good looking out
Short Story / Twitter Town Watch (Version 2) (Analysis)
I signed up for this free dating website. Purely for research mind you. In my about me section I wrote “I’m a good cook when I have the time, surf and ride my bike for exercise, and love a good game of scrabble.” All three pictures of me on the site were action shots. Andrew Caffey, on a water ski. Andrew Caffey, in sunglasses with the top down. Andrew Caffey, at the top of Macchu Pichu with a Peruvian sunset in the background. I didn’t list my income bracket. My books were all Willa Cather and Kate Chopin.
I make most of my money from advertisements on my blog. The research was for an upcoming piece. Working title - Fishing With Dynamite: A Step by Step Walkthrough for Online Dating. I have stumbled into a modest but consistent readership. The article was a no-brainer considering my blog’s demographic. Cutenlexy25 was supposed to be the second date of five.
Fishing, real fishing, is the act of putting yourself in the best possible position to obtain dinner. The “patiently waiting” piece of the metaphor was important. The other sections of the profile were likewise peppered to give a strong and sensitive vibe. The hook was baited, the water chummed. Cutenlexy25 winked at me from across the interweb.
Online winking, on this particular dating site, goes like this. If a party is interested – after searching through the profiles of people with specific ethnicities, weight, and height - he or she can click the wink button. An electronic wink shows up on the recipient’s homepage; they choose whether or not to reciprocate and/or respond. I reciprocated. “Call me Alexis,” she messaged next.
She had four pictures on her profile, and in each picture her hair was the dark side of mahogany. Her nose was studded like the Hindu wear. Under “favorite books” she wrote, “I don’t read that much and even I know the Davinci Code sucked.” This was a point in her favor. I could already tell she was going to give me something interesting for the article. Best case scenario, I’d find a couple of inconspicuous tattoos.
Yes, it was cockeyed that she told me to wear a cowboy hat and a bandanna. You do what you got to do.
*****
How do you think I got there? I drove. How am I supposed to know that meant “by what manner of circumstance did I arrive at the coffee shop.” I don’t like where this interview is going. I had nothing to do with that business across the street. You know full well I’m not a suspect. I’d like to speak to a lawyer.
If you promise to get me out of here, with all of my possessions by four o’clock I’ll tell you. Okay then, I have your word...
I met her through my Flickr page. I took this super long exposure of a pumpkin as it rotted and disintegrated into mold. She made a few flattering comments below the pic. She asked me where I set the picture up I told her where my studio was, just off of Broad and Washington. She seemed really keyed up to meet. She lived like twenty blocks away, she said. She wanted some help picking out her pictures for a portfolio she was submitting for grad school applications.
The only reason I had that getup on was that her homepage had this riveting self-portrait of the most beautiful dark haired girl I had ever seen. She had these eyes that I couldn’t tell if they were light brown or if the whole picture was set to the sepia filter. Same with her skin tone, it was shadow. She told me where to meet. That ridiculous hat – her idea. It was going to be some sort of social experiment flashmob thing. The gist was some cowboy/Indian modern day commentary. To tell you the truth, I didn’t sweat the details all that much. With her figure, I would have gone to the mall in a beekeeper suit if she asked me to.
******
I put the add on Craigslist. I was selling an autographed copy of Sandman #3. The Gaiman Sandman, not the Kirby one. I accidentally met Gaiman at a writer’s workshop I knew he’d be at. I had some of his books in my bag, which he was kind enough to sign. People collect autographs. I sell them.
She wanted to know if I had issues #13, #18. I have the whole run, and I told her as much. She wanted to meet to buy seventy-some of the out of print monthlies. “I’d just have some of the comics out on the table at the coffee shop,” I told her but she insisted I wear a cowboy hat so she would recognize me. She was paying, right? I wasn’t going to haggle terms at the condition of price.
*****
I had some bad ear infections as a kid. I hear about 10% in this ear and bupkiss in this one. Like, unless you’re as loud as a 929 D&D exhaust, I’m going to feel you coming up from behind way before I hear you. I work at The Lexington Machine Shop tooling parts for prototype fabrication. The shop floor, for me, sounds like being in Sea Isle City when I was four. My job is not contingent on other people being able to sign.
I met her in my guild. Started playing World of Warcraft a couple years ago. I have conversations with people, a shared hobby. The Stony Creek Guild goes on dungeon raids, sometimes forty or fifty of us at a clip. I’m the fourth ranking member, and #1 mage. I get to dole out a lot of heat. I throw all kinds of nukes, fireballs, flamethrowers. I coordinate a lot of the attacks. Nobody looks at me cockeyed when I say something with my hands.
