Dire Virgins

This is a parody novel rooted in dystopian YA trilogies told by a young girl in first person present PoV.

Back cover blkurb: There isn't one! here;'s one I made up.

YA fiction had it coming!

This is a parody of YA fiction, and in particular of the dystopian trilogy variety which features a young girl telling the story in first person present PoV.

Priceless Prime is up for the testing, or the selection, or the tribute, or the lottery, or whatever winnowing euphemism you care to substitute to try and sound different from the last trilogy that ripped off this trope.

Contrary to everyone's expectations (save those of you, the reader), she chooses to abandon her own fiction and instead join the Gormless! There follows a brutal period of non-training, of jumping onto moving trains, of discussing wedding trains, and of climbing ferret wheels - but something just isn't right.

Is it the mess hall's finger food that's made from real fingers? Is it the stimulation drugs which are pumped into these virile young teens? Is it the endless bullying for which there's never any price to pay? Or is it simply that despite clear and explicit warnings that her old fiction is going to be destroyed, the heroic Priceless Prime, now known as eLess, is going to do nothing to prevent it?

Why is this law-enforcement fiction is just that: fiction? Is it even worth saving fiction like this? Only eLess can answer that - assuming she wakes up and smells the hosers.

Below is a brief description and a sample chapter, followed by my comments and observations on my experience writing Dire Virgins

Dire Virgins
ISBN-13: 978-0615637907 (MacRyan)
ISBN-10: 0615637906
Keywords: YA fiction, dystopian, parody
Publication date: April 1st, 2014
BISAC: Fiction / Young Adult
Available from Amazon in paperback (6"x9") for less than $7
ebook for $0.99

Here's what best-selling authors have said about this novel: Nothing!

Okay then, here's what completely fictitious authors have said about this novel:

“It’s a crap-shoot, especially since the characters shoot like crap.”
- May Marisaer, author of The Scarlet Cinder trilogy

“Never heard of it, and no, I’m not hard of hearing.”
- Princess Megabucks, author of The Incessant Diaries trilogy

“This novel makes War & Peace look like foreplay.”
- Holly Srillygreen, author of The Red, White, & Blue Cat in a Hat trilogy

“Hush, hush! Don’t even speak about him.”
- Patrick Fitzbecker, author of The Quiet Patch Kids trilogy

“Flush, flush! Let it go.”
- Merrie Loo, author of the Flushed Trilogy

“Great selection of the elite. Other than that, it sucks.”
- Carrie Casket, author of the Shoot The Reviewer trilogy

“Doesn’t say a word about baked Alaska.”
- John & Lauren Olive-Green, authors of The Green Bidet Trilogy

“What a rip-off!”
- Ross Verity, author of The Stolen trilogy

“Wait a minute, I wrote The Stolen Trilogy!”
- Verity Ross, author of The Stolen trilogy

“Ooh you little liar, I wrote it!”
- Verossiter Yoss, author of The Stolen trilogy

ATTENTION: This novel carries a health warning on the front cover! It reads:
Quitting Reading This Novel Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks To Your Mental Health

Back-cover blurb:
There is no back-cover blurb! Here's a parody of one:

Chaper headings:

Chapter 1 – Dire Virgins
Chapter 2 – Thigh Light
Chapter 3 – Under the Never Sky
Chapter 4 – Ever More
Chapter 5 – The Schmoozing
Chapter 6 – Nude Moon
Chapter 7 – Through the Ever Night
Chapter 8 – Weapons Hot
Chapter 9 – Fallen
Chapter 10 – Hush Hush!
Chapter 11 – Passion
Chapter 12 – A Lisp
Chapter 13 – Breaking Fart
Chapter 14 – VD
Chapter 15 – Into the Black and Blue
Chapter 16 – Torment
Chapter 17 – O What Foul Offal Was There
Chapter 18 – Prodigy
Chapter 19 – It Gets Terse
Chapter 20 – Glass Hosers
Chapter 21 – Number One
Chapter 22 – Number Two
Chapter 23 – Legend
Chapter 24 – Arm End
Chapter 25 – Willow
Chapter 26 – Will High
Chapter 27 – Deep In The Chasm of Love
Chapter 28 – Vudu Dudu
Chapter 29 – The Previous Chapter
Chapter 30 – The Next Chapter
Chapter 31 – The Lights Are On
Chapter 32 – But Everyone’s In The Dark
Chapter 33 – Champion
Chapter 34 – Evil-queen
Chapter 35 – The Prime Prime
Chapter 36 – Dead Mothers
Chapter 37 – Dead Fathers
Chapter 38 – All Egos On Us
Chapter 39 – Beautiful Critters
Chapter 40 – Detergent Surfactant Alleviant
Fun Girl Games
Awful Q&A
Fiction Multi-Festering
Bad Writing Tips
Disgusted Guide & Sneak Preview & Playlist

