The paper is terrible, which is generally a sign that this was perpetrated over my nan’s house. My nan was in the habit of feeding me mint Viscounts and sugary tea, but I’m not sure any quantity of blood glucose would justify this nonsense.
What is with my conviction that people in the Future have weird flicky hair? I’m not counting Cinda the alien in this since I’m not sure that even counts as hair. It may be ribbons. Also I love how I have completely given up on trying to draw hands and given her doilies.
(Seriously, though, Cinda has six fingers for Reasons. Aliens have mastered space travel because they have twelve digits and hence count using the duodecimal system, which is better than ours because imperial > metric. Or something. How I was capable of reasoning this while simultaneously giving her A BUNCH OF THUMBS remains beyond me.)
Today’s thing which is going to destroy the world is overpopulation; but at least we haven’t managed to fill Mars yet, which is something, and perhaps Cinda will share the secrets of inter-universal travel with us so we can colonise some more planets; though she seems more interested in mooching around on her weirdly-named spaceship with her new bestie than in helping out our struggling thumb-deficient civilization. Never mind. She’s evidently Doctor Who’s teenage girl regeneration, so they must have loads of other planets to rescue.
As Lexy is from the Future she lives in a skyscraper with a pet snake (called Mixy, because as everyone knows X is the most futuristic letter) and a stepmother, since real parents would interfere with the having of adventures. I don’t know who these mysterious people are who want to stop girls from different universes having adventures, but they’re not relatives. Maybe they just want to stop the entire space-time continuum from collapsing, or something. Killjoys.
Disappointingly, there doesn’t seem to be any human-on-alien action in this one, but that is of a piece with my general heteronormativity at this age. Don’t worry, there’s a lesbian road trip on the way.
(Why, yes, it is based on Thelma and Louise, since you ask. I had never actually seen that film until a couple of months ago, but when did that ever stop me in my plagiaristic tracks?)
‘Jules leaned forward in his chair and spoke wonderingly, intensely “How would it feel to kill someone?”
I think this line is going to be the highlight of my yet-to-be-written book? My friends, we are in trouble already.
Six of them there were — rich, clever and beautiful. They never went to bed at night, they sat up drinking coffee and talking about deep things.
Six of them there were? Are you Yoda? I find my schoolgirl vision of Life At Uni vaguely heartbreaking. I always went to bed at night, mostly because I had to write two essays a week and this is quite hard to do on no sleep. And I knew, like, one person who was rich, clever and beautiful, and instead of talking about Deep Things everyone mostly bitched about her.
Of the six, Ayesha was the richest — of Arab descent, she reinvented herself with blonde hair and contact lenses.
I feel compelled to admit that Ayesha was in fact based upon this Super Cool Sindy:
Now you have a mental picture of her, we can continue.
Jules and the androgynous Christian were twin brothers — Jules was the cleverest, Ayesha’s idol, and obsessed with crime. Christian was ‘happy to be in touch with his male and female sides’ and had a stormy relationship with his twin.
ZOMG TWINS! Also, I want cookies for having a genderqueer character, seeing as how Tumblr is twenty years in the future.
Saundra was a ‘weirdo’ having a platonic affair with Christian.
GIVE ME GODDAMN COOKIES TUMBLR I MEAN IT.
Joe was a general ‘good guy’ and Venitienne was a mysterious and melancholy brunette, who wrote haunting poetry. Six quicksilver young people, bright as the sun, talking at midnight about murder.
Joe is just here to make up the numbers, isn’t he. And Venitienne? There are so many lovely names in the world, why do you have to try (and fail) to invent new ones?
It is Jules who meticulously plans his ‘perfect crime’ and Venitienne who helps him. The victim is unimportant — she is a prostitute of around 35, identity unknown.
Wow. I don’t even know where to start with this. Well, clearly 35 is far too decrepit to be allowed to live, and sex workers are unpeople (which I assume is why Jules has chosen her), and really this poor woman whom I have not even bothered to name (though, given my track record at naming characters, this may be no bad thing) is no more than a plot device. I am cross with you, younger self, and I am confiscating your Tumblr cookies because you don’t deserve them.
