QK Round 1: The Bat is One of You vs. Hot Sauce is Bad for Wound Care
Title: THE LAST SPADEEntry Nickname: The Bat Is One of YouWord Count: 60,500Genre: NA Murder Mystery
Query:
Mary Robert Rinehart’s play, The Bat, dazzles and spooks the audiences of 1920s New York. That is, until a real life murderer begins pinning dead bats to the bodies of his victims and the Bat steps off the stage and into the streets.
Flory is a twenty-two-year-old actress, fresh on the Broadway scene. She has the role of Dale Ogden in The Bat. Her mother is dead and the only friend she has in the world is Priscilla Hayes, her guardian: also an actress in The Bat. Noble is Flory’s nineteen-year-old half-brother. He’s African American, and Flory doesn’t know he exists. He longs to become a poet, and his heart is lifted by the beginnings of the Harlem Renaissance.
One night, as thunder cracks overhead, the cast of The Bat meets alone in the theater to discuss the murders and how they will affect the public’s perception of the play. Noble also chooses this night to tell Flory who he really is. As soon as everyone has arrived, Priscilla finds a letter addressed to all of them, written by the Bat. In rhyme, the Bat informs them that he is a member of the cast and he will kill them one by one that night—unless they discover his identity.
The Bat’s letter is accompanied by a four of spades. As the cast tries to solve the mystery of which one of them is a killer, they find a three of spades, then a two. When they find the ace of spades, the card of death, it will be accompanied by a dead body.
First 250:
A trolley rattled past in the street, and the boy who sold the papers yelled at the top of his lungs.
“Murder! Horrible Murder!” he shouted.
“Spoiling my day with horrible murders,” I said to myself. “What does the world mean by it?”
It was a gray day, what I like to call a jam day, because gray skies make me want strawberry jam. I strolled through the park with my coat wrapped tight around me. The coat was gray with a faux fur collar, but it was beastly thin. Now that I was a person who had achieved her dreams, who had money and things, you would think I could buy myself a nice coat.
“Buy yourself a nice coat, Flory,” I said. “You see? There. That’s an order.”
I enjoyed the sound of my heels clipping across the sidewalk. A man smoking a cigar looked up from his paper at me. Wrapping my fur tighter around my neck, I smiled the way I’d seen a movie star do it.
I strolled up to the newspaper stand and bought a copy of the paper.
“Horrible murder, you said?” I asked the boy.
“Yes, ma’am. Horrible. They say it’s an insane person who murdered the man—leaving a signature, no less.”
“A signature? On what?”
“Not a written signature, ma’am. You’ll see when you read it.” He proceeded to blast exclamations out of his lungs and deafen me. “Murder! Horrible, horrible murder!”
VERSUS
Title: The Gray HoleEntry Nickname: Hot Sauce is Bad for Wound CareWord count: 62KGenre: YA Magic Realism
Query:
Six students at Mayville High will be dead by Saturday night. Again. And again, they will begin the week over just before Tuesday's first period class. Doomed to repeat the same week until seventeen-year-old Grayson Dell decides to stop killing them, the group must work through two problems: First, Grayson has no idea the groundhog week from hell is happening; Second, the victims are all jerks.
As Grayson struggles with the choices he’s made, his victims, seeing nothing left to lose, only increase their cruelty to outrageous levels, making the decision to kill easier and easier. It isn’t until Timothy Mayes, Grayson’s once-most-brutal tormentor, begins to see and treat Grayson as a fellow human being that signs of a possible end to the cycle start to appear. Now Mayes must steer clear of the other victims and show Gray that life is worth living, or be forced to endure the week before prom forever.
The narrator is a second-person voice in Grayson’s head, allowing the story to stay hopeful and sometimes humorous even during Grayson’s darkest moments.
First 250 words:
TUESDAY 7:59 A.M.
You tell yourself today will be different. Maybe it will. The lockers are the same sick, pale blue as yesterday, the linoleum floors still shine with same pungent cleaners that have been disintegrating nose hairs and SEAL-Team-Sixing brain cells for all four years you’ve spent in this school. And your classmates – if they’ve changed anything other than the color of their hair, it’d be tantamount to Chris Hemsworth intentionally eating a carb.
But still.
That pale blue used to be your favorite color before your attitude and your wardrobe took an about-face to the dark side. The chemical glint and nauseating smell from the floor is fading with each sneaker’s squeaking step. And those people – the juniors, sophomores, freshman, even your classmates, the seniors – they all could –
Your head snaps against a locker so hard it’s unclear whether the high pitched hum ringing in your ears is wholly a product of your mind or if the blue painted metal is actually screaming back at you. You try to pull away and see if you’ve changed the blue to red, but the hand that put you there doubles the pressure from its sweaty palms, digging the blunted and jagged ends of chewed away nails into the back of your head and left cheek.
