"Once there was a great ninja, capable of holding his breath for an hour and remaining perfectly still for so long that moss began to grow on his eyelashes. He could kill with a touch and disguise himself as common household objects. He could climb a wall of butter."
For some reason I was immediately amused and therefore "gripped." This is the way I want to grip someone's attention. It's an ordinary paragraph and I'm not even interested in ninjas but the moss and common household objects was unique enough to cause me to read further.
And further down:
"Like so many other things, it's all Sun Tzu's fault. He was the guy who pointed out that you can win a battle before firing an arrow, if you can sow enough confusion and disarray in the other side's camp. In matters of love it's much the same."
I didn't read the whole thing. I didn't feel like I had enough time to waste more than an hour there so I flipped through the rest of the book-sized magazine and my eyes caught another story, Sometime, Soon, We Are Taking Over by Kate Angus. She started talking about the first time she died. She was on the phone with a nagging boss who was going on about how she left work after breaking the copier machine. She was on the phone, coming up on a red light which reminded her of the red light on the retarded machine, aggressively ran the light and ended up in a terrible collision. It was written so well. I wanted to read and re-read it but I only scribbled down the title in hopes of finding it on the internet. Which I haven't.
Anyways, the funny thing is she turned into a zombie. She stumbled out of the car, realized her brains were spilling out and that zombies didn't actually crave brains for eating but rather in an attempt to fill something that was empty. She also became a lesbian and found a zombie lover.
I'm tempted to run up to the bank, withdraw a little cash, and go buy the little magazine for these two stories.
In an interview with an editor, when asked how she handles stress and believe me her job sounded stressful, she said that she always remembered a thing that her friend, Pat Strachan (a big-time editor), would say: "Just remember, when you're all stressed out, that the lives of young children not at stake."
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