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My personal favorite so far is where I changed from a straight-up detective murder story to some weird tale about aliens who live outside of time and collect data for the archives of dying planets, which I accomplished with this:
They got in the car and started driving to the morgue. Sergeant Riggs was staring intently at the screen of his phone.
“Oh, shit!” he exclaimed. He turned a deathly shade of white. “Tell me this is a joke, please, this isn’t funny guys. Not funny at all.”
“What?” Detective Campbell jumped when Sergeant Riggs yelled, and had to jerk the wheel to keep the car from careening off the road. “What is it?”
“Cern just sent out a tweet, and all it says is ‘serious malfunction’. That can’t be good…” He began frantically typing on his phone. “Reports are coming in… explosion… communications being cut off… oh my god, they think they’ve…”
“Hey, do you have a sudden craving for spaghetti?” Detective Campbell asked, just as the event horizon of the newly created black hole hit them.
And then there is this....
Chapter Thirteen
In which the author tries every desperate attempt to pad her word count, like using way too many parenthetical wandering thoughts and adjectives to describe common things. For example, you could simply write ‘he grabbed a ball’, which gets you four measly words. It’ll take forever to even hit your daily word count that way! Instead, use embellishing tricks. ‘He picked through the tall white wire bin of sale children’s super high flying patented Snerdly and Vapint miracle bouncing balls and after futilely rummaging around for a few minutes he managed to get a hold of and pull out a cheap red and white striped (okay, not really striped if he was to be honest, because the wedges – and that’s what they were, wedges – of color tapered at the poles, so can you honestly say that is striped? Is there a rule that striped have to be even? Surely not, there are plenty of wonkily striped things that people refer to as striped, and that makes sense on a flat surface, but somehow it doesn’t seem the same rules should apply to something round, though they very well may be, he isn’t the arbiter of all things striped, wonkily or not, and to be brutally honest it doesn’t matter in the slightest because if it’s not striped that he didn’t know what else to refer to it as, anyway, so striped it is) three and seven-eights inch diameter synthetic man made plastic polymer (easy to clean and disinfect, the little brightly colored paper tag says, because goodness knows what germy, snotty messes kids are) ball in the serious overpriced toy aisle in the big box kill off the small business and ruin the country chain drug store that took the place of that quaint and charming little family owned Italian restaurant they used to like and eat at every Friday that had the most wonderful meat lasagna with the extra cheese melted over the top of it and served with that amazing crispy garlicy breadstick, not that Cheryl (that harpy) would eat it now, since she developed that weird phobia about tomatoes and most everything that is red, blood red or cherry red or maroon or crimson or whatever shade you want to call it, and now, come to think of it, she might massively freak out over the color of the ball so maybe he should get the calm ocean blue ball, the one with the mottled swirls of blues that he supposed was supposed to resemble a sky more so than an ocean (which would have more green and not have the white bits, unless it was frothy), but was a very unnatural shade of blue for a normal sky, at least on earth, but maybe the painter was actually an alien from another planet (who was he to judge) and he’d better get to buying the damn thing which, as he noticed, was not too terribly cheap, it would cost him the day’s Half Caf Non Fat Venti White Chocolate Mocha Starburp’s coffee and the snotty little kid would probably be ungrateful anyway, and his whining, grating voice would intensify the throbbing headache the lack of caffeine would give him.’ Four hundred and seventy four words, and really, I’m sure a few more could be crammed in there.
They got in the car and started driving to the morgue. Sergeant Riggs was staring intently at the screen of his phone.
“Oh, shit!” he exclaimed. He turned a deathly shade of white. “Tell me this is a joke, please, this isn’t funny guys. Not funny at all.”
“What?” Detective Campbell jumped when Sergeant Riggs yelled, and had to jerk the wheel to keep the car from careening off the road. “What is it?”
“Cern just sent out a tweet, and all it says is ‘serious malfunction’. That can’t be good…” He began frantically typing on his phone. “Reports are coming in… explosion… communications being cut off… oh my god, they think they’ve…”
“Hey, do you have a sudden craving for spaghetti?” Detective Campbell asked, just as the event horizon of the newly created black hole hit them.
And then there is this....
In which the author tries every desperate attempt to pad her word count, like using way too many parenthetical wandering thoughts and adjectives to describe common things. For example, you could simply write ‘he grabbed a ball’, which gets you four measly words. It’ll take forever to even hit your daily word count that way! Instead, use embellishing tricks. ‘He picked through the tall white wire bin of sale children’s super high flying patented Snerdly and Vapint miracle bouncing balls and after futilely rummaging around for a few minutes he managed to get a hold of and pull out a cheap red and white striped (okay, not really striped if he was to be honest, because the wedges – and that’s what they were, wedges – of color tapered at the poles, so can you honestly say that is striped? Is there a rule that striped have to be even? Surely not, there are plenty of wonkily striped things that people refer to as striped, and that makes sense on a flat surface, but somehow it doesn’t seem the same rules should apply to something round, though they very well may be, he isn’t the arbiter of all things striped, wonkily or not, and to be brutally honest it doesn’t matter in the slightest because if it’s not striped that he didn’t know what else to refer to it as, anyway, so striped it is) three and seven-eights inch diameter synthetic man made plastic polymer (easy to clean and disinfect, the little brightly colored paper tag says, because goodness knows what germy, snotty messes kids are) ball in the serious overpriced toy aisle in the big box kill off the small business and ruin the country chain drug store that took the place of that quaint and charming little family owned Italian restaurant they used to like and eat at every Friday that had the most wonderful meat lasagna with the extra cheese melted over the top of it and served with that amazing crispy garlicy breadstick, not that Cheryl (that harpy) would eat it now, since she developed that weird phobia about tomatoes and most everything that is red, blood red or cherry red or maroon or crimson or whatever shade you want to call it, and now, come to think of it, she might massively freak out over the color of the ball so maybe he should get the calm ocean blue ball, the one with the mottled swirls of blues that he supposed was supposed to resemble a sky more so than an ocean (which would have more green and not have the white bits, unless it was frothy), but was a very unnatural shade of blue for a normal sky, at least on earth, but maybe the painter was actually an alien from another planet (who was he to judge) and he’d better get to buying the damn thing which, as he noticed, was not too terribly cheap, it would cost him the day’s Half Caf Non Fat Venti White Chocolate Mocha Starburp’s coffee and the snotty little kid would probably be ungrateful anyway, and his whining, grating voice would intensify the throbbing headache the lack of caffeine would give him.’ Four hundred and seventy four words, and really, I’m sure a few more could be crammed in there.