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🍽️ حلال Connor Bible - Everyone's Favorite Molly Ringwald loving, adoption hating, aspiring writer and bellybutton fucker
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He should have went with Cotton Eye Joe
Edit: And I want Cotton Eye Joe to be the BGM for all Klaus Krieger scenes in the audiobook do it do it now
Edit: And I want Cotton Eye Joe to be the BGM for all Klaus Krieger scenes in the audiobook do it do it now
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Using Pachelbel's Canon to make somebody look sopisticated...
A guy hating on Beethoven and listening to Pachelbel does not really sound like somebody with a deep intellect. I mean Pachelbel is nice and pleasant to listen to, but it's pretty much the classical piece closest to pop music. In fact, after 3 seconds of googling I found a number of pop songs based off Pachelbel - and neither "Go West" nor "I shoud be so lucky" evoke in me the feeling of otherworldly sophistication.
On the other hand... picturing Klaus trash talking classical music while jumping around manically - Kylie Minogue playing in the background - that would actually improve the story quite a bit, would give him some character.
A guy hating on Beethoven and listening to Pachelbel does not really sound like somebody with a deep intellect. I mean Pachelbel is nice and pleasant to listen to, but it's pretty much the classical piece closest to pop music. In fact, after 3 seconds of googling I found a number of pop songs based off Pachelbel - and neither "Go West" nor "I shoud be so lucky" evoke in me the feeling of otherworldly sophistication.
On the other hand... picturing Klaus trash talking classical music while jumping around manically - Kylie Minogue playing in the background - that would actually improve the story quite a bit, would give him some character.
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Honestly if Klaus was just calmly listening to Cotton-Eyed Joe it would've been much more unsettling.
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- Apr 18, 2014
Y'know, The thought occurred to me after I made that post. It'd be kinda like that scene in Silence of the Lambs with Goodbye Horses.
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- Oct 2, 2013
Final chapter. This is all he wrote. You'd think that perhaps that might give it a little more depth, but no: it's as dull and pointless as every other chapter so far. This is by far the most telling point for me--to have reached the end of an incomplete work, even a bad one, and have no interest or curiosity about how it ends.
THE NIGHT DIGGER
IMDB tells me that The Night Digger was the name of a thriller from 1971 in which a serial killer murders women and buries their bodies in the path of a soon-to-be-paved interstate. It’s not surprising that the title was quickly switched to The Road Builder, because Night Digger, in addition to sounding like an obscure sex act and a minced racial slur, is just a dumb sobriquet for a serial killer. No one seems to have told this to Connor, though.
In this short section, we never learn why the serial killer has this name. However, thanks to conversations with Connor, I know that she is called “the Night Digger” because she’s murdering people and burying them in her rose garden, resulting in large, beautiful blooms. There’s even a moment in this chapter in which she makes a brief, no-context mention of her roses. I’m pretty sure this particular method of body disposal has been done in other works, but there’s a more important reason I’m bringing it up now, which I will point out when the appropriate moment arrives.
The old shell was gone now, as was the sun.
I do not know what she means by “the old shell.” I presume she’s talking about her old identity or persona.
The darkness welcomed her. It was her one, true companion.
No need for a comma in that last sentence.
She was standing in front of the thing’s house. All of the other things were surely slumbering now. Hello darkness, my old friend, she speaks in her mind.
Hello, tense change, my old friend
I see we’re doing this again
Tenses changing without warning
Careless verbs that need reforming
People writing books that never go anywhere
And no one cares
About the rules of grammar…
Oh, and see how I put a comma between “hello” and “darkness”? Go thou and do likewise.
The scarlet hoodie she wore, along with her rubber gloves and the leather pants, became part of her.
Maybe it’s time to launder those.
Spoilers again: this is Lilith Grant. She’s ditched her red blazer for a red hoodie, which seems particularly strange to wear when you’re breaking into a house to kill someone.
This was her flesh. It would protect her. The instruments of her power were under her sleeves. Now was the time for her to demonstrate that power.
She parked her car a block away, and on the walk over here, she noted a newspaper container.
The tense here is also a little tricky. From the opening paragraphs and by specifying that she is now “here,” it seems as if she’s already in front of the victim’s house and that this sentence is recalling her walk there, so this should probably be in past tense: “On the walk over here, she had noted a newspaper container.” Also, I’ve never heard them called a newspaper container; usually they’re newsboxes, unless that’s a regional thing.
