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Monthly Archives: October 2012

Sam Shivered.

18 Thursday Oct 2012

Posted by Ann S. in Writings

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

dog, fiction, gun, hitchhiker, horror, murder, writing

Sam shivered. It wasn’t the cold.

It wasn’t pleasure, either, like the last shiver caused by Rita Kamkath blowing gently in his ear. They had been entangled on the couch, making out in her parent’s living room long after curfew, when he found himself getting very excited. Her blowing in his ear – so soft like a gentle sighing that travelled all the way to his toes and back up again lighting up every nerve ending along the way – was an unspoken promise of good things about to come his way. Unfortunately, Chewy, her dad’s overweight, chocolate-brown lab, lumbered into the darkened room letting out a gut wrenching howl, and awakened the entire household. Mr. Kamkath burst into the living room wearing nothing but his tidy whities and wielding a baseball bat. Turning on the overhead light and seeing his daughter in a compromising position on the couch, he turned an ominous shade of dark red. Sam never found out what good things were to come from Rita as he adjusted his clothing and ran for the door. Now, as he cowered next to the heavy wooden workbench with his back pressed against the warehouse wall and his knees pulled up under his chin, another shiver ran up his spine.

There was movement from another room on the other side of the wall but Sam couldn’t determine how far away it was. All he knew was the man who had brought him into the building was close. Sam wished for some kind of miracle save but he was alone and certain no one knew his predicament. No one could possibly know that after escaping Rita’s house with the very explicit directions never to return if he wanted to keep his manhood intact, he would be trapped in something so deadly.  A sweat bead trickled down his back.

He had been in a perfunctory mood after leaving Rita’s house when he stopped in front of Mary’s Diner on County Highway H and picked up the hitchhiker. He hadn’t given it too much thought. The guy looked harmless enough – one of those college types wearing glasses, a red hoodie sweatshirt, jeans, sneakers and carrying a blue canvas backpack. The guy said he’d take a ride as far as Sam was willing to go.

As he shut the door and settled into the front seat, the college boy pulled out a small handgun from his backpack and directed Sam to the abandoned warehouse.

No amount of pleading or cajoling elicited another word from the armed hitchhiker until they arrived at the building where he simply instructed Sam to “Get out.” Then he took the keys from the ignition and threw them out into the darkness. Sam watched them disappear and then looked up at the broken metal doors and strained to see what awaited him in the blackness inside.

As they moved deep inside the building, he guessed the stranger was playing some sort of twisted game and he had no choice but to play along. The right hook that caught him on the cheekbone when he hesitated at the threshold had convinced him of that. He didn’t know how skilled his pursuer was but the silent stranger acted lethal. As they started what was going to be a murderous game of hide and seek, Sam pushed all thoughts of Rita and pleasure out of his mind.

The hitchhiker gave him a minute head start and Sam stumbled his way through the building, in large workspaces and around abandoned machinery. He could not remember the way back to the entrance and had found himself at a dead-end in a workroom.

From his left, Sam heard the soft tap of a rubber sole on the cement floor. All he could think of was that the howling of that stupid, fat canine had put him square in this predicament and he wished he could wring Chewy’s neck. As Sam pulled himself into a tighter ball at the side of the workbench and buried his face down into his chest, he heard the cold, metallic click of the hammer of a gun just above his ear. He shivered one last time.

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FANBOYS in the house!

11 Thursday Oct 2012

Posted by Ann S. in The Technical Side

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Tags

Comic-Con, comma splice, conjunction, conjunction junction, Fanboy, grammar, schoolhouse rock

(Another installment on the college course I’m teaching this semester – Writing: The Editing Process.)

The class has moved past the comma splice section, although I refer to it each session to help embed it into the students’ memories, mostly because I still see a few frightened looks when I say the term “comma splice.” (Remember: if two complete sentences are joined by a conjunction – add the comma before the conjunction.)

What? A conjunction? Most people freeze up when asked, “Do you know what a conjunction is?” The pupils dilate, the pulse races and perspiration begins to bead in unwelcome places. Simply put, conjunctions are a group of seven connecting words. That’s it – seven little words that are no more than three letters each. Somehow just bringing up the word “conjunction” elicits fear in grown adults. What is a conjunction? Unless you’re an English major, proofreader or editor, no one talks about conjunctions beyond freshman high school English. However, you might be able to hum the “Conjunction Junction” tune from the Schoolhouse Rock series. But after you’ve sang, “Conjunction Junction, what’s your function?” that’s probably about where the memory ends and the song trails off into a “da da da dada, dada dada…” and then you think about that cute little Bill who went to Capitol Hill to become a law.

I don’t think anyone has ever actually said, “I want to forget everything I learned about good writing and become a poor writer.” But with everything else in our personal and work lives filling up our brain space, writing and editing skills aren’t high on the list of items to retain. With a few helpful hints you can easily improve your writing, so when you’re writing up that sales report or putting together an SOP, you can use conjunctions and edit them correctly.

Maybe it’s the length of the name that throws people off. Like the term abbreviation, conjunction is a long word to describe short words. One of the ways used to get students and writers to remember a conjunction is to call them FANBOYS. FANBOYS . . . what? I’m not talking about those extreme movie and comic book fans who dress up in character and parade around at premieres or COMIC-CON, but rather those seven little words that link ideas together. When talking about FANBOYS in grammar, I mean:

For
And
Nor
But
Or
Yet and
So.

See, the first letter of the conjunctions spell out FANBOYS. Clever memory trick, yes?

So when writing a report or SOP, if you write a sentence that has two complete independent clauses in it connected by FANBOYS, remember to put the comma before the conjunction. And then you may dress up like Obi-Wan Kenobi and head to San Diego where you might just hook up with Princess Leia.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Mine

03 Wednesday Oct 2012

Tags

farm, fog, landscape, photography, postaday

The view from my kitchen on an intoxicatingly foggy October morning.

 

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Posted by Ann S. | Filed under Photography

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