eds, tweets and 3 minute videos that are dumbing down, and crippling the language of even those of us who call ourselves writers. Is it social evolution? Or is it social engineering? Hard to tell some days. Let's just day it is peculiarly, spazmodically entertaining to observe. - JLL
willwilcox said: I don't trim adjectives. I extend them, turn them upside down and right side up. I love to discover new adjectives, new words: like rugate (wrinkled), gravedinous (drowsy), allonymous (ghostwritten), and nipperty-tipperty (silly).
Thanks for all the great responses! |
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Short Stories: January 10, 2018 Issue [#8703]
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