Tag Archives: Deception

PROMPT: Completely Surprised

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Daily writing prompt
What’s a book that completely surprised you?
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I suspect this meant to imply “in a good way,” but I would like to express the view that this is often not good. It’s often because the book is inaptly titled and its blurbs and tag lines deceptively written. When I first started doing reviews I used to get (and am sure I still do but these days ignore them,) “I see you liked X, this is X meets Y!” [Where “Y” is something that is incredibly popular, and “X” was a book I had reviewed positively.] The first time I was intrigued enough to check one of these out, I found a book that bore no resemblance to X, Y, or to good writing of any kind.

The moral of the story is, if someone is selling a marketing plan about how to build blurbs, elevator pitches, titles, and other marketing information that are completely detached from the real product, ignore them. It is in no way a winning strategy for selling books. Nothing good comes of trying to trick someone.

PROMPT: Bothers

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Daily writing prompt
What bothers you and why?
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I once got a masala cookie beside my coffee at a cafe that took itself way too seriously. What’s a masala cookie, you might ask? It’s treachery, I say. It sits on a plate pretending to be a delightful sugar cookie, but without sugar or sweetness of any kind — just salt and a spice mixture. It was supposed to bring out the notes of cherry, chocolate, and… Blah, Blah, Blah. You know what would bring out the notes of chocolate in the coffee, some fucking chocolate in the cookie — that’s what. You can’t just impersonate a cookie and expect anyone to tolerate that level of betrayal. I certainly don’t want to live in such a world. That’s it, the only offense of recent years that I haven’t gotten over. A few years after it happened, I walked by that place and saw that the cafe had gone out of business, replaced by a Hello Kitty phone-case store. Good! I hope the owner and staff have moved on, putting their liberal arts graduate degrees to good use, teaching at community colleges as they should, rather than terrorizing the public with pseudo-cookies to make their overpriced coffee seem more of a bargain. I’ll end my rant here to go sit with my trauma.

Driftwood Deception [Tanka]

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nestled between rocks
the smooth-worn driftwood roots
assume the form
of a pile of writhing snakes,
'til the mind untangles truth