Happy 5th Anniversary to WU…and a CONTEST!
By Therese Walsh | January 21, 2011 |
Five years today, Kath and I started Writer Unboxed. I went through my WU email folder recently and found the trail of madness that led us here. On 12/1/2005, Kath emailed me to say:
I’ve been thinking we should start a blog. We could do one that focuses on craft and the business with an occasional review, something that’s smart ass. I have so much snark building up, and only you to share it with. We could call it “Snark Byte”. Catchy, no? Whaddya think?
I, being the good girl (koff), felt nervous over snark [even though she can be the snarkiest person I know. You guys have no idea what you’re missing –Kath][I will admit nothing –Teri]. I wrote back:
Maybe our blog could be tip oriented–something readers could come to for a hit. Rodale Press (Prevention magazine, Men’s Health) has always had their finger on a winning pulse: Don’t give the consumers information, tell them what to do with it. It’s the difference between being in the health info business and being in the health idea business. Maybe that distinction is what we need to think about?
Kath liked this idea: Be empowering.
As far as I know, no one is doing this at the moment, so this could carve out the niche we need. Yes, I like this very much….
In January, we set up a blog, and named it Writer Unboxed because Idea Warehouse, which was the idea we’d batted around, had already been claimed. (In retrospect, phew.)
It was just the two of us back then, on a Blogger platform that drove us crazy with time-outs. We posted M-F, talking up craft issues, like hooks, and interviewing authors we admire, like Audrey Niffenegger. Kath and I loved the idea of a group blog, sharing fresh lessons and a diversity of experiences, and so we began to add contributors in 2007. Today, we have 13 esteemed monthly contributors, and 8 equally wonderful, not-yet-published, honorary contributors, not to mention a wide range of talented guests.
We’re grateful to have made several prestigious Best Site for Writers’ lists, and to have had over 1 million visitors. We’re especially thankful to all of you for being a part of the WU community–for helping to make this a respected and well-viewed site on the ‘net.
To celebrate our anniversary, and to show our appreciation, Kath and I have created a Writer Unboxed Facebook page. (Crickets.) We’ve also decided to run a new contest. (Cheers!)
What sort of contest?
The best sort, of course–an
Original Analogy Contest!
We ran this contest here in 2009 and cried our way through the submissions. As we love to laugh, and though it may not be original of us, we’re doing it again.
Some of our favorites from 2009:
1. He stared at his cubicle wall, gray as an elephant’s butt and equally crushing.
2. He considered pants with the same regard that drivers on the autobahn considered brakes; they were optional.
3. Eldon’s writing was somewhat reminiscent of Chaucer’s in that it had to be read numerous times to be completely understood. One major difference: His spelling was not quite as good.
4. He turned her on like a radio, until she realized the tuner was stuck on conservative talk radio. 24/7. Without commercial interruption. Siriusly.
5. When Michael kissed her, Joanna recoiled, much the way one’s bare foot does when it encounters a fresh hairball on the carpet in the middle of the night.
6. Her attempts to help were as misguided as vending-machine sushi, and as likely to succeed as tuna marmalade.
7. I hid my shame inside my confidence, like shredded chicken inside a tamale, but then when I met Lance all my feelings were wrapped inside another layer of feeling, which was lust, so then with one stuffed inside another inside another I was more like a walking turducken, only then I’m not sure where the corn husk fits in anymore and besides, turduckens can’t walk.
8. Simone felt as useless as a Girls Gone Wild video in a gay man’s DVD collection.
9. She was beautiful and mysterious like the Mona Lisa, only she wasn’t smiling, or wearing an old fashioned dress and she had better hair.
10. Dana gazed at Mike, her eyes filling with tears as she realized their love was as doomed as a myopic possum crossing the freeway.
11. Even confession couldn’t clear her conscience. After spilling her secrets and being absolved by the parish priest, her soul still felt partially dirty, like one of those low flow toilets that doesn’t flush all the way.
Think you can do better? Here’s your chance.
What will I win?
