Public Outcry: Excerpts of my new book

The Google Search Query that lead someone to this site: "murder in reno, nv - horse tranquilizer novel"

Our interpretation: Tell us about your new book?

Well, I'm glad that you showed interest in my life outside of the survival guide. For all of my life, I have only written about personal experiences and relating them to you so you never have to go through my suffering. My first foray into fiction is a mystery/cop/historical thriller called In the Thick of Time which follows a cop who can travel through time using a magic hat he found in a time capsule from 1790 as he tries to foil an assassination plot of his great great grandfather by a rival cop who also found a time traveling hat. Here is a little taste of it.

The desert air was dry. Very dry. Reno was not kind to plants this time of year, or ever really. It's a desert, you know. I took a long drag off of my cigarette and blew smoke at my best friend Jim Benjamin. He was currently making a sand castle, and I held contempt for everything he brought into the world. Seeing the castle get built reminded me of the the time-space continuum and that time traveling hat I found. How time is made up of nothing but sand, and somehow that makes a castle, but change one grain of sand with something else, like a car, and your castle looks completely different. The bell rang, and I took one last drag: recess was over.

Oh, forgot to mention, the cop is in the 1st grade. I feel that we don't see many young cops today, and it's really a shame because kids have a fantastic moral code. Because of this, his rival is 43 and jaded. I can tell you are hungry for more, so here is a scene where good cop Guy Copperton travels back in time.

Everything starts spinning. The brick walls become a solid red swirl as I feel like I'm falling through the ground. You see history and life run past you and you have that crystallizing moment where you remember that time is a river. Then again, this could have been helped by the horse tranquilizers.

Another thing I forgot, but something you could have taken from the query search that brought up my new mystery/cop/historical thriller called In the Thick of Time, is that cop Guy Copperton is addicted to horse tranqs. In the business, we call that character development.

Benjamin Franklin lifted up his snifter of brandy and exclaimed "To the future and all of the hats that will go with it." We both drank to it, but I spit mine back out because I knew about the poison planted by my cop rival, Schemer Rivalcop. With Franklin dead, the time traveling hats would not be invented, leaving me stranded in the freshly-born States. I found some schematics for the hat, and knew what I had to do. I took my last horse tranqulizer and got to work. Also, Ben Franklin was my dad. This is what Future Franklin Douglas warned me about. This was THE THICK OF TIME!

Did I just blow your mind? Then buy my book, available when I hear back from Scholastic any day now. Until then, just periodically check your local library's mystery/cop/historical thriller section for more!

Writing Workshop: Creative Writing Exercises

In the creative writing scene, one may have heard things like “it’s important to write every day” or “Mr. Jones is retarded.” If I may be so bold to go against the grain, I would like to clarify something: repetition will not make you a better writer.

Also, I am not legally retarded. I used to bag groceries at a super market, oftentimes while staring at nothing while my tongue hanging out because I was tripping balls, so I understand where the confusion could come from.

But I digress. For your writing pleasure, I have created some creative writing exercises to help better your writing. Remember: repetition is a tool of futility! Each exercise need only be performed once!

Bus Station Personality Immersion Experience
Spend the evening at a bus station. Wait for someone vulnerable who lacks the company of others and mug them. After rifling through their wallet or purse and pocketing cash and major credit cards, take a look at a picture ID of theirs. What do you think about this person? What do you think their hobbies are? Do they seem popular? Write about how you imagined their sixteenth birthday went. If the person doesn’t have a picture ID, mug someone else.

Intra-Personal Mosaic Activity
Write about yourself in the fifth person. Hint: the fifth person is from the point of view of your fictitious, homosexual Siamese twin. After you finish writing, cut out all the words and paste them in such a way it looks like a portrait of yourself.

Peer Editing
Take an emerging piece of writing to a friend and have them critique it. Afterwards, write about how much you hate your friend and how he doesn’t understand your genius.