Lady Fancy That: Welcome to our workshop. Here visitors are invited to submit a page of their writing for perusal, and we will offer suggestions. Do not disappoint us by writing better than we do. The editing process should be efficient, since our editors have voice-operated copyediting commands at their disposal.
Cassandra: Please don’t submit porn or anything about politicians. We don’t need to hear about either (strikethrough!) pussies or assholes.
T’weef: For one thing, we Weeves don’t procreate the way you do. You might have noticed that we, Torkulweef, have huge, bulging eyeballs, much bigger than the average even for Weeves. When we eyeball a female Weef, she’d better cross her flanges in a hurry, because—
Lady Fancy That: Delete! Delete! Delete!
T’weef: —?
Cassandra: You use your eyeballs?
Lady Fancy That: Moving right along: we hope to make this site into a place where writers can get help in quiet anonymity. Our trained staff can teach your words to leap joyously off the page and wake up your readers like a jab from a burning pool cue. In fact, our testing procedure uses actual burning pool cues for comparison.
On slow days we planned to show you how to turn good writing into bad, just for the instructional value. The idea was that we would take brilliant paragraphs from major writers and take out the sparkle until you couldn’t read a milk carton by their light. But so far we have found this such a painful process that all our attempts have failed. No one can agree on which author to vandalize. Isak Dinesen seemed an obvious choice, given the quality and consistency of her writing, but when we suggested disimproving pieces of Out of Africa, Cassandra frothed at the mouth and began muttering “Kill! Kill!” It took us a while to realize she was just trying out the voice-operated copyediting commands—proposing to kill our suggestion rather than us. Just to be on the safe side, we hid her Heckler & Koch MP5. But now we’re looking for some great writer whom no one cares about so we can ruin his or her prose for education and the sheer fun of it.
We’re still working on the details, but eventually, with help from another dementia, we hope to get this down to a seance. In the meantime, give us your tired, your poor, your huddled paragraphs yearning to breathe free, and we will try to coax them back to life, even if we can’t offer them permanent shelter.
Please submit your text (one page max) by pasting it into the Comments box.
