Guess the Plot
Canaan Moun- tain
1. Rapper T-Rex moves to a remote area where he thinks the few residents are too caught up in their own eccentricities to notice him. He's wrong.
2. A city girl gives up her publishing career and moves to the mountains of Tennessee to live with a hillbilly she met in an online chat room.
3. No one has ever come back alive from Canaan Mountain. Is The Creature in the Cave responsible? Or is that merely legend? Big Tom aims to find out once and for all tonight.
4. It was once known as Canaan Valley, second to Death Valley as the lowest spot on the continent. Then it was turned into a landfill. Now it's second to Mount McKinley.
5. Strip miners set up shop to ravage Canaan Mountain, but the tables are turned when it proves to be a live volcano.
6. Ghosts from the Civil War haunt the Canaan Mountain Retirement Center. And they want vengeance.
Original Version
Dear Evil Editor:
Canaan Mountain Retirement Center lays [lies] nestled in the hills of western North Carolina, a region where religion and nature are as interlocked as tobacco and paper. [Evil Editor is not crazy about this analogy. Some tobacco is wrapped in paper, true, but are they interlocked? One is rolled up inside the other, like sausage in a membrane. Of course it would be rather cumbersome to say, Religion and nature are as interlocked as two adjacent pieces of a completed jigsaw puzzle. I recommend changing the analogy to "Where religion and nature are as interlocked as tobacco and cancer.] In this setting, a group of characters meet and find a battle between good and evil still exists. Each of these characters finds themselves on their own personal journey.
Jack Heydon yearns to find his family. Chandler Heydon wants to find himself. Parker Heydon is trying to find his grandfather. [Is this set in a retirement center or a hedge maze?] Adam Cobalt looks to satisfy his greed. Ghosts from the Civil War haunt the center and they are looking for vengeance. [Shouldn't they be haunting a retirement center in the North if they want vengeance? Assuming there are any 160-year-old Yankee Civil War veterans to haunt.] [Wait, they could haunt the New York Yankees! No, seriously, I'm on to something here. Southern zombie Civil War vets want revenge against the Yankees so they Google "Yankees" and discover the only ones left are the Bronx Bombers. This could be hilarious. Change the title to Zombie Rebels Versus the New York Yankees. Or The Pinstriped and the Gray.] [The final battle takes place in Yankee Stadium. The Yankees have baseball bats and the zombies have bayonets. The concession stands sell hotdogs and brains. The Yankees ride around on baseball-shaped golf carts; the zombies have a Zamboni.] [If one of the Evil Minions decides to write this novel, Evil Editor wants an acknowledgment in the book, and half the take on the film rights.]
Jack, who cannot walk or speak, knows something is wrong. [For one thing, he cannot walk or speak.] The problem lies within the mind of Adam, a nursing home worker slowly turning mad as the demons from the Civil War haunt him. Fifteen-year-old Parker is the only other person who knows something is wrong and who can save his grandfather. [Save his grandfather? You said he couldn't even find his grandfather.] He enlists the help of a handicapped friend. The two boys save Jack. [From what?]
But there is a cost.
I am a writer living in Chattanooga, Tenn. and have currently finished writing a novel called Canaan Mountain. The novel is part horror, part suspense and part thriller. It is a little more than 85,000 words long. I am a newspaper reporter, by trade. In June, I will be published in the online dark fiction magazine Dark Reveries. I have published short stories in the online fiction magazines The Dead Mule: School of Southern Literature and The Half Drunk Muse. [When building a list of credits, it's best to send your work to publications with impressive-sounding names, like Pretentious Quarterly or The Pompous Review. An editor who's never heard of them won't be impressed by The Dead Mule and The Half-Drunk Muse.] I have been named a poet of the week on Poetry Super Highway. The strength in my writing lies in interesting characters and a strong story driven by suspense and plot. Even though I'm a horror writer, gore and blood are secondary. The story and the characters drive my writing. [Then, just when the reader thinks he's reading boring literary fiction, I bring out the gore and blood.] I am currently working on a second novel [in which Greek nursing home residents are attacked by dead Pelopponesian War soldiers.]
I look forward to speaking to you further about my novel. I can be reached at (insert e-mail address) or you can call me at (insert phone number). [Or you may use the enclosed SASE (insert form rejection slip.)]
Sincerely,
3 comments:
No selected comments? Everyone must have been laughing too hard to type.
What can I say but I want to make the movie about the Zombies vs. the Yankees, and your final jab EE is hilarious.
Wasn't western North Carolina one of the many regions in the South where the locals didn't want to secede, and spent the whole war taking potshots at Confederate soldiers?
I guess that would explain why the ghosts wanted revenge, actually, but they're 55,000 days late and a dollar short.
Author, please don't think I'm knocking your story. I don't know enough about it to knock it. The story itself may be good. The problem is the query. I always thought the part of the query that talked about the story should be longer than the author talking about himself and previous accomplishments. Luckily for me, I won't have that problem when I finally submit(and I will). Also, that last paragraph ... seemed a little presumptuous. Personally, I plan on sucking up.
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