Ah, getting right to the pith of it, eh? If you’re dubbed the winner, you’ll win your pick of one item from this list of three:
- a Kindle (worth $139)
-
a Nook (worth $149)
-
a bundle of our best-loved craft books, including Writing the Breakout Novel book and workbook, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Save the Cat, A Dash of Style, Forest for the Trees, War of Art, On Writing, and Stein on Writing, shipped to you from the outlet of our choice. [Doin’ a jiggy dance yet?–Kath]
How do I enter?
Type your original, never-before-seen-by-human-eyes analogy in the comment area of THIS post. Though we can’t crown a winner outside of the continental US –sorry, shipping can be steep–we encourage everyone who’d like to play to play. [You can’t put a price on bragging rights. Just saying — Kath yet again]
Submit repeatedly as inspiration strikes. You can continue subbing through Friday, January 28th, midnight EST.
Who picks the winner?
Kath and I will choose the top 10 analogies, and put them up on the blog. Then WU readers will vote on a winner.
Any tips?
Yes. Aim for hilarity and elegance of prose. And enter often.
Thanks again for all of your support for Writer Unboxed, for Kath and me, and for our contributors. Thanks for making this a community site we’re proud to call home. Good luck, and write on!
(We really do have a spanky new Facebook page. Come on over and like us!)
Photos courtesy Flickr’s elvissa and Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com.
Therese Walsh (she/her) co-founded Writer Unboxed in 2006 and is the site’s editorial director. She was the editor of WU’s only book, Author in Progress, and runs the Writer Unboxed UnConference.
Her second novel, The Moon Sisters, received starred reviews and was named one of the best books of the year by Library Journal and Book Riot.
Learn more about Therese on her website, and sign up for her newsletter to be among the first to hear about any new projects.
Confident that her choice had been sensible, she flipped over the box to determine the calorie count, only to realize that the smart marketing had preyed upon her trust and misled her like a Fox News anchor during political sweeps.
To his credit, he took the hit like his balls had been formed on Krypton.
She sunk her teeth into the donut, glazed and lovely, like a diamond encrusted Hershey bar.
Every time the network goes down on her watch, it’s like a fart in the room — everyone is silently unhappy about it and knows exactly who is responsible for it.
Surfing the net and the social medias made as much sense to her as swimming through an often used sponge, all of the good sense was filtered out.
The look he gave her was cold as a brass toilet seat in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Wow, great prizes, and what a fun look at the Origins of WU! I can’t wait to read some more great analogies. :)
She slid across the wet floor in her stocking feet as graceful as a feather in the wind only to land with the earth shaking thump of an over weight hippo.
Her refusal braced and buffeted, as if he’d crested the last dune to face the ice-locked great lake of her soul; seizing his breath, flash-freezing his spit and phlegm, chapping and pinching his prickling exposed skin, coercing stinging tears from his blinking eyes, and forcing him to face the knowledge that even the coming thaw would only initiate an inevitable ache.
This was inspired by my morning walk along the frigid Lake Michigan shore. My female dog refused to avoid going down to the beach, in spite of 10 degree weather–that bitch.
In between bouts of frenzied lovemaking, he’d leisurely scrawl magnificant poems on her lower back–poetry that would go on to become his best selling anthology. But when his muse left him, he was like a writer…unboxed.
Woohoo! Go WU! Love the history tidbits you posted here, and look forward to continuing to watch WU’s fabulous history unfold. And that contest…. great fodder for distraction. :-)
[…] US. You can win either a Nook or a Kindle, loaded with writing-related e-books. Check out this link for […]
Happy birthday, WU! Will be back with non-qualifying entries when I have my writer-brain engaged. Oh, maybe this would pertain!
Sam shook is head and refrained from smiling. Poor Mitchell. The guy thought he was tough shit in advertising, but his ideas held as much pep as a lukewarm mug of Horlicks. Made with soy.
