Tag Archives: Evil Editor

When he said “evil” . . .

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I thought Evil Editor was, maybe, a cutesy nickname for a kinda reckless guy who’d bumped his noggin too many times, ya know, like Evel Knievel, only instead of jumping a bike over a canyon he’d just never listened when his teachers told him not to rock on the back two legs of his desk chair.

Or maybe it a coolish reference to EE’s passing-ultra hipness, like, “wow, those new adverbs you backformed are really eeeeevil.”

But look at this. In a critique of a query letter describing a paranormal romance, Evil Editor posted a link to this painting of an incubus by Henry Fuseli.

I clicked on the link . . . I looked at the painting . . . I looked AGAIN. . . Am I the only one who noticed this?????

evil editor's true identity???

Yikes!!!!

The answers are in

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Evil Editor has published the answers to his match-the-title-t0-the-synopsis contest.

I picked three right (my picks here). No prize for me! :-)

Here are the fake synopses I contributed:

Little Girl Blue
Will a sex-change operation finally enable a ravishing but desperately insecure house paint heiress to blow her own horn?

The Midnight Diaries
With her carrot supply dwindling, night vision blindness threatens to destroy Angela Fastling’s only defense against clinical depression: journaling in secret after dark.

The Monster Within
Two star-crossed veterinary techs find they have more in common than love when an outbreak of feline tapeworm triggers panic in their once-sleepy town.

Portal to Murder
Desperate for original submissions, a blogging literary agent snaps when her admonitions to “drop the portals, folk” fails to discourage a timeworn sci fi device.

Raise the Buried Dead
Belle Jackson’s photographic memory of local obituaries attracts the attention of Congressional aide Philip Tyler. But why?

EE edited the last one. My version began with the phrase “In this voter fraud thriller.”

My contest picks

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Okay, as promised here are my picks for Evil Editor’s “match the synopsis to the title” contest.

This was hard! I’ll be very surprised if anyone gets even half of them right. At first I was picking the ones that seemed kind of straight, but that can’t be a good strategy, considering how goofy people get when they try to invent what they think will be a saleable novel premise. So I switched my choices on a couple, looking for synopses that have a particularly naive “out there” feel to them.

But of course, the Evil Minions submitting fake synopses were presumably trying to create examples that had that feel . . . so who knows?

Like I said — this was hard!

(And John, I promise I’ll publish which five I contributed as soon as the contest is over! I can’t do it now, tho! lol)

Q1. Spitting Image
13. After a night of drunken stupor, Hal finds himself married to a girl who is identical to a ghostly figure from his childhood dreams.

Q2. Bad Ice
8. Stan Milburn, heist-man extraordinaire, gets more than he bargains for after he steals the cursed black diamonds of Calcutta.

Q3. The Heart of the Tengeri
6. Clarissa trusted rugged jungle guide Will to lead her through the Tengeri rainforest. Will her trust in the gentle stranger lead to danger? Or romance?

Q4. Little Girl Blue
2. When rookie cop Sarah Baxter is sent on her first undercover mission, she must catch the killer quickly… or miss her thirteenth birthday party.

Q5. The Whog Manual.
6. Space Pirate Verna’s newly-stolen starship is a special prototype about to plunge the reluctant thief into an adventure he never expected.

Q6. Commandment
3. Doctor Death, the self-proclaimed lord of crime, finally meets his nemesis: The Deity. Will Death bow to The Deity’s commandment — “Thou shalt not kill!”?

Q7. Life, Love, and a Polar Bear Tattoo
10. Pam moved to California envisioning the high life and true love. Dreams don’t  always come true, Pam learns, as she struggles to pay for bread.

Q8. Raise the Buried Dead
3. Nobody ever said voodoo was easy. But when Vance raises a trio of zombies, he finds that undead underlings are more trouble than they’re worth.

Q9. When Sid was Sid
1. Chapters alternate between past and present, as Margaret Divan describes life before and after she discovered her husband Sid, is a transsexual.

Q10. Dressed to Kill
10. A nightclub owner’s plan to have themed costume parties to attract business seems to be working — until she realizes the vampire “costumes” aren’t actually disguises.

Q11. Second Growth
12. A forest fire takes Mary’s family, and her sight. The power of nature can restore the woodlands, but can it give her back her happiness?

Q12. The Midnight Diaries
3. Two kids venture out every midnight to solve crime and help their mom get elected mayor, aided by GPS technology.

Q13. The Innocence of Evil
12. Only Macy Sanders knows that inmate Trey Mitchell doesn’t deserve lethal injection. He’s innocent. But Macy’s fiance knows nothing of Trey. Or of Macy’s past.

Q14. Heart of Desire
3. Vascular surgeon NICK loves JESSICA, but her ailing ticker may “do the newlyweds part.” Nick’s first wife once promised him her heart; is she Jessica’s genetic match?

Q15 Lack of Control
3. An alpha male CIA agent must battle his inner demons and protect a vital microchip from a beautiful and mysterious spy, or millions will die.

Q16. The Island and the Bell
6. Following a plane crash at sea, lone survivor Bob has only a silent bell, found in the wreckage of the plane, to keep him company.

Q17. Bad to the Bone
6. Custom motorcycle builder Danny Irons must prove he didn’t kill the man whose oil-soaked skeleton turns up buried behind his shop.

Q18. Portal to Murder
4. A detective and his attractive partner discover a string of murders caused by a mysterious portal that transports your soul to hell. Even if you’ve been good.

Q19. The Monster Within
7. Anna’s lycanthropy is under control–until she meets Jerome, who inspires all her best instincts and excites all her worst.

Q20. Soulscape
3. Danni knows she’s special. But now she’s involved with a treacherous voodoo priest, and must prove it–on the Soulscape, the realm of the dead.

UPDATE: I didn’t win :D

I’ve entered!

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I sent a submission to Evil Editor’s “invent a synopsis” contest.

I chose Group 3: Little Girl Blue; The Midnight Diaries; The Monster Within; Portal to Murder; Raise the Buried Dead.

I’ll let you know if any of mine get picked.

In related news, it’s possible I’ve developed a low-grade e-crush on Evil Editor. Fortunately it will never get out of hand, thanks to the appalling cartoon he uses to represent his personage next to his posts. But omg his posts crack me up!

UPDATE: oooh, it’s not an invent-a-synopsis contest — it’s a pick the real synopsis from the fake synopses contest. LOL

UPDATE #2: My Contest Picks

Query help. For writers.

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Found this morning via Miss Snark, who introduces this blogger, Evil Editor, as “[a]n editor, an honest to dog editor, [who] is critiquing query letters on his blog.”

I jumped over to check it out and this guy’s advice is worth it’s weight. Double worth it’s weight. Well. It would be double worth it’s weight if it were printed on something heavy, like, say, corrugated tin.

He takes query letters people have sent him, and prints them, once with his comments inserted and then once revised to accommodate his critique.

His comments are basically real-time “huhs?” that an editor/agent would experience each time the query writer blunders. They’re always illuminating and often funny. Here’s an example, from a suspense novel titled Coiled Revenge. Evil Editor’s comments are in brackets:

She escapes death when Tony barges in, using the key he stole from her apartment to save her. [He uses a key to save her? Who is this guy, MacGyver?]

It’s hard, because in a query letter, we’re trying to condense an entire novel down to a few paragraphs. So the inane can creep in. But we have to realize how off-putting it can be.

Evil Editor is a wonder resource. I’m adding it to my blogroll right now.