She was a gnome priest, a healer. We would hang on the back line, lobbing our respective swaths of terror and tranquility. Watching the meat totems do the dirty work. After we destroyed Lady Vashj in Serpentshrine Cavern, we agreed to exchange some gear and log off for the night. I was as apprehensive as the next guy when she asked me out. What are the odds that two people in the same guild were from the same city? I never told her I was deaf and she didn’t tell me about the police in S.W.A.T gear.
*******
An odd job thing I picked off of Monster. Almost as good as overtime at eighteen per. Can’t pass up Saturday work, you know. I didn’t ask what the job was, just what I should wear. Be prepared for sun, dust, and wind. You tell me how to dress for that. It was supposed to be a long day…I was getting a coffee. I thought these other guys were there for the job too.
********
The Twitter Town Watch is happy to announce this week’s winner. One lucky hostage of the bank robbery on October 19th, 2009 was Raphael DeSouza. Contest rules are as follows.
1) The tipster must not participate in the crime being committed.
2) That person must not put his- or herself in any undo danger while Tipping the Twitter Nation.
3) The crime must be described in such a way as to aid law enforcement in returning order and/or apprehending the alleged suspect(s).
4) The Twitter Tipster must use the phrase “Twitter Town Watch Alert”
5) The Twitter Tipster must have a minimum following of 2000 Twitterers.
Raphael has won a $30 dollar gift certificate to Amazon.com in addition to the knowledge he has helped make this world a safer place. If the information Raphael provided leads to any convictions, he will be eligible for the grand prize, which is an all expenses paid iVacation to the Pirate Bay, Deepweb, and Blogosphere. You can see Raphael’s contribution after the jump.
11:35 Heading to the bank. If its still in business lol. Holla at the blackberry.
11:48 TWITTER TOWN WATCH ALERT. I’m at the Wachovia in the strip mall off Delaware and South. Men with guns. NOT A RICKROLL.
11:49 TAZERS ARE NO JOKE. Two security guards down. Children crying. Holstered pistols visible. Two each
11:50 for each of the three guys white guys tall like six two all of them cowboy hats jeans guns in gun-belts. Can’t see their faces. Bandanas.
11:50 Taking peoples phones… Gave them my backup. Still broadcasting. The real guns are out now. POLICE THERE ARE 20 HOSTAGES.
11:51 Gerry, if anything happens, my password is the same as the place where we bought that dope-ass calculator for Physics class. Carry my torch.
11:53 Gunmen just left. They are heading across the parking lot. IF YOU ARE IN STARBUCKS GO OUT THE BACK NOW.
12:05 The cops are here. I’m waiting around to be questioned. What a shit show. There’s 15 dudes in cowboy hats, and none of them have any
12:06 of the banks money, that I c neway
*****
Masked Bandits Disappear into the Internet
Philadelphia, PA – Three gunman armed with Tazers and Six-shooters apparently used a variety of social networking sites to facilitate their getaway after holding up an States’s Bank branch in Southern Philadelphia. Wearing black cowboy hats, sunglasses, and bandanas to mask their appearance, the three assailants entered the branch on Delaware Avenue just before the lunch-hour rush. Two bank security guards were attacked with electric stun guns. The ten-minute ordeal turned fantastical when the assailants made their way with $90,000 stolen cash to the Starbucks across the strip mall parking lot.
The suspects had plotted a very deliberate getaway plan. Police arrived on the scene moments after thieves entered the Starbucks. There, they found twenty men between the ages of 24 and 32, dressed identically as the three suspects.
“I saw an ad on Monster.com for a two-day job for eighteen bucks an hour. The email said the uniform was required,” said Ryan, who responded to the ad requesting semi-skilled day workers near Penn’s Landing.
He was told to meet outside the Starbucks at 11:50 a.m. Saturday. The sender stressed punctuality.
“Black cowboy hat, red bandana, and sunglasses [instructed the email]… there was also a chance for time and a half,” Ryan said. “I was checking my watch every couple minutes, waiting on the blue F-150 they said would show up. Three cruisers came in with lights going and I didn’t know what was happening.”
The robbers lured other men to the Starbucks through social networking websites including Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, Urbis, Adult Friend Finder, Linkedin and Livejournal. The bait ranged from rare book sales to promises of romantic entanglement.
Police held the 20 cowboys for questioning as they searched the coffee shop for the stolen money. Instead, they found matching sets of the disguises in a garbage bin two blocks away. A dye-loaded stack of false twenty-dollar bills turned up as well, leaking from a freezer-seal Ziplock bag.