I’m in Canada, so I can’t enter, *pouts, but I just wanted to say congratulations on your anniversary! What an accomplishment! :)
Sam had a sinking feeling, like the trapped and quivering seeds inside a rainstick slowly trickling down to fill his shoes with the dregs of possibility.
Howsa bout this?
Sondra laughed a sickening sort of laugh, that sounded like a sniveling melodramatic tie-the-maiden-to-the-railroad-tracks villain blowing bubbles in a cup of bubble-gum-flavored corn syrup.
Happy birthday!!
His five-hundred dollar words were as baroque and overcompensating as a one-eyed man with a unibrow.
Awesome, you guys, I’m dying. Keep ’em coming!
Her tears fell dark, heavy, and in profusion like dead grackle birds from the Alabama sky.
The new logo idea went over like a mob snitch off the side of the fishing boat.
His speech had the diction of Dickens but the wit and depth of the ingredients of a bottle of seltzer.
As Julie finished her piano piece, her mother saw the pride in her face, like a two year old who’s pooped in the toilet for the first time all by herself.
His love for her was like a boa constrictor, nauseatingly claustrophobic until she played dead and he went to find better prey.
As she walked away, her husband gazed longingly at her, admiring how her butt moved against the tight fabric, like two bull dogs fighting in a burlap sack.
She entered the conversation subtly, like the troops at Normandy.
She trod the stairs like a pachyderm with bad sciatica.
My husband laments to my son about his basketball game performance, “Your shot is as flat as my middle school girlfriend’s chest.”
For a moment she hid in the exhilaration of imagination of hide-and-seek and forgot her sorrow. She stopped to lean against the wall, paused to catch her breath and reality caught up with her. Depression cloaked and smothered her like a burlap bag in a kidnapping, successfully stealing the illusion of happiness.
Noted in my teaching journal in September: The kids have a level of energy that puts the squirrels storing nuts for winter to shame.
He found the literary contest annoyingly distracting and yet irresistable, like the little wooden game on the tables of the folksy chain breakfast place up by the freeway. It had looked so simple, so childlike, and yet, try as he may, he failed again and again to end with a lone golf tee in the correct peg-hole.
Eek! I accidentally “liked” my own post. Damn iPhone.
“You’re kidding!” Her sudden burst of laughter was as heart stopping as the squeal of brakes in the middle of a traffic jam and as misplaced as a priest in a nudist bar.
“Her mother-in-law embraced her with all the warmth of a Siberian gulag commando.”
“Chairman Mao watched the Shirley Temple flick with the rapture and abandon of a nutritionist scarfing a triple-decker ice-cream snicker-doodle cheesecake.”
“‘Do you like my new hairstyle?’ Amanda asked her husband, fishing for a compliment. ‘I thought I’d go for something shorter.’
‘Yes,’ he said, searching for the right words, ‘now you are as lovely as a German spy from WWII.'”
The old man ignored my question. He turned his back on me and stared out the window, running his fingers through his thick white hair, over and over, until he was all fluffed up, like a late summer dandelion gone to seed.
Margie called her new house the “crown jewel” of the neighborhood, but it was like a two-story Toddler in Tiara, with none of the class.
The door was about as squeaky as an ungreased iron mouse.
His joke was as flat as a tire that had been popped, pressed between the pages of War & Peace—with long-winded commentary by a bored literature professor—and then run over by a nine-thousand-pound steam roller. And then popped again.
My post on Facebook had more “Like’s” than a teenage girl’s vocabulary.
I could go on… :)
He was as close to the point as Russia was to Alaska.
When they made love, it was like a Dickens novel: for him it was the best of times; for her, it was the worst of times.
[…] have got to check out this fun and funky blog!), Study Hacks (always smart and insightful), and Writer Unboxed (be sure to check out today’s post about a contest to win a Kindle or a Nook!). Translation = […]
The broken air conditioner left the bedroom as hot as a hatchback in a parking lot on a sunny day in July, but she was so exhausted she sprawled on the bed like a leftover grilled cheese sandwich reheating in a microwave.
