WRiTE CLUB 2014 – Bout #11

Sapphire Eyes is the winner of Bout #9. The voting for Bout #10 remains open until noon on Wednesday, July 23rd.

A rundown of all the past and current matches, with their respective winners, can be found right HERE.

Here's a recap for anyone just stopping by for the first time. Back on May 3^rd we began taking submissions from WRiTER’s far and wide, spanning the globe, representing all ages and multiple styles of WRiTING.  We received 167 entries in all! Those 500 word samples went under careful consideration by 11 judges and that panel narrowed the list down to 32…which are the ones that are pairing off in the ring over the course of eight weeks. 

These illustrious WRiTER’s are not only from all walks of life, but they also occupy various levels of the publication world. But none of that matters here, because inside this ring everybody stands as equals. You know why?  Because no one uses their real name…the only identification you’ll ever see is their pen name. This is not a popularity contest.  The focus here is on the writing, where it should be.

Today is the eleventh of sixteen bouts, two bouts per week, with a new one posted every Monday and Thursday. The winners are decided by votes left in the comment section and anyone can vote. The voting for each fight will last for one full week, so you can vote for a Monday battle all the way until midnight on Sunday, and you can vote for a Thursday brawl up until midnight the following Wednesday.  And when you do vote, please let the contestants know what you liked and disliked.

Have you got your popcorn and favorite drink? Time for the fun to begin!

Here are this bout's two randomly selected WRiTER's.

Standing in this corner, representing the Middle Grade genre and weighing in at 463 words, please welcome to the ring……..Dame Hortense Pemberton

Winicker would rather pee in her pants than use the Plouffes’ bathroom. She opened the front door and stepped into the apartment building’s courtyard, wiggling and crossing her legs. She rushed to the big, iron gate and looked down the street in one direction, and then the other. She spotted exactly what she was hoping to find—an ugly gray pay toilet.

Winicker dug a handful of change out of her pocket and inserted four coins in the slot next to the door until it opened. Inside, the bathroom was dark, and the smell of disinfectant stung Winicker’s nose and eyes. Even with the smell, and even with the scary-looking French graffiti scrawled across the thin wall above the toilet, Winicker was glad not to be using the Plouffes’ bidet.

When she finished using the bathroom, Winicker sighed a very content sigh. “Sweet relief,” she said. But the sweet relief only lasted a moment. The pay toilet suddenly seemed much smaller and darker than it did just a few seconds earlier. She rubbed hand sanitizer on both hands from a little dispenser on the wall, and stood to open the door. The problem was, the door wouldn’t open. Winicker pushed as hard as she could on the handle. Then she pulled as hard as she could on the handle. The door did not budge.

           

“Help me! Can anyone hear me? I’m stuck in here! Hello! I need help!”

Winicker banged on the bathroom door with both fists. She looked around frantically for some kind of emergency button, but all she found were more graffiti, lots of old gum, and a wad of wet toilet paper stuck to the wall. “Help! I’m stuck in here! Can anyone hear me?”

Her stomach felt like it was falling out of her body when she realized that Grandma Balthazar and her mother didn’t know where she was. She never told them that she was going to use a pay toilet. They thought she was next door in Mirabel Plouffe’s apartment!

“SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME! I’M TRAPPED IN THIS PAY TOILET!”

Winicker imagined Mirabel watching the story unfold on her daily afternoon news show. She would sip some kind of awful French tea and shake her head and say, How perfectly terrible. I wonder why she didn’t just use our bathroom with its fancy French bidet? Winicker wished more than anything that she had used the Plouffes’ bathroom. She wished that she had seen the Eiffel Tower and all of the other things in Paris that Mirabel and Grandma Balthazar told her were so wonderful. Instead, the very last thing Winicker would ever see would be graffiti and a wet wad of toilet paper stuck to the wall of the pay toilet.

“LET ME OUT! LET ME OUT!”

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And in the other corner, representing the YA Contemporary (LGBT) genre with 498 words, let me introduce to you……….Hingle McKringleberry

So when someone in your family has a certifiable sex addiction, people usually think it’s some skeevy uncle or a cousin a bazillion times removed. Of course, my family couldn’t follow what my ninth grade English teacher calls “societal norms.” Oh no, not the McGuire family.

The sex addict in our family is my eighty-year-old grandma.

Yup, you read it right. Grandma. Hillside Manor Nursing Home wants to kick my grandma out for sneaking around at night and causing strange encounters of…erm…the feisty kind.

“You’re kidding, right?” my best friend Kiara asks, her brown eyes opening so wide I’m afraid her eyeballs might pop out of her skull.

“I kid you not.

She laughs as she falls off the bed and on to the plush gray carpet of my bedroom. I nudge her leg with my foot. “That’s right. Yuck it up, Fuzzball.”

“Total point for the ‘Star Wars’ ref. Really, though. Why have you never told me about this before? You’re a bad friend Megan Winston McGuire.”

“Let me see,” I reply, tapping my chin. “Embarrassment? Shame? The fact that I don’t want our entire high school to read about it on the ‘Wildcat Word’?”

Kiara is the editor for our Timmons High School blog. Rah, rah, blah, blah. Go, Tigers! She also writes the gossip shots for the school. I’m the only one who knows about her secret identity. I’m special that way. You fill out a form on the blog with your name and phone number, and any time there’s juicy gossip, Kiara sends it out to all two thousand thirty-eight subscribers. There would be two thousand thirty-nine but my mom refuses to let me have a cell phone. I’m freaking fifteen and have to be the only girl in the entire state of Michigan who doesn’t own a cell phone. For sure, I’m the only one in Detroit.

Kiara wipes a tear from her eye. The sunlight catches the rhinestones on the tips of her French manicure. “So this is the first time she’s been caught?”

“Second.”

“That’s not so bad then.”

“Second at this nursing home. She’s already gone through nine others.”

This sets Kiara off again until she’s pounding on my floor with the palm of her hand. She lies on her back, staring up at the popcorn ceiling. “Stop. You’ve got to stop. I can’t take any more.”

“Glad I could be your entertainment for the day.”

“Okay. Tell me what happened.”

I pull my legs to my chest and raise an eyebrow at her. The way she keeps acting makes me almost regret telling her about the boniest skeleton in my closet. “You said you couldn’t take any more.”

Kiara jumps to her feet, vaulting through the air to land next to me. The springs underneath us creak. “No. You have to.”

“And none of it—not even the word ‘sex’ in the same text as my name—appears on the blog.” She leans forward, pressing her nose against mine. 

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Enjoying the words of two talented writers is only part of the price of admission, now it’s up to you to decide who moves forward to the playoffs.  In the comments below leave your vote for the winner of Bout #11.  Which one tickled your fancy?  After you vote please tell all of your friends to stop by and make a selection as well.  The voting for this round will remain open until noon Sunday.  Yes, it’s subjective, but so is the entire publishing world.  It’s as much about the readers as it is about the writers. 

Here in WRiTE CLUB, it’s not about the last man/woman standing -- it’s the audience that gets clobbered!