Sample chapter

Chapter 1 – Dire Virgins
There’s a single looking glass at my home. We keep it hidden because it’s very shy. We call it Alice. I'm in Abjection, a fiction which allows me to view myself on the thirty-second day of the month, the day my mumsie trims a hair.
Our motto is per ardua ad ass kiss. I can see myself years from now, but for now I have only today, only a nanosecond. Anything longer and I would become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser morons than myself. Hoo-rah!
Mumsie stands behind me with her incisors at the ready, choosing which hair to snip. It’s very important that she not make a mistake. People have died for less. People have died. For lessy. Less. eLess.
The hair falls to the ground with a ring, like swords being drawn with a particularly loud pencil.
When mumsie is done, she pulls my hair away from my face and twists it into a knot. It hurts. It hurts. Hurts. Hertz. A Megahertz is the cyclic rate at which I scream. I note how she focuses on my pain to avoid her own. She is expert in the art of war. She used to work at Sun-Tzu Microsystems. I can’t say the same of myself. I've never worked and I'm proud of that fact. My hands are clean. Clean as a Bex Bristle. My ally Carter would be thrilled.
I was an artist, after a fashion (which we were never allowed to wear in Abjection, although I understand that knock-offs of my outfits are selling at designer prices these days. How sick is that?).
I designed a whole show based solely around old iPods. There was ‘Two Pees in iPod’ where I got two people to urinate on an iPod and then framed it. I made a pair of shoes out of iPods (that was the fashion portion of the exercise) and called it ‘iPod Your Best Foot Forward’. I made a neck-less of iPods for people who had no neck, and I draped it around the almost non-existent neck of a stuffed gorilla and called it ‘Hair iPodder’.
My really erudite bother (Hint!) Turncote wanted to get high on speed and sit next to the gorilla so we could call it ‘Hairy Podder and Velocity Stoned’, but we couldn’t find sufficient DVDs of the Speed movie to stack high enough to make it work.
In the nanosecond I had to look at myself, I saw an eyesore. I have a very narrow face. When my hair is in a bun, it doesn’t taste good at all, which is why I don’t put it in buns any more. I like to fry it with some spices and onions, and then it’s quite edible. I sometimes look like an upside down exclamation point, which is very appropriate, because I’m considered the most fun person in the Abjection fiction in an inverted introverted kind of way. We don’t have much fun in Abjection. Not much fun.
I have very round eyes, like a cartoon character, which I guess I am. I look all the time like I’ve just sat in something that’s as sticky as it is stinky. And let’s not even get into my nose. Not before I’ve blown all the crud out of it, at least. It’s horrible in there. Horrible. It was the source of my first nightmares, and even many day-mares, too. You would have laughed so hard that you became hoarse yourself.
But enough about you. Let’s hear more about me! I’m suite sixteen (that’s the room I was in at the hotel during the Abjection convention - which was of course, very unconventional. Sixteen is the suite spot for YA tropes as everyone knows.
"Here," mumsie mutters, as she pins the knot in place, pushing the pin deep into my skull. The pin reminds me of the noodles Feculent sometimes uses when they fire injections at us every year during the One Flu Over the Shot season. They combine it with Gormless target practice. I should have realized then that something was seriously adrift. But I didn’t. I didn’t. Didn’t.
Sometimes I wonder whether my mumsie is actually Abjection at all, or whether she came from another fiction before she joined ours (Hint!). Certainly the endless quest for a decent Yapness Athletics (YA) fiction is a huge driving force in our society, at least it is in my mind.
"Tonight’s the night!" she says, and starts singing, “Over-chewer, gangling height, it’s a bitch, etc.” Yeah, she actually sang etc.
"Yes," I reply quickly to stop her. If anyone had heard her, the Abjection police would have been here jacking into their boots with great thuggery and gratuitous violets. We can’t be having joy. Not here.
"Are you pooping into your sack-cloth panties out of fear?” She asks inquisitively, inquiring as only a chorister can.
I stare into my panties for a moment. “I don’t think so” I say, “But I’ll be sure to tell you first if it happens.”