She was so excited to be on her own, standing in the minuscule studio apartment, she started to spin like a plastic ballerina in the jewelry box of a little girls whose big brother took apart the wind-up mechanism and didn’t reassemble it correctly.
She painted her nails in the car. Not caring that the fumes singed the nose hairs of the other occupants like lava flowing over the foliage of a Hawaiian island.
My ex-boyfriend was like shrink-wrap. A little heat brought him close, but he was impossible to peel off.
His intellect was like shatter-proof glass. If you hit him with logic, his arguments broke down into a million pieces.
Every time I have an argument with my husband I feel lost, like a GPS that can’t reach any satellites.
The child was finally free from timeout. The essence of his punishment forgotten as easily as an ice cube melting in a glass of hot tea. He smiled and pointed to the scribbles on the wall, “I drew that rainbow for you.”
“Did you hear Max dumped Ann for Janie?”
I rolled my eyes. “Honey, your lips are like dressing room drapes. No matter how hard you try, you can never get them closed.”
Cecilia’s blind date hungrily stared at her face, taking in her pale, goose-pimpled skin, the puffy fat under her eyes and one wiry hair sprouting from her chin, and thought of raw chicken under plastic wrap.
Would you accept a second one (inspired by traffic tonight)?
He rushed blithely past her objections like a pizza delivery guy running late.
Ben shuffled off the mortal coil with the careless grace of a two dollar stripper removing her bra.
Finding the right place was easier than picking the tanning booth abuser out of a lineup of albino stooges.
His eyes, which she had once compared to limpid pools offering a glimpse into an ephemeral soul, now seemed to more closely resemble the insipid translucency of an email inbox registering empty.
His technique in bed was like a Rube Goldberg construction: far more complicated than necessary.
Singing transcendently was easy; a simple matter of combining talent, technique and practice with music that spoke to the soul. What the maestro was now asking Carlotta to do grated on her sense of artistic superiority like the soaring wail of an unfed baby grates on the nerves of the avowedly childless.
It’s not that she was addicted or seeking a false idol that morning, but when she saw the monolithic image of the Trenta at Starbucks, the urge to jump around and beat on it with a bone-colored biscotti was suddenly over-whelming.
The judges watched with fascinated horror as the couple waltzed across the room like two hockey players vying for a puck.
The school’s newsletter was about as relevant and accurate as a weather forecast for rain in Antarctica.
She couldn’t marry a man with his personality. He was like raw onion – fine in small bits, but overwhelming when taken as whole.
It seemed as unlikely as finding a supermodel at the deep fried Twinkie booth.
In the bright sun, she gazed at the snow, glittering as if millions of teeny tiny rainbows were frozen within the microscopic crystals.
She postponed the meeting as if it were a new release going up against a newly found Stieg Larsson treasure. This author was as annoying as her ever-growing slushpile. Like an omniscient viewpoint, he knew everything.
The unpublished writer held his many hopes high, strewn about him, like lights and ornaments festooned around a Christmas tree, that the inevitable breaking of a few would scarely be noticed. Even should he fall, once he brought himself upright and the shattered pieces were swept away, the allure of those remaining would shine and sparkle on.
If only fixing Ruby’s body in the coffin so she’d sink in the lake was as easy as burping Tupperware.
Her new agent reminded her of the neighbor’s terrier, scampering to yap and snap at everything that moves. She realized this was better than the alternative in glancing down at her aged lab, slumped and snoring beside her writing desk.
As she lay among the dead, their bodies threatened to suffocate her with their unmoving heaviness. Her eyes burned from the smoke hanging in the air and her breathing restricted, as if she was trapped under the bedcovers with her husband after a night of heavy imbibing and pungent eats. Death couldn’t come soon enough.
As she contorted her body to mimic the yoga instructor, she felt as graceful as an inebriated giraffe.
She gave him a look as withering as that of a literary agent encountering the phrase “fiction novel” in a query.