“I figured they were a bunch of Dallas fans in town for the Eagles game,” said Philadelphia resident Erich Vadino, “Then the cops had them in handcuffs”
The suspects are described as white males in their mid to late twenties, between 5-foot-10 and 6-foot-2, with short dark hair. The twenty victims of the larger than life scam were cleared and released early Sunday morning.
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Matthewtuckey reviewed Version 2 -
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Your opening sentences are very short which gives a kind of stop-start feel. By bridging two shorter ones together it will flow a little better.
You tell us it’s for “research”- this is a grabber- I want to know what kind of research! then you move on to what you put in the “about me” section. I’m finding it a little broken up. The info is all good, but I think a few sentences need swapping around.
For non World Of Warcraft people, can you tell us a little more about dungeon raids? It has a big following so I’m sure some description would be entertaining without distracting us from the plot. It could drive it forward, in fact.
I think you could rephrase the sentence with “as the three suspects”. To keep it newspaper style, don’t mention that they are the suspects- the fact that they have been arrested tells us that. Also when you say “the suspects had plotted”- the journalist doesn’t know this for sure, but it they can be pretty sure of it. “apparently/seemingly plotted” might be what a paper would print. Maybe take it to your local paper and see what they say.
I had to google “rickroll”, but fits perfectly.
”...handcuffs.” full stop.
Well thought out. The open ending works- the thieves got away, but I feel okay about them not being brought to justice because I’ve been tricked just like narrator Andrew.
One point- I’ve done net dating and I’m always a bit suspicious about too-good-looking girls being too friendly. The instant thought I have is that I’m going to be robbed, or it’s just a fake profile. match.com and myspace are full of them. But maybe I’m paranoid. Could be why I’m single. Anyway, to cover that, maybe describe the pics a bit and how the interviewee felt- were they holiday snaps, amateurish pictures? These might be convincing. If it’s all photo shoot pics it’s easy to believe the girl isn’t real.
I always find multi-perspective stories a little difficult- the feeling of “who’s talking to me now?” is a tough one to quell as a writer. I think a heading with the name of the character narrating might clear it up. Once I understood it I enjoyed it a lot. Very original and believable.
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ispeaknonsensestuff reviewed Version 1 -
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Please insert line breaks between paragraphs. ^^;
Very entertaining. I like the snippety style here, makes me go like “what happened to the other story?” It can be a little tiresome, though. But that’s just me. Maybe. :)
As for the last * section, I… sort of… didn’t get it. :O
inconsistency issue: Cutenlexy25 vs. Cutenlexy45. which is it?
other errors:
“Purely for research mind you.” = should be = Purely for research, mind you.
“goes like this.” = i’, not sure about this one but i think you should use a semicolon instead of a period. =
“How am I supposed to know that meant ‘by what manner of circumstance did I arrive at the coffee shop.’” = if this is a question, it should end in a question mark = “by what manner of circumstance did I arrive at the coffee shop”?
~GBÜ
BrianA reviewed Version 1 -
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Okay, this was a very clever story. I really liked the idea behind it. There is a delicate line to tread and I think you realise this. You needed to make segments seem like the same man i.e. a trace of ambiguity, at the same time differentiate them sufficiently to allow later reader acknowledgement after the conclusion. When I first read didn’t register what was going on, and segment after segment I became more confused – it was only faith there might be eventual sense kept me reading. So each individual segment needs to be sufficiently interesting and intriguing in itself. I think you have done this admirably, but I would consider making longer segments shorter if you can – all readers may not be as patient as me. In the segment re Warcraft it is unclear who has been playing for years. If it was her, this meant either she actually is a habitué or crime was a long time in the planning.
`...any (undo) undue danger…’
`...after the jump.’ – didn’t understand what this meant.
I couldn’t see any other problems. Because story is related dialogue, I have no grammar problems. Narratives run quite smoothly. Excellent piece of work. Good luck with this.
Phantasmagoria reviewed Version 1 -
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I liked the concept, but I liked it as a potential start to a longer work rather than as a stand alone story.
I think the reason it didn’t work for me as a short story was that it was just a description of a situation from a few POVs. It needed a protagonist, someone it could crystallize around – an investigator perhaps.
Because it had no protagonist it kind of had no resolution. An event had occurred and people were talking about it afterwards. More focus was put on the diversion than the drama of the robbery. It didn’t resolve for the robbers – did they get away with it in the end. It didn’t resolve for the people who were used as diversion – was one of them in fact a robber that got caught up.
