Quiet as a Mouse! Quick as a cat! And other Stupid Animal Activities.

Angry quiz time!

You might not have known that this blog has quizes, especially not angry quizes, but now it shall! Because I am angry and I will quiz you and then explain myself, and then--well, I have not thought it through 'til the end, but it will do something, like make you feel annoyed for me, and then I will feel better because you are annoyed,which makes no sense, that I should feel better because you are upset now, but it is human nature, and that is why they coined the cliche "misery loves company."

That was called an opening, because the quiz is about cliches!

Question number one: What comes to mind when you hear the phrase "at a snail's pace?"

A SNAIL, right?

If you said "snail" then you got 100! Ding ding ding!

Not things slowing down. Just a stupid little snail, and maybe even a squished one that your son stepped on.

That is an example of a cliche that is the worst of both worlds; it is a cliche, and therefore boring, and also? IT DOESN'T EVEN WORK. It adds nothing to the story you are writing. It is a pointless sentence. And in a short story, what does not add only serves to detract.

I can spent an unlimited amount of time on a story. I can sit on a word for a full hour, and then come back to it the next day. I need my words to work for me. I need them to enhance the telling of the story. No slackers in my fiction.

When it's non-fiction, it's even more important to me.

When it's something personal, even more.

When it's about my father...ah. I can take forever. At the end of the process, I know it by heart.

Then you send it in to the magazine. And they publish it. Yay, right?

Then you buy the magazine and rip open the plastic while walking up the stairs pour yourself a cup of coffee and curl up on the couch with it.

You find your story.

And sitting there, where it does not belong, they put a snail. Or to be more precise, they replaced this sentence:

"Time passed slowly, slowly."

with

"Time passed at a snail's pace."

????

And. They changed my tense. They messed with my italics. They changed another sentence so that it is now INCORRECT. And they stuck a squishy, stupid snail where it does not belong.

I know that when you publish things they get edited. But my wonderful experiences up until now made it clear that it was to make it better, not worse! To enhance, not detract!

That was the end of the quiz, by the way. It was just one question, so you can put away your pencils and pat yourselves on the back, because I know that you got it right. No one thinks of anything besides "snail" when they view that sentence.

And now no one with think of anything besides "snail" when they read my story.