This week we should be celebrating the 9th birthday of my son.
Instead we are celebrating the 9th anniversary since his murder.
If you have any information, please call FBI Portland Office @ 207-774-9322
ask for Agent Andy Drewer.
November 14, 2013 10PM @ Southern Maine Community College Art Studio Bug-Light Parking Lot: 3 strangers armed with golf clubs, attacked me from behind while I was loading bags into the backseat of my car. They were a blond woman 60s-ish whom the others called "Claire", a natural red-haired woman also 60sish who called herself "Kendra", and a bald man, football player-body-type-build in his 30sish. I was 8 months pregnant. They murdered my baby, ruptured 3 discs in my spine, shattered 3 vertebra, broke my pelvis, hips, and knees. I was paralyzed for 5 months and was 18 months relearning to walk. The nerve damage has left me with limited use of my hands, legs, bladder, and intestines.
On top of that, they have also taken to harassing the baby's father, a disfigured, homeless, WW2 veteran, whom they call "Etoile". They spread hateful rumours about him claiming he is a cryptid, a demon, or most often what they term "an amphibious alien". He lives in pine branch lean-toos he builds in Old Orchard Beach and Ocean Park, and they have been hunting the locations of them, tearing them down, and smashing up his belongings.
April 10, 2015 1PM at 146 Portland Ave Old Orchard Beach Maine a gang of estimated 74 people, some of them wearing ku klux klan robes, invaded my farm, used a Blow Brothers sewage truck to pump 500+gallons of sewage into my motorhome flooding it to over the kitchen counters deep, ripped out all the cabinets and built in furniture, while 14 men armed with guns, held my family down on the ice and snow, with guns to our heads, and used cinder block bricks and a metal pole with metal wire loops to beat and behead 10 of my 12 foster children (the youngest age 4, the oldest age 16). May 15, 2015 they returned and nailed their heads to my front door. The 3 people of the November 14, 2013 attack were among the group.
September 12, 2015, 9AM a dozen+ of these same people arrived again in my driveway at 146, this time chanting: "Too gay for the family friendly town of Old Orchard Beach. Kill of be killed. Remember Saco Shaw's, Transgender Murder Store, kill the transvestites before they kill us all", one white haired man in a dark green pick up truck was leading the herd, while waving a rifle over his head and shooting at me and my pink motorhome, he shot several holes through my neighbour's shed. The crowd was accusing me of being a male-to-female "transgender terrorist" (they thought I was Muslim because I wear Catholic veiling).
June 26, 2016, the same 2 women of the first 2 attacks, arrived at my Scarborough WalMart workplace, and in a near repeat of the first attack, again while I was leaned over the back seat of my car putting bags in, this time they attacked with a chopping cart, re-injuring my spine, hip, and pelvis that was not yet fully healed from the first attack. The blond "Claire" woman was screaming "That's EelKat, she tried to kill my husband!" while the redhead screamed "I'm Kendra Silvermander it's my turn the shine!" They sped away in a early2000s-vintage gold Volvo SUV station wagon. This attack left me permanently crippled, and bedridden from 2016 until May 2022.
November 21, 2021: They shot "Etiole" in Biddeford, while he was staying at the tent-shanty-village with about 50 other homeless people along the Saco River in Biddeford. They made the claim he was a "suicide demon" citing that he was driving locals to suicide by putting "evil eye curses" on them.
These people murdered my baby, attempted to murder the baby's father, drove a backhoe over our house, and left me crippled for the rest of my life in their attempt to murder me.
I do not know who these people are. I never saw them before these attacks, and I've not seen them outside of these attacks. The police and FBI believe I was not the intended target, and that they were likely after my mother because of posts she makes on FaceBook and got us mixed up. The Old Orchard Beach and Biddeford Police and the FBI are seeking information leading to their identity and arrest.
More Info @ eelkat.com
Long detailed info on the over 200 attacks they have done between June 2001 and May 2022, including photos of them driving a backhoe over our house on August 8, 2013 and the details of the malicious "amphibious alien" rumour they have been spreading about a local homeless disabled veteran @
https://www.eelkat.com/AmphibiousAliens.html
Images:
July 4th 2013: my car in front of my house.
