Okay! You are now firing a gun at your imaginary friend, next to 40,000 POUNDS OF NITROGLYCERINE!
My job,” Mitzi said, “is to make everyone in the whole world scream at the exact same time.
From his research he knew that child traffickers walk amongst us. They stand beside us at the bank. They sit next to us in restaurants. Foster had scarcely had to scratch the surface of the web before such predators had glommed onto him, sending their corruption and trying to rope him into their sickening world.
Your characters have arms and legs and faces. Use them. Use attribution. Control the delivery of dialogue. Support it with actions, or negate it with actions.
It was beautiful. We were selling rich women their own fat asses back to them.
Stabbing, Mitzi could write a book about. For example, why some killers kept stabbing for so long. Only the first thrust is intended to inflict pain. The subsequent twenty, thirty, forty stab wounds are to resolve the suffering.
You can smell diesel and deep-fried food and vomit and powdered sugar. These days, this is what passes for fun.
People shopping for a messiah want quality. Nobody is going to follow a loser. When it comes to choosing a savior, they won’t settle for just a human.
I am Jack’s prostate. I get cancer. I kill Jack.
An orange-stained Los Angelina she wasn’t. Not yet another bimbo beat hard with a blonde stick.
Tyler says I’m nowhere near hitting the bottom, yet. And if I don’t fall all the way, I can’t be saved. Jesus did it with his crucifixion thing. I shouldn’t just abandon money and property and knowledge. This isn’t just a weekend retreat. I should run from self-improvement, and I should be running toward disaster. I can’t just play it safe anymore.
Everything we did to fix me had side effects we had to fix. Then the fixes had side effects to fix and so on and so on.
Taco Tuesday. Only in prisons and aboard submarines were people more excited about food than they were in office jobs.
The past lived on in her hands, the way they’d shaken when Mitzi took her first DAT into a pitch. The memory lived as pain in her scalp, the old tug of her hair. She’d such long hair back then. High school-long hair, she’d pulled it tight, knotting it into a French braid she’d pinned down. Her French braid pinned to the back of her head, pinned as cruelly as any butterfly or scarab beetle pinned to the board in freshman-year Biology of Insects.
Her body continued to be the black box of a jetliner that had crashed with no survivors.
It was hard not to love a man who so steadfastly ignored the awful truth about her. But it was even more difficult to respect him.
There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher. What we can’t understand we call nonsense. What we can’t read we call gibberish.
Brainless wasn’t bad. Today, brainless was right up her alley. This world of grunts and clanking iron, the same tasks repeated mindlessly until failure, Mitzi loved it the moment she’d stepped through the door of the weight room. The Sisyphean repetition of lifting and lowering. Nothing represented life better than this endless losing battle against gravity. The grunts and cries that conveyed so much more than words ever could.
Since the dawn of films when young women had been tied to railroad tracks and tied to logs sent into hug sawmill blades, Hollywood ha never lacked new ways to take pretty girls apart.
Haunting her was the idea that we each summon our own death.