The Chronicle said in big black letters:
NIGHT DIGGER BUTCHERS FOURTH VICTIM, LAPD BAFFLED
This just in: HEADLINE PROVIDES BACKSTORY; EDITOR FACEPALMS
So apparently, the newspapers—and by extension the police working this case—know about the “Night Digger” name, which would imply that they know about her signature trick of burying the bodies under the roses. In which case…does that mean they’ve already been to her house? Do they actually know where she lives? Why hasn’t she been caught yet?
Again, Chronicle should be italicized or underlined. I am so sick of saying that, you just don’t know.
The Night Digger. How degrading.
Complain to the author, honey; he’s the one who steals this shit from crappy old movies without thinking of how it sounds.
Dear Dr. Krieger would agree. However, now was not the time to dwell on something so frivolous; the thing in that house will undergo her Test.
Semi-colons should only be used to connect two complete sentences. This is a sentence and a fragment. “However, now was not the time to dwell on something so frivolous; it was time to think on the thing in that house that would undergo her Test.”
Second time the tense has changed. It makes me wonder if this whole section was originally present-tense.
It was safe to proceed.
The lights were out in the house. That was perfect. The thing would most likely be asleep now, like the others.
Remember the line “like the others.”
It wouldn’t know what struck. When it did, it would be too late. The Test would have begun.
She came to a stop at the front door. Locked. She looked over her shoulder. It was a mistake, and she knew it. She noticed to the right of the yard were bushes, hedges.
While I recognize this as a stylistic device, it’s kind of redundant here. Either “hedges” or “bushes” would be sufficient, but not both.
There may be a door to the side of the house.
How does the presence of hedges and/or bushes suggest the existence of a side-door?
She crouched down, and moved around. She was right. It was a sliding glass door, locked from the inside. She would remedy that, but quickly and cleanly.
The Instrument on her right forearm extended out into the night air, and very carefully, she cut a hole into the glass door big enough for her hand to fit through and unlock it. With the circle cut, she gave it a tap, and grabbed the piece before it hit the floor on the other side. She yanked it out through the hole, placed it in the grass beside her.
1) Glass-cutters do not work the way they do in Bugs Bunny cartoons.
2) I’m not sure which law of physics your character just broke, but that’s the only way this scene could have happened as you describe it.
She could make out the interior of the house in the moonlight. She was staring into the thing’s living room. A high-definition television on a shelf. Beside it on racks were books. I’m Okay, You’re Okay. DSM-IV and V. This thing was into psychology.
Hahahaha, I’m Okay, You’re Okay is like the cheapest kind of pop psychology book.
Not that it mattered.
She slid the door open, breathed in the air conditioning and scent of lemon from the freshener on the shelf. If only it could match her roses. She stepped in, and looked around. There was a couch to her right, facing the television. To her left was small table with a lamp. Next to that was a framed photo of a middle-aged thing with big blonde hair. The thing had obviously had work done to it.
This is something else I hate: using cosmetic surgery as shorthand for being a bad person. Vanity = evil! Coming in the middle of a novel about radical human genetic manipulation, I don’t know if that throwaway line is hypocritical or ironic.
It was the only entity within the photo. Not a very social creature, she deduced. No one would miss it.
Cautiously, she crept out of the living room and in to the front of the house. There was a stairway, going up. She could hear typing.
Typing? YES! She’s going to murder Brian!
The thing was up! It was up and aware, like the others!
Meanwhile, from four paragraphs ago: The thing would most likely be asleep now, like the others.
It would participate in her Test. It would be willing. She came to a stop at the first step, and took her boots off, setting them on the between the rails. She wore no socks.
Have fun getting caught!
Plantar prints are just as identifiable as fingerprints. In a way, they’re even more useful in forensic work, since they give away details that fingerprints can’t (foot length can be used to estimate height; foot pressure patterns indicate weight; shape, size, and callus placement can help determine sex). It’s just that fingerprints are used more often because we tend to leave them everywhere. And for bonus fun, people whose fingerprints might not be on record will almost certainly have their plantar prints in a file somewhere because hospitals take those at birth!
She began to walk up the stairs. When she got to the top, she turned the corner to see the thing sitting at its computer in the room at the end of the corridor, fingers pressing keys. By standing in the thing’s doorway, there would be no means of escape. She was at an advantage.
The other blade slid out, alerting the creature before her.
She would be the last person that Christine Pickens saw before her death.
Aw, boo, it wasn’t Brian.