August 8, 2013: me getting home from work to find a backhoe sitting on top of my house.
The FBI already found the people with the backhoe incident, and learned that the backhoe driver was paid $600 and given a fake demolition paper, the paper stating one of my relatives (the one who paid him the $600) owned my land. The backhoe driver was unaware that the man he was dealing with was not the owner. I have lived at 146 Portland Ave since 1975 and have owned the land since 1983, it has never been owned by anyone else, even though we have now learned that both my mother and my father and 3 of my uncles had been actively going around Old Orchard Beach claiming they owned my land.
This happened 3 months before my son was murdered and the police and FBI believe my son was murdered BECAUSE of this picture being posted on FaceBook, and my mother making inciting/inflammatory posts about it on HER FaceBook, where she falsely accused me of being a witch. The FBI and OOB police believe the golf club wielding woman of November 14, 2013, is somehow connected to the backhoe driving over my house incident.
Since the murder, 3 other different backhoes have invading my land to dig up my yard, looking for the grave of my son. There is a family cemetery on my land, the stones dating mostly in the 1500s and 1600s, with a few from the past hundred years, the most recent being my son in 2013. 146 Portland Ave has belonged to my family since 1530, and I inherited it in 1983 from my grandmother Helen Ricker Allen. The most recent backhoe attack happened September 19, 2020, when they illegally cut down several trees in my yard, and started construction of a road through my yard between my pink 1975 Dodge Sportsman motorhome and BackElder Brooke, again the backhoe digging up and destroying large portions of my farm, in their search for my murdered son's grave. They dug up 16 of the graves in this attack.
We have had to remove the grave markers from the family grave in order to stop these vandals and their illegally trespassing construction equipment from destroying the graves.
The FBI believes these construction crews are being hired by the golf club wielding women, and believe she is trying to destroy the grave of my son, due to a fear of his golf club smashed skull being used as court evidence against her.
The most recent attacks by these people occurred November 21, 2021 and March 27, 2022 when they attacked my painted Volvo while it was parked at my dad's apartment in Biddeford, both times the vandals also cut all the wires to electricity, internet, and cable off the apartment building, effecting all 9 families living there.
The Old Orchard Beach and Biddeford Police Departments as well as the Portland FBI are seeking any information regarding any and all of these attacks on my family, my home, my land, or my cars.
If you have any information, please call FBI Portland Office @ 207-774-9322
ask for Agent Andy Drewer.
Due to the very long length of this question, only a small portion of it is shown here...
Thread: Starting a novel with a prologue
One critique I saw recently written (for someone else's work) stated that you shouldn't start with a prologue, and that that information should be incorporated into the first chapter, or scrapped entirely. I'm... nervous about that? Because while I am a ways off submitting my own work for critiques, the fact is I HAVE started with a prologue, because I just don't see any way around it. The prologue centers on the Big Bad of the book, and is about him setting things in motion. If that scene didn't play out, then I don't see how any of the rest of the book would even make sense.
So what say you, Absolute Write? Can a novel that starts with a prologue work, or do I need to go stand in the corner and think about what I've done?
(for context, the novel is a fantasy quest type premise, and I'm not sure who it's aimed at yet. I think young teens, based on the readability scores, but then again I don't know how reliable those are, or if people even really use them.)
I didn't want it as part of chapter one: because none of the MCs appear in it, the Big Bad does. And unless and until he does what he does in the prologue, nothing else in the book can really happen.
My prologue is literally about 350 words long, so I briefly considered having it be the first scene of the first chapter, and then doing a really obvious scene transition. But, the gosling thing. I don't want The Big Bad to be the first character in the first chapter, I want him clearly set apart. I want you to meet Bill in the first chapter!
Also, my setup has each chapter "narrated" by a different character, 3rd person POV fly on shoulder, the same way GoT centers each chapter on a person. The difference, if there is one, is that my chapters are written more how the characters talk. Not heavy dialogue, because I think only Brian Jacques could pull that off, but like... one of my characters has zero contractions in her speech, and when it's her turn to "narrate" a chapter, the prose doesn't have any contractions in it either, because it's her thoughts.