You stop struggling before you start, so inured to bullying it’s become your norm. Embarrassment is the baseline of high school, and pain’s just a reminder you haven’t left yet.
Yet.
Query:
Mary Robert Rinehart’s play, The Bat, dazzles and spooks the audiences of 1920s New York. That is, until a real life murderer begins pinning dead bats to the bodies of his victims and the Bat steps off the stage and into the streets.
Flory is a twenty-two-year-old actress, fresh on the Broadway scene. She has the role of Dale Ogden in The Bat. Her mother is dead and the only friend she has in the world is Priscilla Hayes, her guardian: also an actress in The Bat. Noble is Flory’s nineteen-year-old half-brother. He’s African American, and Flory doesn’t know he exists. He longs to become a poet, and his heart is lifted by the beginnings of the Harlem Renaissance.
One night, as thunder cracks overhead, the cast of The Bat meets alone in the theater to discuss the murders and how they will affect the public’s perception of the play. Noble also chooses this night to tell Flory who he really is. As soon as everyone has arrived, Priscilla finds a letter addressed to all of them, written by the Bat. In rhyme, the Bat informs them that he is a member of the cast and he will kill them one by one that night—unless they discover his identity.
The Bat’s letter is accompanied by a four of spades. As the cast tries to solve the mystery of which one of them is a killer, they find a three of spades, then a two. When they find the ace of spades, the card of death, it will be accompanied by a dead body.
First 250:
A trolley rattled past in the street, and the boy who sold the papers yelled at the top of his lungs.
“Murder! Horrible Murder!” he shouted.
“Spoiling my day with horrible murders,” I said to myself. “What does the world mean by it?”
It was a gray day, what I like to call a jam day, because gray skies make me want strawberry jam. I strolled through the park with my coat wrapped tight around me. The coat was gray with a faux fur collar, but it was beastly thin. Now that I was a person who had achieved her dreams, who had money and things, you would think I could buy myself a nice coat.
“Buy yourself a nice coat, Flory,” I said. “You see? There. That’s an order.”
I enjoyed the sound of my heels clipping across the sidewalk. A man smoking a cigar looked up from his paper at me. Wrapping my fur tighter around my neck, I smiled the way I’d seen a movie star do it.
I strolled up to the newspaper stand and bought a copy of the paper.
“Horrible murder, you said?” I asked the boy.
“Yes, ma’am. Horrible. They say it’s an insane person who murdered the man—leaving a signature, no less.”
“A signature? On what?”
“Not a written signature, ma’am. You’ll see when you read it.” He proceeded to blast exclamations out of his lungs and deafen me. “Murder! Horrible, horrible murder!”
VERSUS
Title: The Gray HoleEntry Nickname: Hot Sauce is Bad for Wound CareWord count: 62KGenre: YA Magic Realism
Query:
Six students at Mayville High will be dead by Saturday night. Again. And again, they will begin the week over just before Tuesday's first period class. Doomed to repeat the same week until seventeen-year-old Grayson Dell decides to stop killing them, the group must work through two problems: First, Grayson has no idea the groundhog week from hell is happening; Second, the victims are all jerks.
As Grayson struggles with the choices he’s made, his victims, seeing nothing left to lose, only increase their cruelty to outrageous levels, making the decision to kill easier and easier. It isn’t until Timothy Mayes, Grayson’s once-most-brutal tormentor, begins to see and treat Grayson as a fellow human being that signs of a possible end to the cycle start to appear. Now Mayes must steer clear of the other victims and show Gray that life is worth living, or be forced to endure the week before prom forever.
The narrator is a second-person voice in Grayson’s head, allowing the story to stay hopeful and sometimes humorous even during Grayson’s darkest moments.
First 250 words:
TUESDAY 7:59 A.M.
You tell yourself today will be different. Maybe it will. The lockers are the same sick, pale blue as yesterday, the linoleum floors still shine with same pungent cleaners that have been disintegrating nose hairs and SEAL-Team-Sixing brain cells for all four years you’ve spent in this school. And your classmates – if they’ve changed anything other than the color of their hair, it’d be tantamount to Chris Hemsworth intentionally eating a carb.
But still.
That pale blue used to be your favorite color before your attitude and your wardrobe took an about-face to the dark side. The chemical glint and nauseating smell from the floor is fading with each sneaker’s squeaking step. And those people – the juniors, sophomores, freshman, even your classmates, the seniors – they all could –
Your head snaps against a locker so hard it’s unclear whether the high pitched hum ringing in your ears is wholly a product of your mind or if the blue painted metal is actually screaming back at you. You try to pull away and see if you’ve changed the blue to red, but the hand that put you there doubles the pressure from its sweaty palms, digging the blunted and jagged ends of chewed away nails into the back of your head and left cheek.
You stop struggling before you start, so inured to bullying it’s become your norm. Embarrassment is the baseline of high school, and pain’s just a reminder you haven’t left yet.
Yet.
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