When we kissed, his cologne gushed into my mouth and ravaged my throat like cheap vodka from a plastic cup. My plummet in self esteem would only be complete with some frat boy’s triumphant smile as a chaser.
The espresso machine fired up like it was hawking an enormous loogie.
He could hear his roommate making out with his girlfriend in the other room. It sounded like mashing bananas.
Jason was an idiot. He knew trying to avoid the tears and drama from the impeding break up was going to be as slippery and nerve wreaking as trying to avoid an accident during a rain storm on a traffic jammed highway and as dangerous as playing with a downed electrical wire. And yet, there he stood in front of his wife with his new girlfriend. Smiling gleefully like a child at Christmas.
She slumped in her seat, feeling much like Antoine Dodson’s sister after realizing everyone cares more about her fame-whore brother than finding her rapist.
“Sweetpea, writing a query letter is like trying to shoot a clay pigeon in a funhouse with your pal, Dick Cheney.”
Colleen’s approach to dating is a bit flighty; a single kiss is all is takes to rocket her into the stratosphere of romantic delusion.
His personality was larger than life, but she found his high-pitched laughter to be inadequate, it was squeaky and ribbed in texture — not at all to her pleasure.
The summer air stirred like a tentative whisper, wanting to tell me the secrets from the land it had traveled. It stilled, suddenly silent like the audience at a comic’s awkward innuendo. Clearly, I would remain unenlightened and ignorant of the secrets of life today. I still have hope for tomorrow.
She slapped him across the face, furious. The sound resonated throughout the air, hitting the walls like pancakes thrown by a two year old having a tantrum.
After my boys were done getting their picture taken with Mulan, I eagerly stepped up; she was my favorite princess after all.
“You do me too?” I asked and stopped. Wow. Was it just me or was I was suddenly speaking like a European tourist? I wondered for a moment if I could pull that off. I glanced down. No luck: I was wearing tennis shoes with my socks.
I carried the overflowing pitcher to the dog’s bowl. As I filled it, I realized I had thrown a kitchen towel over my arm. I felt like a waiter in a high-end restaurant…for dogs.
At the sight of the dog lifting up its leg, his heart was like a ninja as he lay face down on the concrete, silent and suicidal
The light was like a fat child trying to push its way through the sweaty overweight crowd in front of a doughnut store as it passed through the dense smog of the atmosphere.
She growled and clutched the baseball bat as tight as a pitbull’s fangs sinking into its owner’s arm. The door opened and she swung.
Trying not to come back and add another analogy is as hard as trying not to have a baby when you’re dilated to ten. The water bag of thoughts has burst,the words keep pouring out and the thrill of holding the prize of your first ereader looms.
She found him as irresistible as a fuzzy-faced kitten wearing a neatly tailored jacket made of intact thousand-dollar bills.
His jokes were funnier than an angry white cockatiel with a red Jello-powder mohawk and a misguided but hilarious blue pedicure applied by an eight-year-old.
He was hopping mad, like an angry one-legged bunny rabbit on a pogo stick chased by an asthmatic tiger.
Bus drivers are the substitute teachers of the adult world: they’re temporary, they’re in charge, and they’re usually bat-shit crazy.
Her beauty threatened to reduce me to a quivering mass of… I don’t know, something that quivers.
I love you like the Tiger Mother loves controversy, like Donald Trump loves hairspray, like Glenn Beck loves gold.
Time wasted on the internet trickles away like an escape artist slipping chains,shackles and straight jacket; a great deal of squirming, a few interesting positions and finally you are back at the beginning.
My hands were so dry from the winter air, my skin crackled every time I clenched my fist, as if I were balling up a piece of paper.
The gaudy funfair glittered with a choreographed madness, like hundreds of tribal shamans prostrating with nightly effort before hopping on the dodgems of a hallucinogenic trip.
Like a cat with an empty food bowl, Roger threw himself into the middle of Simone’s stride and hoped for the best.
They kissed, and his lips were flat, wet, salty and cold, like the webbed feet of a duck that had been swimming in the Dead Sea in winter.