So slap the fuck out of nowhere, we get this. No previous set-up, no foreshadowing. It’s like a chapter from an entirely different novel crept into this one, or as if Connor simply said “wait, it’s a thriller; I have to have a serial killer here, right?” Maybe it’s to play up the Silence of the Lambs thing again; the Night Digger’s (god, I cringe every time I read that) interior monologue and her tendency to depersonalize her victims by calling them “things” is very Jame Gumb. Then, too, if Eva’s our Clarice, she’s got to have a crime to solve sooner or later.
This is the last chapter Connor’s made available, and it’s honestly a sad, stupid note to end on. He claims to have a completed draft, but if it even exists, we’ll probably never see it.
Beyond that, how was the book?
Eh. It’s about what I expected.
It’s what any young writer produces when in the grips of trying to prove to himself that he can write a real live grown-up book for grown-ups: dark, edgy, and with a lot of boobies in it. It’s not spectacularly bad, all things told, but there’s no real promise of this being a practice run, either. Most young writers with talent, I’ve found, have a basically good sense of story and characterization but also a tendency to devolve into melodrama and get their facts wrong (the classic example, in my opinion, is probably S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders).
This, on the other hand, is a great confused wad of story elements with no connection to one another. There’s a strong sense that Connor was simply trying to produce as many pages with writing on them as humanly possible, regardless of what the writing actually was, in order to convince other people—and perhaps himself—that he’s a really real for-real writer. But he doesn’t actually seem to have very much to say, and he doesn’t even understand what he’s saying, which is just mind-blowing to me. He’s obsessed with the idea of being a writer, but has nothing at all to say. The only really extraordinary thing about this story is how little he actually seems to care about it, and how little thought he’s put into it.
Can the story be saved? Well, there’s no story, really. If you took these characters and this premise and handed them to a competent writer, I’d say they’d be hard-pressed to sort them out and force them into coherency. Huge sections would have to be removed—particularly the SOTL stuff, of course, but much of Eva’s school day and probably the entire Night Digger (ugh) subplot would need to go. That leaves one with a bare skeleton, and I’m not sure it would be worth it.
IMDB tells me that The Night Digger was the name of a thriller from 1971 in which a serial killer murders women and buries their bodies in the path of a soon-to-be-paved interstate. It’s not surprising that the title was quickly switched to The Road Builder, because Night Digger, in addition to sounding like an obscure sex act and a minced racial slur, is just a dumb sobriquet for a serial killer. No one seems to have told this to Connor, though.
In this short section, we never learn why the serial killer has this name. However, thanks to conversations with Connor, I know that she is called “the Night Digger” because she’s murdering people and burying them in her rose garden, resulting in large, beautiful blooms. There’s even a moment in this chapter in which she makes a brief, no-context mention of her roses. I’m pretty sure this particular method of body disposal has been done in other works, but there’s a more important reason I’m bringing it up now, which I will point out when the appropriate moment arrives.
The old shell was gone now, as was the sun.
I do not know what she means by “the old shell.” I presume she’s talking about her old identity or persona.
The darkness welcomed her. It was her one, true companion.
No need for a comma in that last sentence.
She was standing in front of the thing’s house. All of the other things were surely slumbering now. Hello darkness, my old friend, she speaks in her mind.
Hello, tense change, my old friend
I see we’re doing this again
Tenses changing without warning
Careless verbs that need reforming
People writing books that never go anywhere
And no one cares
About the rules of grammar…
Oh, and see how I put a comma between “hello” and “darkness”? Go thou and do likewise.
The scarlet hoodie she wore, along with her rubber gloves and the leather pants, became part of her.
Maybe it’s time to launder those.
Spoilers again: this is Lilith Grant. She’s ditched her red blazer for a red hoodie, which seems particularly strange to wear when you’re breaking into a house to kill someone.
This was her flesh. It would protect her. The instruments of her power were under her sleeves. Now was the time for her to demonstrate that power.
She parked her car a block away, and on the walk over here, she noted a newspaper container.
The tense here is also a little tricky. From the opening paragraphs and by specifying that she is now “here,” it seems as if she’s already in front of the victim’s house and that this sentence is recalling her walk there, so this should probably be in past tense: “On the walk over here, she had noted a newspaper container.” Also, I’ve never heard them called a newspaper container; usually they’re newsboxes, unless that’s a regional thing.
The Chronicle said in big black letters:
NIGHT DIGGER BUTCHERS FOURTH VICTIM, LAPD BAFFLED
This just in: HEADLINE PROVIDES BACKSTORY; EDITOR FACEPALMS
So apparently, the newspapers—and by extension the police working this case—know about the “Night Digger” name, which would imply that they know about her signature trick of burying the bodies under the roses. In which case…does that mean they’ve already been to her house? Do they actually know where she lives? Why hasn’t she been caught yet?
