Well It Wasn’t Dark And Stormy To Begin With…
It was a particularly calm and well lit night, aglow with the burning iridescence of several schools of flying fish. The forecast called for it to remain like that. Unfortunately, the forecast was also compiled by a particularly mundane set of well meaning but thoroughly ordinary people and, no matter how well educated they were, no chart in existence included variables for him.
I was just pulling on my galoshes to muddle out and give the jabberwocky his dinner when the sky rather abruptly turned a disturbing shade of totally unseasonal indigo before darkening abruptly to Egyptian black and filling with thunderclouds and lit, although not substantially, with bolts of lightening followed suspiciously quickly by uncommonly loud, threatening lightening.
Oh bollocks, I thought to myself as the fish scattered, their scales clattering noisily against one another as they shook in pure terror. The plot bunnies rampaging around my feet and through my head promptly took it into theirs to follow the flying fish and I swore privately- both were costly and time consuming to hunt down again.
The boss-man had better have a really, really, very exquisitely convincing explanation for this one.
Speaking of the devil, he lumbered into view as I was wrapping up my mutinous thoughts and nodded in my direction before bowing his head again in a futile attempt to escape the sheeting rain and hurricane gusts of his own Dramatic Entrance Storm. I shook my head at the idiocy of it all and rummaged through the bin beside my door in search of an umbrella before he approached any nearer. Suspended disbelief would only keep me so dry once he reached any kind of proximity.
I glowered at him and he glowered at me until he came near enough for me to see the deep lines around his eyes and mouth and the odd, stooped posture he had adopted in the time since our last encounter. By the time he made in to my doorstep and out of the rain my eyes picked out a thatch of graying hair and a pair of rose colored bifocals tucked into his jacket pocket.
“Well don’t just stand there girl,” he snapped. “Let me in out of this infernal rain. Lately it’s been following me everywhere.”
“It won’t follow you into my house, will it?” I asked, with some trepidation. After all, stranger things have happened.
“Of course not,” he replied scathingly as I finally shifted sideway to allow him to pass. “Don’t be daft. It will just hover ominously above you- er…lovely abode.”
I chose to ignore the jibe at my preferences in habitat location and appearance in favor of what was- or so I hoped- a sharp and witty retort. “Just hang there? Won’t we drown?”
“Of course not you daffy girl,” he chided, incredulous. “Look at how much water is already out there(True). I practically had to swim to your doorstep!(A slight exaggeration, but not much) Your standing in your foyer in galoshes for pity’s sake. (First he insults my house, now my footwear?) A little more water won’t do any harm (I beg to differ),” he finished with a flourish, looking perfectly reasonable.
And that, dear, masochistic, possibly non-existence readers, is, in a nutshell, all you need to know about my strange guest: The Plot Liner, a man with as many names as faces- and his faces changed daily. The last time he showed up at my house uninvited and proceeded to turn my life upside down a pair of deranged fangirls had invaded the Sherlock Holmes universe and were cleverly employing their surprisingly resilient Mary Sue’s to simultaneously best both Moriarty and Holmes- and, if my suspicions were correct, seduced the both of them.
By a stroke of brilliant, if somewhat accidental luck, I had managed to work with a Dr. John Watson to beat some sense back into Mr. Holmes and defeat the scheming females once and for all. But Mr. Plot had warned me that the damaged caused by these roving monstrosities of fans could be more permanent than just the one fan fiction gone awry. If his current appearance at my house and incredibly disheveled façade were any indication, the problem struck deeper than we knew.
It also meant that my few weeks hard earned vacation from the Looking Glass Publishing Company was about to turn into two weeks of mucking around some fandom or another in search of the plot slandering pussies who couldn’t just stick with the canon characters. Oh joy.
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Gasp! What is this? The world's most avid lurker, actually posting something? Yep, that's right. I'm notoriously overprotective of my novels (they are, in fact, my children.) I do, however, want some feedback. So here's a humor piece I may or may not expand on. It's the second book in a series (I haven't actually written the first yet...)