At a bleak beauty spot the six assemble. Each does his or her part, wearing rubber gloves and bathing caps to prevent leaving fingerprints or hair.
Oh yay, Jules is forensically aware. I do however feel that his ‘perfect murder’ would be substantially more perfect and the risk of leaving DNA traces significantly lessened if he hadn’t roped in FIVE OTHER PEOPLE to help out.
She is buried in a strange ceremony composed by Venitienne and conducted by Christian.
Well, that’s nice.
Then they return, talking incessantly about the experience.
Sounds fun.
Only Saundra remains silent. A week later, tormented by guilt, she kills herself.
Saundra, Saundra, Saundra. Why did you agree to it in the first place? Did it not occur to you earlier that you might feel an eensy bit bad about killing an innocent person just for kicks?
Her suicide note, confessing everything, is burned by Christian — grieving for her, but loyal to his twin.
What has fraternal loyalty got to do with it? Presumably the note implicates everyone, in which case destroying it is kind of a no-brainer.
Joe ‘cracks’ — eventually returning home but visiting the grave constantly.
I thought Joe was supposed to be a ‘good guy’? How did Jules even get these people to participate in his human sacrifice thing? Maybe when he leans forward in his chair with a preponderance of adverbs he is actually hypnotising them all?
But Jules and Venitienne were hooked by the first blood — now they form a sinister alliance…
I ran out of page at this point, but I can tell you that in the fragment of this which succeeded in getting written (and not many blurbs made it that far, so I must have considered this one of my Best Ideas), Jules and Venitienne were engaged in a bathing-cap-clad killing spree which was rapidly developing BDSM overtones, Joe was in a psychiatric hospital, and Christian was on the run with a spaced-out Ayesha.
(Also, there was a conversation about infinity. It was awesome.)
So essentially this is The Secret History, right? Except for how it is rubbish. Six fabulously pretentious students? Check. Murder, suicide, intra-group affairs and infatuations? Check. There are even TWINS. (Of course there are twins. There are always twins.) I’m thinking I must have been ‘inspired’ by a review in the Sunday Times Books section, which I suppose is a step up from stealing my plots from Neighbours.
I am phoning this in, rather. Everything is in crappy blue biro, the title is repeated three times for no apparent reason, and I seem to have dispensed with anything resembling a plot. OK, we have ‘five sixteen-year-old girls, one from each continent’. So far, so BBC Three documentary. But there doesn’t appear to be anything to connect them other than the fact that they are all sixteen-year-old girls.
I kind of love that ‘Californian’ is equivalent to ‘African’? Um, hello, neither of these are actual nationalities. And I suspect that Maria Luisa is actually Colombian, unless she was born on a space shuttle.
I feel that having a character born on a space shuttle would have made this substantially more interesting.
Let us review. Naturally our representatives from South America, Asia and Africa live doomed lives of poverty and unrelenting misery. They are either knocked up, ‘coping’ with repressive regimes (it is so hard to be sixteen and not able to vote! oh, wait…) or homeless. Meanwhile, our girls in Europe and North America seem to be doing… not very much, to be honest. Poor Veronique hasn’t even been given a dilemma, while Lullaby (LULLABY) seems destined for an endless round of pointless plastic surgery.
(Your ‘first nose job’ should really be your last, if your surgeon knows what they are doing. Noses are not breasts. Glad we got that cleared up.)
There are times when I think these things were less a spontaneous overflow of my creative mind than a desperate attempt to avoid doing my maths homework.
(No, I didn’t suddenly develop a tremor, my biro was running out)
So yeah, fall of the Iron Curtain! It’s 1989! I’m twelve! I can’t draw hands!
I will say, even now, that as names of fictional eastern European countries go, ‘Barillia’ beats Enid Blyton’s ‘Baronia’ to which it is closely related. And that as made-up eastern European names go, ‘Romilla’ could be worse.