ANYWAY. The point of saying all that, is to say that I just don't see the prologue scene working as part of a chapter, because it's Big Bad centric, so to shoehorn it into the narrative turn of one of the MCs would be really out of place and odd. It wouldn't be fair to Bill, for example, if during his turn to narrate he had to sit aside and let the Big Bad's thoughts take precedence!
-James
My site, like my book is a work in progress, but you can find it at
https://nimrien.wordpress.com/
For me, I don't mind prologues IF they are ACTUAL prologues... the definition of a prologue being 2 to 3 pages to introduce a previous event important to the plot, but does not take place in the same timeline as the novel.
But far too often these days, authors use the prologue as a place to lecture the readers or write a 90 page worldbuilding explanation of what the world looks like or a detailed 50 page history of a battle or whatever. I feel like the bulk of authors these days don't know what a prologue is anymore and just slap anything at the front of the book and stick the title "prologue" on it no matter what it is.
Fantasy is my primary genre, both as a reader and a writer, and as a result of this recent trend of 50 to 90 page "prologues" that are not prologue... I've stopped reading prologues all together for any book written in the past 10 years.
There was a time when a prologue was a quick 2 page introduction to the back history of the story.
Not anymore!
Yie!
For the past 5 years, almost every prologue added to a Fantasy novel, is now a 50 to 90 page detailed description of not only the world, but all the things the author researched as well.
I started reading a book a few months back... it had a 90 page prologue - NINETY FREAKING PAGES! - on why Neanderthals make the ideal basis for the book's main character race, and why dinosaurs and Humans should never be in a novel together, and then a detailed history of all the author's Anthropology and Archaeology degrees, then listed off all the actual fossil dig sites he dug at....
I was like... does this guy even know what a prologue is? This is not a prologue, this is a damned history lesson! I mean, if this guy ever wrote a college textbook on the history of the Jurassic Period, he'd be amazing! He really knows his stuff, I'll give him that. But you don't put stuff in your novel! I just felt so much, like this guy had never read a novel in his life and the only movie he had ever watched was Jurassic Park, and that the only reason he wrote this novel was so he could tell fans of dino-sci-fi they were jerks (his word) for liking those types of books. (Yes, he started right in the "prologue" that readers of dino-sci-fi were "jerks"!)
So I contacted this guy and asked him about it and...oooooooooh boooooooy....
WOW! I got a 60+ page response telling me that "Fantasy readers needed to be taught a lesson" (his words), and that they had "no business making up fictional races that couldn't possibly exist" (his words), and he proudly boasted that he never in his life ever read a fiction novel and never would....yow.
Well, it certainly showed in his novel writing, that he had never read a novel before writing one.... but it especially showed in his so called 90 page long "prologue", because it was clear by reading his prologue that he had no clue what a prologue even was!
And I wish I could say this was an isolated incident, but, dang, I'm seeing this sort of "prologue" being written more and more often. Especially in self-pubbed Fantasy. And, as a self-pubbed Fantasy author myself, I know this sort of thing reflects on ALL of us. The more prevalent these sorts of quasi-prologues become, the more they turn off readers to prologues.
For me as a reader, these days, I'm likely to skip even buying a book if it has a prologue, let alone read it. ESPECIALLY if it's self-published, as it's become a trend of late for authors to let their egos lose in prologues. You don't see it in agented/trade books that often, because editors don't let those sorts of author rants go in the book. And as a self-pubbed Fantasy author, I'm worried that this sort of thing is not only putting readers off Fantasy with prologues, but turning them away from ANY self-pubbed Fantasy prologues or no. Yes, this is something I worry about a lot, because I know that as a Fantasy reader myself, I'm tending to avoid self-pubbed Fantasy lately, because of this "fake prologue" issue... and that worries me because I LOVE self-pubbed Fantasy and don't want to avoid them! Newer self-pubbed books these days have these weird "fake prologues" that are insanely long. 50 pages is fast becoming the norm, and I've seen longer ones.... which I wouldn't mind if they were actual prologues and not just the author having a hissy-fit rant.