They stood hand-in-hand in the silent glow of the desert, crickets chirping, an owl hooting. He didn’t want to ruin the serenity of the moment, but he couldn’t hold out any longer. The noise erupted from the seat of his Wranglers like a barking spider. The crickets stopped chirping.
He tended to ramble on so much and so long, repeating the same thing over and over and over, that it reminded her of the 45 she had in high school that she played so much it skipped, but she played it anyway, but she played it anyway, but she….
Jessi waited in line for Adriano’s autograph. They were SO meant for each other, like Edward and Bella, except he was a cowboy, not a vampire. And she didn’t speak Portuguese.
A list of all of the things I have done and might be fired for scrolls through my mind like the credits at the end of a movie.
The elevator climbs slowly, like six old men hoisting the gold-plated casket of a 500-lb. man.
Damien takes his place behind the desk in a chair that could double for a throne in a pinch if the Royal Family were ever to visit.
The wind changed direction and the smoke from the campfire blew over her. It wrapped itself tightly around her, leaving her free to move but barely able to breathe, with an impending sense of danger. It reminded her vividly of the way she felt the night she had wrapped herself up in plastic wrap and presented herself to her husand’s horrified stare as he walked in the door at the end of the day.
She nattered on in a shrill whisper, insistent as a starving mosquito on a fat man’s earlobe.
She was about as smart as the powder blue, three piece suit her husband wore on their wedding day.
She looked at the dress on the runway model, and thought, “I should try something like that.” However, deep down she knew that it was like Superman’s costume; only one guy could get away with wearing his underwear on the outside of his pants.
Her thoughts were behaving like a group of unruly preschoolers refusing to cooperate and form a single, straight line.
As he watched the wine bleed into his date’s Italian silk couch, he heard Pac-Man unwinding into a high-pitched burp in the background. Game Over, dude.
She was the Staples of first-dates, well-stocked and complete with her own Easy Button.
Any attempts to appeal to his sanity were rebuffed with a shrug of indifference as a 15 year old boy rebuffs the kisses of a grandmother.
Time escapes, not like the dashing prisoners in The Great Escape, but more like the nerdy teenager that no one notices leave the party early.
That “Unsubscription notification” jumped out of her inbox like the cat from under the bed this morning. The words sliced and stung like the scratch she got from Benny, and all she’d wanted was a little love.
She named the Illadelph, her three-foot bong, “The Oracle of Delphi.” Fitting, I thought, because when she smoked it, she was given to oracular declarations—amid coughs, and phlegm, and curls of smoke.
So… let me get this straight. If a pin drops in a forest the Catholic bear poops?
When asked, “Tell me the truth, does this dress make me look fat?” by his just-bought, tags-already-ripped-off, three paychecks worth, two-sizes-too-small, Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress clad girlfriend, John felt as uncomfortable as an already breathing heavily claustrophobic on a cross-country flight whose only choice of in-flight entertainment are the films “Buried” and “127 Hours.”
Getting pooped on the face by a seagull at a too crowded theme park was about as pleasant as being forced to sit next to a heavily perspiring man who decided to eat an onion bagel with salmon cream cheese and who wants to make small talk with you while your plane is sitting on the tarmac for three hours before your actual five hour flight thanks to inclement weather travel delays.
He would have described her as tweet–enough of a statement to lead him on, but in conversation, she capped out at 144 characters.
Alas, for all for her protestations to fidelity, to using a high-quality fountain pen and actually keeping up with daily entries this time, she knew it wouldn’t last. She wanted nothing more from this new journal than cheap entertainment. A hookup. A scribble call.
His two excuses for cheating on her were like the expiration date on a single-serving bag of Pretzel M&Ms and the expiration date on a Twinkie — both irrelevant for totally different reasons.
She felt as lost as she did in math class after last year’s week of absences. Or in science. Or reading the newspaper. Anywhere, really.