I love that Paul is ‘promising’ and ‘talented’, because recognising that Barillia might not be a Marxist utopia of happy smiling peasants is obviously really hard, especially with all these people wandering around in Dickensian rags covered in bruises and weird haematomas (what is that on Romilla’s foot? and that blonde woman who is presumably her mother has, like, a snake issuing from her mouth, it is freaky).
He tricks his way into the workhouse! He rescues a hot skinny blonde chick! He becomes a fugitive! He becomes a revolutionary! Whatever would ‘bleak Barillia’ have done without the hunky Western guy to help them out?
OK, so the ‘winds of change’ are operating independently of him (bonus points for Scorpions reference! also bonus points for totally subconscious Sydney Carton quote) and Romilla does help him out a bit with the whole revolution thing, maybe by acting as an interpreter. Or possibly Paul is so super that he picked up the language in a week. Or (more likely, this) everyone just speaks English.
I cannot end this piece without pointing at the bloke in the hat. And the bob. And the purple bowtie. And the mad eyebrows. And the moustache which entirely conceals his mouth (how is that even possible?) He is clearly EVIL and quite possibly a dictator of some sort, but how for the love of god is he getting anyone to take him seriously in that hat? Does he just shoot everyone who laughs at it? Or is he cultivating an image as a murderous yet lovable buffoon so the West will sell him arms? (Oops, sorry, wrong batch of revolutions)
Small mostly illegible writing! That means I can do another line-by-line commentary [rubs hands in glee]
Earth, 2073. A space craft orbits the planet, containing a family of ‘others’. Pondro, the father, is married to Glinna
Pondro. I’m going to say that again, just for the hell of it. PONDRO.
and has recently started an affair with his evil daughter Rillia
Eeew, random incest and labelling the abused child as ‘evil’. Just because Shakespeare does it doesn’t mean it’s OK. (Not that I had read Pericles yet, so I can’t even use that as an excuse.)
On Earth, Mark and his computer Trianne pick up signals from Glissop, a computer on the ship.
GLISSOP.
Glissop belongs to Raeone, Pondro’s youngest daughter. Raeone and Mark soon fall in love, much to the distress of his girlfriend Kady.
If my boyfriend was cheating on me with an alien he met on the internet, I’d be distressed too.
So do the computers.
The computers are in love as well? Why have they been programmed with this ability? I would be pretty pissed off if I found my newly-rechristened laptop was having a fling with some virus-ridden XP-running skank on the other side of the world.
Then Rillia finds out and threatens to tell Pondro.
Ah, this would be the evilness showing through.
Pondro hates Earth people.
OMG RASCISM!!!
But, unknown to all, he has a daughter on Earth —
OMG HYPOCRASY!!!
Clemantine, the bullied ‘hybrid’ who’s in love with Mark
What’s so great about Mark that he has three girls chasing after him? It’s not like he’s fit. Also, how and why does Pondro have a secret half-human daughter? Were there test tubes involved or did he just do the nasty with some woman he met on the internet? I don’t really want to think too much about the inter-species crossing, so let’s just marvel at Clemantine’s hair and move swiftly along.
Is the romance of Raeone and Mark doomed? Will they ever meet?
Do we actually care? I’m more interested in Trianne and Glissop, not to mention the stylish waistcoats which are apparently de rigeur in alien circles.
So yeah. I invented hot blue aliens. They are not Noble Savage hippy treehugging blue aliens, they are kind of evil and prone to random incest and impregnating other species; but Raeone is prettier than Kady, so there.
This wouldn’t fit on the scanner because it’s foolscap. It wouldn’t fit in my ringbinder either. Annoying.
The detective’s name is making me think of this stupid epitaph:
Here lies Lester Moore
Four slugs from a 44.
No Les. No Moore.
Maybe that’s meant to fit with the whole noir-ish feel I’m trying to get going here, with nightclubs and random references to the Mob? Either way, it fails.
