Tin Foil Mania

I consider the following an instructive piece of writing because it illustrates pretty much ever dang thang a writer can do to mess up a scene, and was written after a period of Rehab in CompuServe’s Writer’s forum. Rehab is for quitters.

Nonetheless, many writers worked with me and I was cured. Except for inserting flashbacks without warning. I forgot that one.

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MESSAGES FROM THE MOTHERSHIP

She froze, immobile, as if she'd been locked in an ice-cream truck all day.

In fact, she had, and the Baskin-Robbins man was now dead, done in by an orgy of orange creams laced with ethylene glycol. Ha! And they said a woman was a defenseless, a helpless creature. "They" had never surfed the net.

But the sound that froze her, even worse than the time she'd been frozen in the first paragraph, was the sibilant hiss of metal, a muted screeching, scrunching sort of sound, the sound of ... someone touching her tinfoil hat! The delicate, tinny whisper of metal that evoked security, sanity and kept her teeth from picking up Country and Western.

Her magic hat! Her magic hat!

She screamed -- a long silent very loud wail -- as she saw the black-cloaked intruder. He stared at her and smiled, a devil-may-care expression on his bronzed, aristocratic face. Oh, and aquiline nose and leather knee boots.

His eyebrows raised ironically, or some other sort of adverb, as he waved her magic hat tantalizingly in the air. Taunting, teasing, titillating...he finally gave up on 't' words because he couldn't remember how to spell them, so he continued, since he was on union time and he wasn't worried about POV shifts.

"Is this what you were looking for?" he said, waggling the hat in one hand.

"Yes! Yes!" she sobbed, weeping brokenheartedly. "Please don't take it!"

He laughed, a rolling diabolical laugh that the pious might envision on the lips of Satan, which was only stealing a little bit from a very famous writer, who would never find out anyway.

Damian thrust one long leg out the open casement window, flashed his movie-star smile, balanced on the window ledge, put his other leg on the casement window, hitched up his long cloak, slid his butt over the edge of the casement, ducked his graceful head under the top edge of the casement window, decided he was finally, almost, maybe out of the room, leaned out and –

Fell ten stories to his death.

"And about time, too," she said dryly, flashing to the window with a whirl of skirts, a sway of her hips and reckless disregard for the fact that the scene had run over the word limit.

Leaning precariously out the window, the only way she or any other respectable heroine could lean out a window, she saw, far below...the bent, crushed form of the dastard...wait a minute. Wait a minute. The heck with him!

Where was her tinfoil hat?

Where WAS it?

She clapped her hand over her mouth and screamed, a long silent very loud wail...

The [Thank Goodness] End