What I really did like was the different voices of the various diversion guys. You showed their different characters in fairly few words for each – nicely done. Though in terms of balance it felt like you gave more to the first guy, Andrew Caffey. Also his section felt more like it was written, whereas the others felt more spoken. Because of this and because you gave him a name it felt like he may have ended up being the protagonist and wondered whether the story would come back to him. In fact if you wanted to work this up into a longer story he could end up being a good protagonist – as a blogger he could become an amateur investigator of this thing he became caught up in, and as a blogger he’s probably more web 2.0 savvy than the police are at the moment.
Proofreading notes:
cutenlexy25 becomes cutenlexy45
Flickr probably needs to be capitalised, in their logo it’s lowercase but elsewhere on the site it tends to start with a big F.
Also it seems a bit weird that Flickr guy can extract a promise from the police to get him out of there by 4 before he talks.
danielleharlow reviewed Version 2 -
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I think this great! You might have a hard time publishing it, but I dig it.
mderosier reviewed Version 2 -
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So, after reading, I see that the breaks separated with asterisks were meant to be from new characters perspectives. I think that was the main problem I had reading through the piece… I had no way of knowing these were different characters, and I was trying to figure out why this one person was telling all of these different things. Some type of indicator that these are different people could be helpful. Maybe there is a way to set that up so the individuals pieces are also not so short?
Interesting idea to use these people as a way to confuse the police, I definitely didn’t expect that.
The only recommendations I have are what I said about how it was confusing because of no indicators of new people being the focal point. Hope that helps in some way.
Crysa reviewed Version 2 -
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In re-reading, it seems that most of the story is a flashback. He is remembering, or retelling, meeting the “girl”, and how he came to be in the area. This isn’t something that comes across with the first read through, and at times it is just confusing.
(“Yes, it was cockeyed that she told me to wear a cowboy hat and a bandanna. You do what you got to do.
*
How do you think I got there? I drove. How am I supposed to know that meant “by what manner of circumstance did I arrive at the coffee shop.” I don’t like where this interview is going. I had nothing to do with that business across the street. You know full well I’m not a suspect. I’d like to speak to a lawyer.”)
In this particular section, for example, it wasn’t clear until the second read through that he is talking to the police about the incident. I think the story would read better if you found a way to differentiate between the recollection and the current situation. Having the dialog better noted would probably help as well.
In my opinion, the beginning is a bit too ominous for where the story ends up. The way he met the “girl”, and the way she kept showing up to “meet” with him online was kind of weird. Even more unsettling was her desire to meet, coupled with her insistence on the cowboy get up. I was expecting something a bit more dreadful than a bank heist.
Speaking of bank heists, your story is a way too close to fact to pass as fiction without at least some mention of it being based on a true story. Being new to Urbis I’m not sure if posting links is allowed, so I won’t here, but I can provide it through email if you like. Cracked had a feature of “5 Real Bank Heists Right Out of the Movies“, and included in those 5, “The Inner Tube Bandit” who pulled the scheme in your story, right down to the ad in Cragslist.
Phantasmagoria reviewed Version 2 -
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The addition of that last section to tie it up and give the overview just pulls the piece together nicely. Decided improvement from the first draft.
The only addition I can suggest is to end it on a punchier line. A pithy one liner quote from one of the saps who got arrested or similar.
oknapp reviewed Version 2 -
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“Andrew Caffey, on a water ski.” How about on “water skis?” Would this sound better?
Andrew Caffey, in sunglasses with the top down” On what kind of car. The car will help define Andrew.
My books were all Willa Cather and Kate Chopin.” How about? My favorite authors are Willa Cather and Kate Chopin (You have excellent taste in authors. I love both of them, too)
Ok here is what throws me: “How do you think I got there?”
It is the way you transition to the view of another character i assume. It is too quick. You can fix this by telling the reader that this person is at the police station.
Once inside the police station….Do you think i have a point or am i missing something? Or is he in the police station or practicing what he would say to the police, or is he revisiting or telling what had happened earlier. It may not be your fault that i am not clear. Its probably mine, okay. But i did read closely
“You know full well I’m not a suspect.” Oh contrair, he is a suspect if he is being grilled by the police. How about, you know i am not guilty of anything.
A very clever piece. i read it twice to make sure i understood it. Most of it is clear. I like how you use each person to describe the events. I suggested things above. Overall a nice piece. Sandi
Fido reviewed Version 2 -
Read 43% of the Item
This story needs to make more sense. I don’t know if you’re using the “*” to break chronological order or just jump forward in the story but whatever you’re doing needs to start coming together a lot sooner because if you’re losing readers (for example, myself) less than half way through the story, there’s no way this is going to get read by a publisher.
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