So, anyway, here be spoilers. Obviously I didn’t want to give away the big plot twist because that’s not what blurbs do. But Sheila’s ‘bizarre’ ‘secret’ is… she was assigned male at birth. Shocking, huh? You weren’t getting that vibe from her drag queen stagename, makeup and costume at all, were you? I don’t know why the police failed to figure this out at the autopsy and had to get the info from her sister. The murder must have been really horrific 🙁 I have a vague idea that the murderer may have been an ex-lover with objections to Sheila’s trans-ness, but since I was steering clear of spoilers I can’t remember. Oh well.
I feel bad for Sheila that not only is she dead as a result of a probable hate crime, but her case is being handled by a police officer who seems more interested in perving on her sister. Plus, his unprofessional conduct is hampering the investigation, as Jacey is withholding vital evidence in case the bad people hurt him. Um, he’s a cop. Dealing with dangerous people is sort of his job.
Mainly, this production screams out to me ‘I just got a new set of Berol felt-tips and I’m going to use them!’ There is something so retro about the lettering in the title, I almost love it. Almost.
(Oh, and when I first heard of Macy Gray I was like ‘OMG she has nearly the same name as the sister in that shitty crime story I thought up several years ago.’ My brain is full of this irrelevant junk.)
This one is laid out like a small child’s newsbook — pic on the top, words below — so I’m going to transcribe the text and give you a running commentary. Woo!
When Alistair returned to his beloved Highlands to take over his father’s croft, he brought a surprise — a new wife. Welsh-born Meredith was confined to a wheelchair, but accepted it cheerfully and soon won the local’s hearts. It was easy to see how Alistair had fallen in love with his ‘Merry’.
Jesus, it’s a Celtic Pollyanna. Nicknamed Merry. Do you see what I did there?
But Meredith was often lonely at their isolated farm. Although the doctors advised against it, she and Alistair started trying for a family.
I do not feel loneliness is a good reason for having a baby against medical advice, assuming of course that said medical advice is more substantial than ‘you can’t breed ’cause you’re disabled.’
As soon as she became pregnant, her twin sister Madolyn turned up — causing havoc.
YAY EVIL TWIN!
With her wavy black hair and strikingly green eyes, Madolyn was almost dangerously beautiful.
Not evident from the wonky-mouthed, scant-chinned portrait of her, but never mind.
She led the local boys a merry dance, letting them fall in love with her then ignoring them.
That’s the worst it gets? I suppose that’s why she’s only ‘almost’ dangerously beautiful.
And all the time Meredith was reminded by her sister’s presence of the freedom she had lost. What made it worse was that it was Madolyn’s carelessness that crippled her in the first place…
But of course.
When Madolyn turned her cat’s eyes to Alistair, Meredith couldn’t cope. She worried about leaving them in the house together when she went into hospital to have her baby.
I have a plan! Your evil twin has already been staying with you for months… why not just kick her out? She put you in a wheelchair. She is lucky you are angelic enough not to mind too much and are still speaking to her.
Then the baby was born with a slight mental handicap —
I have approximately four million problems with this plot development, chief among which is that it is a newborn baby, so how can they tell? It may be natural to assume that any child born into this family is going to be pathologically stupid, but you cannot make this diagnosis before it has even failed to hit any developmental milestones. Also that the doctors were right and any kid born to a woman in a wheelchair is inevitably going to be defective. Ugh.
— and a guilty Madolyn confessed tearfully to seducing Alistair.
Evil Twin FTW.
Meanwhile, Scotland wanted independaence from the United Kingdom — and the spirit of change wafted through the lonely hills.
What has this got to do with anything? Oh, maybe it’s a Theme. Like Meredith is representative of Scotland, or possibly Wales, getting repeatedly fucked over by Evil Twin/England. Or perhaps she wants a divorce from Alistair and Evil Twin the same way Scotland wants one from the UK? I don’t really see how the handicapped baby fits into this schema. Maybe it is the Isle of Man or something.
And the bewildered, tragical Meredith wandered with her baby, and wondered what to do…
I am having a really hard time picturing wandering around in a wheelchair if you have a baby in tow and live on a lonely hill. It seems like it would be a fairly major operation. Has she even bothered to ask Alistair what went on? Evil Twin could easily be lying. Lying is what Evil Twins do, when they are not busy maiming or ignoring people.
