Friday, December 09, 2022

The Bush Detective and Red Riding Hood

 

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The BushDetective and Red Riding Hood

 

Horror in the Maize Field

 

They say that a picture tells a thousand words. I like to think that the picture can actually influence your writing. Suppose you approach a scene that you have scrambled in your Cinema mind.

 

You are the script writer and the director of the film. Your task is to take the film and write it as you see it. In this chapter of my book, which will be fully illustrated, as I built the collage for the chapter, the picture changed the way the film progressed.

 

Look at this picture carefully. What do we have? A man fighting a leopard, a Red Riding Hood, an Alsatian puppy, a blind runner, a Bavarian couple, a burning cross, the book logo and link.

 

As I started creating the collage, I couldn’t find the right image for my film, so I adapted. The dog changed to another species, the couple became half the age of the original pair, the blind man needed a white stick, and other additions of Adolf Hitler and a burning cross - made me conclude - Just change the script! Which then leads to more changes to the story as the scene is manipulated around the visible image. I regularly have light bulb ideas from post WWII, adventure, pulp fiction magazine covers.

 

So, is it possible to cram that many images in  the reader’s head into a viable second part of a chapter - that the illustration helped to make a rewrite? I think so.

 

Genre – Horror, History, Satire, Erotica, Dark Comedy, Farce (Monty Python/National Lampoon) 1800 words.

 

Anyone willing to give it a go? Thanks.

Sunday, December 04, 2022

Why is there a snake in the Baobab tree?

 

Why is there a snake in the Baobab tree?

 


Hello everyone.

I was recently asked to Beta read the start of an erotic novel in the style of a typical romantic erotica such as a raunchy Millstone and Bombs for a former member here who was banned by admin for promoting himself . (Bad man.)

Genre – Romance, Crime thriller – target audience - Reading age - till can’t anymore. The futuristic novel set in the future, which could be best seller once tweaked (a lot), is titled - Why is there a snake in the Baobab tree? It is quite good. -  

Opening scene: Chapter 13, Page 12. Fifth paragraph -

 “I dearly love you Adamo,” she said as he stuffed his nicotine stained tongue down her oesophagus, choking off most of the sentence that he couldn’t hear anyway as his Bluetooth headphones were banging out Meatloaf’s ‘Two out of three ain’t bad.

Managing to lip read what she said as he was half deaf from having yellow wax stained, screaming lumps of plastic and metal stuffed in his ears.

“I truly love you too Evana, let us lay together under the shade of this very large, dead baobab tree. But at the front of it. I think someone did an odourless poo at the back.”

He gently threw her violently to the ground, her heaving bosom covered by an immense head of nit filled, tangled, filthy black hair from being dragged through a hedge backwards. Hair that hadn’t been cut for 36 years due to the Covid 19 lockdown.

“Let us make gentle love, for I do need you to relax my tension before I run away from facing the electric chair.”

As they lay together on the rock-hard ground, sadly devoid of soft green grass due to the drought now in its 35th year, together, Adamo removed his 27-inch-long wooden prothesis leg and rubbed his bloody stump.

Just then, Evana trumped his lustful desire by screaming out in terrible fear, “Adam look!” She pointed at a mysteriously moving object, “Oh-oh, Adamo,” in shock, “an ant has stolen my Chinese made plastic fig leaf .”

 

Although cleverly written, it contains a few flaws. But first the way the writer has already given you the loving couple names and address of the scene being logically the Kaahari desert in Botswana. Lots of ants live there.

 

Well described descriptions, describe in so much that Adamo is obviously an Italian, Mafia chain smoking, one legged dwarf mobster on the hop from the law. (Murder weapon? Wooden leg – blood?) Also, the reader can presume his breath will smell and he will have plenty of black teeth to match his gangster outfit he might or not might be mightily wearing or not.

Evana is obviously of Czechoslovakian background who parents  could have been that famous couple who used millstones as bombs against Russian tanks in the uprising known as the Prague Spring in 1968. She also, perhaps, have a problem with personal hygiene and public naked exhibitionist similar to Lady Godiva, to protest against climate change.

We can also conclusively conclude it’s set in the future and the end of the world as we now know it soon will be. Since Covid 19 was developed in a laboratory on the 31st of December 2000 just as the clock struck 12 making it a second later just part of history - add 36years since they shut all the shops and the reader knows the story is set in 2036. Brilliant. The author doesn’t, tell he shows!

The air is full of pungent stink as the poo doesn’t smell. (Well maybe to flies. They can still survive in that kind of environment. Presumably if there is enough defecated excrement lying around.)  

However, I noticed some serious mistakes of logic.

1.You don’t face the electric chair; you sit in it.

2. If he is on the hop from the law, he can’t run away because he just took his leg off.

3. Why are they not waving their arms about because of those flies?

4. How come there is no mention of being uncomfortable on the hard ground.

5. If she is such an environmentalist, why a plastic fig leaf? Did she perhaps get it from rummaging through the remains of a Chinese restaurant she assisted in blowing up for selling endangered shark fin soup.

6. Why is there a dead horse on the cover of the book?

The author does leave more questions than answers in this short scene, but I wish him luck flogging a dead horse.

Now -  I don’t write sex scenes like that. Some readers may have lost the plot in my opening scene and promptly start seat wetting and just speed read through the non- sex scenes. Other readers are enjoying the plot but can’t understand why the couple seem to have so much sex. Sometimes twice in one chapter!

Someone please Beta read my opening from the half-written book Titled provisionally - ‘Seat Wetting’. Thanks. –

He…1200 words CENSORED… “and please pass me the bottle of apple juice.”

 

 

Sunday, November 27, 2022

A Gokwe Kid’s Final Fight



It is with much sadness that I received news that former Patrol Officer Ian McKinnon of The British South Africa Police, has passed away in South Africa last night. It was only two days ago that we were chirping together (audio) on messenger. He sounded irritated because he was bored and wanted to go back to work. He had been battling with cancer for quite some time.

I met him in Gokwe 1977. We were just kids programmed to be ‘Men of Men’ in a war with good odds of being terminated. I suppose we were together for a year, if you ever did get together and were not out on some Bush Patrol. I left Gokwe, and a short time later the police.

Decades go by. I wrote a book. The Gokwe Kid. He is mentioned in it a few times. Along with the book, I created the Facebook group of the same name. Many of the  Gokwe kids, nigh all, crouched under that tarpaulin of exclusivity. He followed the feed all the time and made frequent comments.

 

He may have been hidden from sight but not from memory. Ian marches on over my pages for ever in plain sight.

 

My condolences to all family and friends.

Rest in Peace, Gokwe China.