Today we face the attitude test to discover which of the five fictions gives me maximum attitude. There used to be many more than five, including such classics as: Altered, Broken, Cress, Damaged, Emerald, Graceling, Hushed, Jumpers, Knots, Legend, Mocking, Naturals, Other, Prophecy, Roomies, Starcrossed, Testing, Ugly, Variant, Witch, Xenophobia, You, Zenophobia (that last one is for people who can’t spell Xenophobia).
There was one beginning with ‘F’ but it’s forgotten, and there was also one called ‘Identity,’ but it was stolen. The majority of these stinked and subsequently they didn’t, and so they became extinct. But this is all irrelevant. I merely include it just to pad out this first volume and make it look like I wrote a lot for the publisher. The more nonsense I write, the more they can jack-up the price, and it’ll only be a trice before they do.
The very next day, at the Schmoozing Ceremony, I’ll embrace a fiction; “I will use knife! Oh, as long as I know how to slay, I know I'll stay alive, I've got all trilogy to live, I've got shoulder pain to give...”
“Priceless! That’s enough!” My father has spoken, like the first father. His voice is broken, like the first voice. It’s been years, if not leers.
"Let’s have some brekkies," mumsie says. She smooches my cheek as I bend over to pick up the hair. I think my mumsie could be beautiful if only she wouldn’t kiss ass so much.
She has high cheekbones and we all know where that comes from. Perhaps if she’d spent less time getting high, and more time getting the low-down, we wouldn’t be so badly off. No wonder we so abject.
We walk to the kitchen together, in case I get lost again or have a panic attack over the muffins. I’m only sixteen. Only sixteen. Sixteen. Sick teen. One these muffins (and it won’t be very long), one of these muffins, they’ll look for me and I’ll be so gone. If they don’t keep an eye on me and make sure I don’t get lost again.
When my bro’ makes breakfast, it’s always very intelligently done. Perhaps I should divine something from this, but being a girl, I’m not allowed a divining rod and I’d only blow it off anyway.
My father’s hand skims my hair for contraband as I sit down, but he finds none. I haven’t worn any sort of hair band for a long time.
Mumsie humsie as she cleansie the table with carbolic soap, trying not to carbolix it up like she did last time. We never did find that table, but it was unstable anyway. This new one is much better in an abstract way; then we leave. The clean table is the only breakfast I’ll get today. Crumbs!
The bus stinks of exhaustion. The same bus, every day, the same people abjectly sitting in the same seats in exactly the same positions wondering what the point of it all could ever have been. Why even put points on seats? They only hurt. They only hurt. Every time it hits a patch of uneven pavement, it jostles me from thigh to thigh, even though I’m gripping the seat to keep myself still life.
Turncote is my older brother. We lost the other one on the way to the kitchen one day. He stands in the narrow aisle looking smart. Not the one we lost, but Turncote. We don’t look alike. I look dumb, but it suits me. I’m a girl. An abject girl. Turncote has my father’s hair. He borrowed it once and never gave it back. He took his beard, too. He’s a bald-faced thief. But I love him dearly, never cheaply.
He’s the last man standing, because he gave his seat to a surly Callous man who wears nothing: the standard Callous garb. Their fiction values disregard, and they view truth as optional, just as they view clothing.
The Gaps between the buildings are all selling gray clothes in the Abjection district. D’Troitus was over 80% black, but you have to go to the Vanity district to find any color. We sure don’t have any here; what isn’t gray is white.
Chicago was pretty much the same, with whites in the minority, which makes me wonder why so few people of color seem to have survived the apocalypse, whatever that was. I mean, you’d expect, in a city with only 45% white, like Chicago, or with 83% white like D’Troitus to have non-whites still in the majority, so why aren’t they? No one ever talks about this in YA fictions because it’s not considered important.
Don’t get me wrong. YA isn’t racist! No! It disses all non-whites equally. I mean it wasn’t just the African Americans who got deleted. Native Americans were all sold to a pawn dealer and became the founders of a new pawn-ee nation, and Asians all became business interns and were sent to study at an internment campus, for example. Fortunately, no one dares to discuss these things, and we’re sure as hell never educated about them, but this is YA fiction. Why would anyone care if it’s not realistic?
The bus winds its weary way to the building that was once called the Brittney Tower. We call it the Falus, and I’m once again breathless as I see it thrust manfully through the fog, a pillar of color with a puffy collar. The bus scoots under the elevated tracks which lower themselves after we pass. It doesn’t do to get too high too early, hence the scooting. What a hoot!
