The Snarky Sarcasm Chromosome

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Spotlight... Forever Fredless

A new contemporary romance 

by 

Suzy Turner

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Kate Robinson has spent the past two decades yearning to find her soul mate, the boy she found and then lost during a family holiday.

Shortly after her twenty-eighth birthday, however, she inherits a fortune from an old family friend and becomes something of an overnight celebrity. Can her new-found fame lead her to him after all this time?

The fun of Harry Potter

by

Mary E Twomey

Writing a comedy started out as a way to challenge myself. I had just finished a fantasy fiction space opera quadrilogy, Saga of the Spheres, and needed a bit of a laugh. I had never written a comedy before, but as I slipped into the genre, I found it to be incredibly relaxing. There were no megalomaniac plots to interweave. My cast of characters was cut in half. Plus, I had a wealth of humorous situations stored up from years of marriage. 

One thing that always manages to make my husband laugh is my impeccably bad aim. We spent a very long evening where he had me practice giving high-fives. After being smacked in the head, the neck, the shoulder, had his fingers bent back, and watched several total misses, he ruled the training session a flop. This scene made it into my comedy book, well after my pride (and my hubby) had healed. 

Another thing the people around me have learned is that I am, perhaps, too sensitive to animals. Aside from being a vegetarian, I burst into spontaneous tears if I drive by a particularly mangled bit of roadkill. This translated into one of the characters throwing miniature funerals for the poor animal they hit on their roadtrip across the country.

Needless to say, the jokes were piling up, and needed a place to go. Jack and Yani Love Harry Potter combined my two happy things: young adult fiction and ridiculous humor. I adore Harry Potter. I also love a great many books in the booming young adult genre. If it’s got a vampire on the cover, I’m all over it. After reading the Iliad four times through high school and college (that’s right, four), I decided to cut myself a break and just read for fun. I devoured all things wizard, witch, vampire, superhero, angel and the like. We even throw an annual Harry Potter’s Birthday Party on July 31 every year. I wear my Luna Lovegood dress robes with my crazy blonde hair, and wish everyone a magical evening. I used to bring in cupcakes to work that had golden snitches and broomsticks on them to celebrate. It’s amazing how tolerant people will be to my theatrics, so long as there is cake involved. 

Yes, I’m in my thirties. No, that does not bother me or my ridiculous friends one bit. That’s the gem I’ve found in the people I’ve been fortunate enough to surround myself with. While they may not read the YA books that I adore, they can get into just about anything. I made sure to add to the novel a group of friends to egg on the two main characters, as all good friends should.

When searching for a plot for my comedy novel, I came across some great advice by Stephen King. He said to write what you know. I know Harry. I even have dress robes that make me look like Luna Lovegood all dressed up for a party. And so the plot of Jack and Yani Love Harry Potter was born. Yani is a girl obsessed with all things young adult fiction, which I could write without any further research needed. She gets to visit all the places she’s read about in her books. As I read and write, I smile and sigh with longing that one day I might be able to go on a similar young adult adventure of my own.

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Comedy and Fun Excerpts

by

Bryan Taylor

When you think about fun, what is the first word that comes into your mind? Is it nuns? No? Most likely you never met the nuns in my novel, or you had to put up with nuns as teachers for twelve years in Catholic School, or both. As one person who read my novel put it, I never knew any nuns like that. To which I replied, what is it about the word fiction that you don’t understand?

Though I have written a book about three former nuns who do things most nuns would never think about doing, it isn’t from experience. I have never been a nun, since I am a man, and I have no background as a Catholic. My dad was a minister, and both my parents’ dads were ministers of the hellfire and brimstone Jesus-died-for-your-sins variety, which probably explains more than never having attended Catholic School. So as you can see, when I took that writing class and the teacher told me to write about what I knew, I didn’t listen to a word the teacher said.

Adding comedy to your manuscript whatever the genre

By

R.J. Crayton

Whatever genre people write in, there has to be a touch of comedy somewhere in the manuscript. Why? Because in real life, people try to make things funny. They do it because that’s their personality, or to break the tension, or to entice a lover, or because that’s what the situation calls for. Every person you have ever met has told a joke and had someone laugh at it. The computer nerd whose jargon everyone else ignores has friends who will laugh hysterically at some jargon-filled joke very few would find funny.

 So, if you want to infuse humor into your books in appropriate places but don’t feel you’re particularly humorous, don’t worry. There are a few things you can do to try to see the humorous side of things.

1. Try to look at things in a different light. The best comedy often comes from looking at things from a fresh perspective. My six-year-old daughter, for some reason, was looking at the milk carton, and turns to me with a look of utter horror on her face. “Mom, why is it only one percent milk? What is the rest of it?”  Yikes. She’d be right if the one percent referred to the milk content, not the milk fat content. (Sadly, in a bad mommy moment, I laughed hysterically at her question, causing her to look at me like I'd been conspiring to feed her 99 percent bat sweat for many years.) Regardless, a fresh look at something can often provide a wealth of comedy.

Minor Characters: Big Humor in Small Packages

by

Jayne Denker

I write romantic comedies—emphasis on the comedy part. I suppose I’d be able to write angst-filled dramas if I really tried, but I’ve always believed that if I’m going to spend many months crafting a decent story, and have a whole mess of characters taking up residence in my head, I might as well be laughing the entire time.

However, there’s one thing I’ve learned: The main character can’t have too much of the cray-cray. The reader is in that person’s head and expects to sympathize with her or him. If the main character is too weird, it alienates the reader.

So I reserve the highest level of insanity for the peripheral players. They can be there for pure comic relief, or they can play integral parts in the plot, or both, but whichever role you set for them, you—and they—have the freedom to make them as bizarro as you like, with fewer consequences.

I had a lot of fun writing my second book, Unscripted, about Faith Sinclair, a high-powered TV producer who gets fired from her own show. She’s fun, and crazy in her own way, but the people surrounding her are really off the rails—just the way I like it. She has a freeloading stepbrother, a domineering movie producer mother who will only drink “pure glacier water” (which Faith notes probably has mammoth poop in it), and Randy Barstow (also known as Randy Bastard), the sexist head of the TV network who swears so much he turns the air around him blue. Oh—and there’s Bea, a grouch of a studio gate guard who hates Faith on principle, a few air-headed actors whom Faith has to shepherd like wayward children, and others populating the story.

Every Woman - Whose A&& Is That?

Spotlighting...

Marylu Zuk with 

WHOSE A$$ IS THAT?

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Filled with whimsical illustrations and witty rhyme, Whose A&& Is That? encourages women to laugh at our collective selves. Author Marylu Zuk reassures us that we are indeed perfect regardless of the size or shape of our buns. Whose A&& Is That? permits every woman to relax her abs, exhale, and laugh at what we rarely see - our own backsides! This quick read is a delightful gift for your female tribe - sisters, aunts, coworkers, and friends.

Reviewed in September: Ugly Reviews