Twists and Turns

photo by Mamluke

            I was a thief on Friday.

        I stole from O Henry...

        In my story for Book Blurb Friday, hosted by the dishonest Lisa Ricard Claro ,* I wrote a blurb that mirrored a short story O Henry wrote. ("The Last Leaf" is the title, if my memory is not in its normal swiss cheese form.) In this story, a woman is dying. She says she will last until the last leaf of ivy (growing on the building outside her window) falls off. All of them dry up and blow away except for one. That lone leaf lasts through all of fall and winter as well; the woman's health improves, and ultimately she recovers.

       It ends up that a painter friend who lived in her apartment building had painted the leaf onto the wall of the building.

      (Lisa called me on my plagarizing. She recognized the way my story mirrored O Henry's right away...)

       O Henry, author of the better known "The Gifts of the Magi" and (one of my favorites) "The Ransom of Red Chief," was known for the twists he put into his stories. They rarely ended as the reader expected them to.

       Jodi Picoult is also quite adept at slipping the unexpected into her novels. I have just started her book Salem Falls and eagerly await the point where I start to lose my balance, when the earth under me shifts, and I get completely flummoxed.

           What are some of your favorite authors who surprise you/give you the unexpected, and in what ways are you surprised?

* As the show "Mythbusters" has uncovered, the belief that Lisa Ricard Claro is a hardworking writer as well as  a parent of grown children has been debunked. She rents her kids (Rent-a-Rugrat) and sadly, her scheme has even spread...

Now Linda O'Connell has gotten on the kid rental bandwagon.  Since she is a teacher, she's too broke to pay the steep leasing fees. With no other option, she has turned to her little doll-of-a-granddaughter, Nicole.

(You don't believe me? Check out Linda's blog. Notice how many pictures there are of Nicole lately. Zero in on her tiny wrists...Clearly, there are marks, where the duct tape was attached, tethering this tot to Linda's computer. Focus on how large Nicole's eyes are...They are huge because only for these photos is Nicole allowed out in the light of day. The rest of the time she is hunched over a keyboard, as Linda dictates her stories.)