My belief is, if the author feels they have to explain the details of their story, outside of the story, then that author is a very poor writer and in desperate need of taking some writing classes so they can learn how to tell a story and include everything the reader needs to know, woven within the story.
I would like prologues if they did what they were supposed to do, and BRIEFLY in a few pages, introduce the setting/backdrop of the story. I mean if it's an ACTUAL prologue, then fine, I don't mind.
But I think far too many authors these days don't know the difference between a prologue and an "here's my life history on how I wrote this book"...and it's ruining my perspective on books with prologues.
I mean, you look at books written 30 or more years ago, and how prologues were written... they BELONGED with the story. They were PART of the story, but they were just a part of the story that didn't fit in the story. And they worked, because they helped the reader get to know the plot and characters better. Prologues like that I'm fine with and don't mind reading.
But I don't want to read 50 pages of an author explaining how they did their research to ensure that we stupid readers know the difference between a cave man and a neanderthal, followed by explanations of all the hows and whys of the ice age and its effect on the story, followed by the author listing off all their degrees in anthropology, and which digs they dug at, blah, blah, blah. I bought the book to read the story, and if I want to know the history of how and why they wrote it, I'll head to their website and read their "About Me" page.
Far too many authors use their prologues as a way to talk down to their readers and, I wanted to read a story, not be lectured by an arrogant author.
Now, from what I'm understanding, it sounds like you want to tell you story from one character's perspective, but it's important to the plot, that the reader know a bit of backstory from another character's perspective first? But you don't need to do a 2 PoV story, so you just want to write a quick short story told from 2nd character's PoV, and call that a prologue? Right? Well, that's EXACTLY what a prologue is supposed to be. A quick backstory, from the PoV of someone not the PoV character, to help the reader understand the main character.
Based on what you have described, I think your prologue sounds like it fits the story and is actually a prologue being used as intended. So I would think your story would be fine with a prologue.
Of course, you also said it was only 350 words?
A 350 word prologue is only half a printed page in a paperback novel... you know that right?
What you are classifying as a prologue, is barely big enough to even be called a paragraph, so I'm not sure, you even need to put it separate from your first chapter at all. Just have it be the opening scene of your book, on the first half of page 1.
That said however, I still as a buyer, would probably skip buying the book, just on grounds that it had a prologue at all, even one done right, simply because I'm so fed up with trying to slog through world building info dumps and author lectures, disguised as "prologues", that I just don't even bother to sift through fake prologues trying to find real prologues.
So, with that point in mind, I think, it may in fact be in your best interest to rather then write it as a prologue, instead write it as a flashback, and then title it Chapter 2 (not Chapter 1) So, what I'm suggesting is, use chapter 1 to introduce your main character and plot; then swing into the important backstory in chapter 2, then jump back into the main character's story in chapter 3. Does that make sense? You end up weaving the "prologue" into the story itself that way, instead of it being a separate piece before the story.
Or perhaps, if the prologues was very long... perhaps you could tell it throughout the whole story. Say for example your novel is 200 pages long, and your prologue is 20 pages long, and your novel is 20 chapters long. You could have 1 page of the prologue at the beginning of each chapter; have it be an "opening scene" printed in italics, on the first page of each chapter, so taking the entire book to tell the prologue, each page ending abruptly with a '...'. With the reader learning a little bit more at the beginning of each chapter, resulting in it being a sort of mini-story within the story. It makes sense in my mind, I hope I'm explaining it correctly. I think that method would work pretty well with the particular story you are describing.
In the end, I think, some stories NEED prologues, but most stories don't, and far too many authors, thinking ALL books REQUIRE a prologue, slap together something that is NOT a prologue and stick it at the front of the book and call it a prologue when it isn't one.
As a reader, I don't mind prologues that really are prologues, but I'm fed up with things that are not prologues being slapped in the front of a book and being called a prologue.
So, if your book needs a prologue, give it one, but if it doesn't need a prologue, don't write up something just for the sake of having something at the front of your book.
Last edited by PinkUnicorn; Today at 06:20 AM. Reason: I can't spell :P
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