At first he’d been like the shiny-eyed teddy bear your aunt gives you for your fifth birthday. A safe shot, sure, but still appreciated and cuddled frequently. But their failed relationship seemed to play the part of a teething puppy, the way it dirtied his fur and tore out one eye, leaving a big, gaping hole in the middle of his face. And she kept the analogy going, acting exactly like she did when she was a little girl- she couldn’t bare to throw him out, but he wasn’t fun to play with anymore, and seeing how he’d been mutilated hurt her so much that she was regreting her promise that they could still be friends.
Maria was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. She had a lovely, light brown complexion that resembled the color of coffee when you add just the right amount of cream.
Once she found out he wasn’t showing up, she felt that sense of both exuberance and desperation. It was like finding that one candle during a power outage and then realizing there isn’t a book of matches anywhere in the house.
Daniel had brought along his wife, of whom no one left with a favorable impression. She was like a gifted bottle of cheap wine: uninteresting, slightly offensive and easily forgotten.
Daniel had brought along his wife, of whom no one made a favorable impression. She was like a gifted bottle of cheap wine: uninteresting, slightly offensive, and easily forgotten.
(Corrected version)
Her comment was jarring and uncomfortable. Much like discovering the lovely, tasteful Kate Spade shoes in the on the loud woman in the bathroom stall next to you are the ones belonging to your boss.
From Canada – Just playing for fun
When he went to the beach the women lost their minds. It was like an episode of Oprah’s Favorite things if Oprah had a thing for abs and a fake tan.
Her attempted advances toward him were rebuffed with the embarressment of unwanted underarm sweat marks and the added insult of an errant chin hair.
Being back on the market was like being a half-tag special at Loehman’s, you might have been shopped around the market place, but you were a guaranteed bargain.
the turducken one is just awesome. happy birthday writer unboxed!!
Her remarks were received in much the same manner as the loser in a fencer’s duel: sharply and with none too fine a point.
It was just as he feared. His mother-in-law was there, sitting in the dead-center of his hard-earned leather sofa, drinking his coffee, judging his wife. She moved on a loop–a repetitive cycle of re-positioning of her rump, accompanied by a slow mouth-opening motion, not unlike an animatronic hippopotamus on the Disneyland Jungle Safari.
Her face burning with embarrassment after tripping *up* the last two stairs to the crowded cafeteria smack dab in the middle of lunch period, Grace had never wished she had an old shoe (or in her case, a now broken heel) portkey to escape the cruel laughter more than like how Harry, Hermoine, and Ron were able to escape the Death Eater’s summoning charm. If only willing *obliviate* in her mind would erase that memory from the mean girls clique and their cell phones.
The glare of the setting sun through her windshield was like the blinding light that comes when sunlight shines upon Edward Cullen’s ridiculously sparkling, alabaster-and-diamond skin when he moves out of the shadows of the forest and into the grassy field where he and Bella lay in what has to be the most uncomfortable position known to man as they crush the pretty purple wildflowers.
Being filled with pearls of wisdom and various insightful schools of thought, Writer Unboxed was a bit like the ocean, only without that great garbage patch floating where the currents meet.
For the debut author, opening a twitter account was a bit like learning Latin in high school: confusing and with uncertain purpose, though surely edifying in some obscure way.
The new paint colors reminded me of my childhood: mismatched and unpredictable, though not without a sense of adventure.
He towered over his peers, like a maypole devoid of ribbons or frolicsome music.
Her young screaming and crying son clung to her like a thick curtain, wrapped and molded to her hips and legs, hampering any movement. She was unable to pull him off, because he was so adhered to her.
Once upon a time, he’d been full of ideas. They’d swum about in his head like a swarm of betas, though, fighting to the death until only one remained, and now he was married to it for good or ill. Probably ill. No good can come of being married to a fish-thought.
She wrote right up until her deadline, like a fairytale princess awaiting the doom that would be pronounced at the last stroke of twelve.
Farts are like neighbors. You have to watch out for the quiet ones.
She felt as welcome as a cockroach on a wedding cake; as wanted as meatloaf at a vegetarian picnic.