Again, Chronicle should be italicized or underlined. I am so sick of saying that, you just don’t know.
The Night Digger. How degrading.
Complain to the author, honey; he’s the one who steals this shit from crappy old movies without thinking of how it sounds.
Dear Dr. Krieger would agree. However, now was not the time to dwell on something so frivolous; the thing in that house will undergo her Test.
Semi-colons should only be used to connect two complete sentences. This is a sentence and a fragment. “However, now was not the time to dwell on something so frivolous; it was time to think on the thing in that house that would undergo her Test.”
Second time the tense has changed. It makes me wonder if this whole section was originally present-tense.
It was safe to proceed.
The lights were out in the house. That was perfect. The thing would most likely be asleep now, like the others.
Remember the line “like the others.”
It wouldn’t know what struck. When it did, it would be too late. The Test would have begun.
She came to a stop at the front door. Locked. She looked over her shoulder. It was a mistake, and she knew it. She noticed to the right of the yard were bushes, hedges.
While I recognize this as a stylistic device, it’s kind of redundant here. Either “hedges” or “bushes” would be sufficient, but not both.
There may be a door to the side of the house.
How does the presence of hedges and/or bushes suggest the existence of a side-door?
She crouched down, and moved around. She was right. It was a sliding glass door, locked from the inside. She would remedy that, but quickly and cleanly.
The Instrument on her right forearm extended out into the night air, and very carefully, she cut a hole into the glass door big enough for her hand to fit through and unlock it. With the circle cut, she gave it a tap, and grabbed the piece before it hit the floor on the other side. She yanked it out through the hole, placed it in the grass beside her.
1) Glass-cutters do not work the way they do in Bugs Bunny cartoons.
2) I’m not sure which law of physics your character just broke, but that’s the only way this scene could have happened as you describe it.
She could make out the interior of the house in the moonlight. She was staring into the thing’s living room. A high-definition television on a shelf. Beside it on racks were books. I’m Okay, You’re Okay. DSM-IV and V. This thing was into psychology.
Hahahaha, I’m Okay, You’re Okay is like the cheapest kind of pop psychology book.
Not that it mattered.
She slid the door open, breathed in the air conditioning and scent of lemon from the freshener on the shelf. If only it could match her roses. She stepped in, and looked around. There was a couch to her right, facing the television. To her left was small table with a lamp. Next to that was a framed photo of a middle-aged thing with big blonde hair. The thing had obviously had work done to it.
This is something else I hate: using cosmetic surgery as shorthand for being a bad person. Vanity = evil! Coming in the middle of a novel about radical human genetic manipulation, I don’t know if that throwaway line is hypocritical or ironic.
It was the only entity within the photo. Not a very social creature, she deduced. No one would miss it.
Cautiously, she crept out of the living room and in to the front of the house. There was a stairway, going up. She could hear typing.
Typing? YES! She’s going to murder Brian!
The thing was up! It was up and aware, like the others!
Meanwhile, from four paragraphs ago: The thing would most likely be asleep now, like the others.
It would participate in her Test. It would be willing. She came to a stop at the first step, and took her boots off, setting them on the between the rails. She wore no socks.
Have fun getting caught!
Plantar prints are just as identifiable as fingerprints. In a way, they’re even more useful in forensic work, since they give away details that fingerprints can’t (foot length can be used to estimate height; foot pressure patterns indicate weight; shape, size, and callus placement can help determine sex). It’s just that fingerprints are used more often because we tend to leave them everywhere. And for bonus fun, people whose fingerprints might not be on record will almost certainly have their plantar prints in a file somewhere because hospitals take those at birth!
She began to walk up the stairs. When she got to the top, she turned the corner to see the thing sitting at its computer in the room at the end of the corridor, fingers pressing keys. By standing in the thing’s doorway, there would be no means of escape. She was at an advantage.
The other blade slid out, alerting the creature before her.
She would be the last person that Christine Pickens saw before her death.
Aw, boo, it wasn’t Brian.
So slap the fuck out of nowhere, we get this. No previous set-up, no foreshadowing. It’s like a chapter from an entirely different novel crept into this one, or as if Connor simply said “wait, it’s a thriller; I have to have a serial killer here, right?” Maybe it’s to play up the Silence of the Lambs thing again; the Night Digger’s (god, I cringe every time I read that) interior monologue and her tendency to depersonalize her victims by calling them “things” is very Jame Gumb. Then, too, if Eva’s our Clarice, she’s got to have a crime to solve sooner or later.
