The Prose Assassins

I misread a post recently and saw the words “prose assassins” instead of “poetry assignment.” In that moment, I realized that the Prose Assassins were real and that they had slipped up.

You’ve had them strike before, but they are so stealthy, so insidious, that you blamed yourself. You know the moment of which I speak. You finish writing and it’s good prose that you can be proud of, but then, in the morning, you find a terrible bloated thing. You stare at the page, wondering how you could have written such an unspeakable horror.

The answer is that you didn’t. The Prose Assassins have struck in the night and killed your beautiful prose replacing it with an impostor as part of their nefarious plot to take over the world. In order to defeat them, you simply need to use your Utility Belt of handy tools such as The Smoking Gun, Handwavium, or The Red Pen of Doom.

Fear not! You have the tools to defeat them. Are you willing to accept the challenge?

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15 thoughts on “The Prose Assassins”

  1. Dark Readers Rep (the villain from my short story ‘Chasing His Own Tale’) strikes again! I’ll have to include the Prose Assassins as part of my next CHOT installment. This is a great idea!

  2. Prose Assassins don’t swap out your literary baby for a monster.
    Prose Assassins are the ones who crash your computer when you have forgotten to save/backup your work. They steal the last five pages that were “right there a minute ago”.
    They ring the doorbell interrupting you writing down that dream you had last night so that you loose your train of thought forever.

  3. Much prefer the Vorpal Machete of Darling Mayhem m’self… first to dispatch the changelings, and then the dastardly ninjas of doom! ARRRRR!

  4. I had to share this as well….and it’s so true! I’m a big bombad grammarian, so there’s no way I would ever make a “there/their” error….. =)

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