This is the last chapter Connor’s made available, and it’s honestly a sad, stupid note to end on. He claims to have a completed draft, but if it even exists, we’ll probably never see it.
Beyond that, how was the book?
Eh. It’s about what I expected.
It’s what any young writer produces when in the grips of trying to prove to himself that he can write a real live grown-up book for grown-ups: dark, edgy, and with a lot of boobies in it. It’s not spectacularly bad, all things told, but there’s no real promise of this being a practice run, either. Most young writers with talent, I’ve found, have a basically good sense of story and characterization but also a tendency to devolve into melodrama and get their facts wrong (the classic example, in my opinion, is probably S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders).
This, on the other hand, is a great confused wad of story elements with no connection to one another. There’s a strong sense that Connor was simply trying to produce as many pages with writing on them as humanly possible, regardless of what the writing actually was, in order to convince other people—and perhaps himself—that he’s a really real for-real writer. But he doesn’t actually seem to have very much to say, and he doesn’t even understand what he’s saying, which is just mind-blowing to me. He’s obsessed with the idea of being a writer, but has nothing at all to say. The only really extraordinary thing about this story is how little he actually seems to care about it, and how little thought he’s put into it.
Can the story be saved? Well, there’s no story, really. If you took these characters and this premise and handed them to a competent writer, I’d say they’d be hard-pressed to sort them out and force them into coherency. Huge sections would have to be removed—particularly the SOTL stuff, of course, but much of Eva’s school day and probably the entire Night Digger (ugh) subplot would need to go. That leaves one with a bare skeleton, and I’m not sure it would be worth it.
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kiwifarms.net
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- Aug 11, 2014
I don't think there'll be much left of the story once you remove all the stupid stuff. At this point it'd be easier to just give up on writing a gritty dark mystery thriller and turn the whole thing into a full on grotesque. Just amp up all the weird, incoherent stuff and create some kind of Troma-novel.
Also, are those fragments really supposed to be whole chapters? They seem to be awfully short for that. Even a throw-away pulp story will usually have chapters that cover at least five to six pages - R.E. seems to embrace the radical concept of ending every chapter after about ten sentences.
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- May 20, 2014
Night Digger please...
- Joined
- Feb 4, 2013
I swear having your killer call their victims "things" is ripped off from somewhere (besides SotL) but I can't place it.
- Joined
- Oct 28, 2014
Well, Alois is actually an Austrian name. Alois Hitler Sr. was born, lived and died in Austria-Hungary. Adolf was born in Austria to Austrian parents. So, to be honest, Connor is further betraying his absolute stupidity by using an Austrian name between two German-ish names.
Furthermore, all of Connor's attempts to make himself look intelligent, strange and broody make him look like the 'uneducated others' he always spergs about. I bet you most people know Adolf Hitler was Austrian, and have enough sense to Google names to see their etymology and origins. Nearly everyone knows Pachelbel's Canon in D by name, or recognize the tune. He badmouth Beethoven, who composed primarily Gothic work during the Romantic era, which would fit the theme Connor says he wants (the eerie, supernatural, crime and killers, a damsel in distress who is ruled by powerful men). It shows how fucking out of touch Connor is with reality and how fucking lazy he is.
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2014
Many thanks to @The Knife for going through and sporking Redesigning Eva! I'm not sure that I'd be able to read it otherwise.
This may just be me, but I feel like the chapters read as outlines. They're so short and cram in as much information as possible; the story doesn't flow organically, it's choppy and confusing and impossible to immerse yourself in.
This may just be me, but I feel like the chapters read as outlines. They're so short and cram in as much information as possible; the story doesn't flow organically, it's choppy and confusing and impossible to immerse yourself in.
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- Apr 18, 2014
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2014
That's probably because the chapters essentially are outlines. In fact, I'm fairly confident your average middle school essay is longer than some of them.
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- Apr 18, 2014
To be fair, short chapters aren't necessarily a bad thing. Pick up any of William Gibson's more recent novels and you'll see that the chapters are rarely longer than several pages. That said, this is Connor we're talking about...
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2014
Gibson I would think has an idea of what he's doing with his short chapters though, whereas Connor struggles be consistent with even major details and his whole plotline seems to be made up as he goes, which turns his two-page long ramblings into even more a nightmare.