I’ve never been on a train, though they quite literally never stop running. There are tracks all over the place. When we take a trip, it’s usually over one or other of the rails, which are frankly a nuisance, but railing against them does no good. It does no good. All it will do if you overdo it is get you in a sleeper cell for the night. The only way to deal with it is to cut all ties, but who has the time?
Half a decade ago, some deck aides from Abjection started in the middle of the city and just built rail tracks like maniacs. The tracks don’t even all connect or go anywhere, but at least our desolate city can’t be described as a trackless wasteland.
Abjection favors self-sacrifice, but it’s a bit hard to sacrifice one’s self because that first stick of the knife usually incapacitates you and you can’t cut your heart out then, although there are abject people who’ve died trying.
Turncote’s expression is placid. In fact, he uses that expression all the time. “Placid” he’ll say, when looking at a lake, or he might say “Placido” or something of that tenor when looking at a peaceful Sunday morning. Callous values nothing, but our fiction, Abjection, values hopelessness. There’s no hope otherwise.
The bus stops in front of the school and we can’t restart it, so we all get out and push, even though we know it’s hopeless. Eventually, we give up and walk the rest of the way along the walk-way where people are resting. Walk the walk. My shoulder is already hurting. My pants are too slack, and I pant harder, so I don’t sound like a slacker.
The Up-A-Level building is on the lowest level of the Plaza del Mario Brothers and, exactly like all the other buildings around it, it’s very different from anything else. It used to be made of glass and steel but in the sequel it changed to nondescript concrete. No one knows why. No one knows why.
In front of it is a large metal sculpture with jagged corners and sharp edges that the Gormless climb after school, daring each other to get higher and higher. Last year I watched one of them fall and break her wrist watch. I was the one who ran away. Their motto is oppresso libation, which means, “Give the poor guy a drink”.
"Attitude tests today," I say with an attitude. Turncote is less than a year older than I am, so we are in the same year at school. My mumsie and dadsie really churned out babies that year. I've no idea what happened to them all. I didn’t know my parents had it in them. Or at least one of them did.
Turncote nods off as he passes through the front doors; the smell is something awful. It smells like someone had a fart attack, but we manage to evacuate him. He wakes up smelling a lot better. My muscles are nonexistent, so they don’t even tighten as we enter the building for a chance at winning the lottery. We always enter it, but it never wins. I think the lottery is fixed.
The atmosphere feels hungry, but I think it’s just the odors wafting from the kitchen playing hunger games with our stomachs, turning me into a girl on fire, mocking Jay, me, and the rest of salivating us.
Our classes are cut in half today, so only fifty percent of us survive this first test. My heart rate is already elevated as we ride the lift to the next level. We pause at the fourth hallway, where Turncote will advance to math, and I’ll retard to a fricasseeing class. Math is hard, but everyone is treated the same, even the blonds with hourglass figures.
He sees me and raises an eyebrow. I know he’s bluffing so I call him. I could put my cards on the table and show him that I have a bad attitude about what the test will tell me: Abjection, Callous, Feculent, Vanity, or Gormless? And who cares, really? Instead I smile and walk toward Fricasseeing For Fun and Fiction (4F), which is clearly where I belong. I’m chewing on my lower lip because I missed brekkies when my dad skimmed my hair.
A girl with long curly hair shouts "Hey!" next to my ear, so I slap her good and hard; then a Feculent in blue eyeglasses smacks me on the cheek with his patella. I lose my balance and fall hard on the ground. My shoulder hurts. It hurts.
"Out of my way, Stiffie," he snaps, and no one sees anything wrong with this because we all know that random brutality is the only way to avoid the violent clashes of the past which brought us into this condition in the first place. Besides, if church taught us anything it’s that it’s better to burn people at the stake than to try and understand them.
I trick myself up, adjust myself off, and start all over again. People stopped when I fell, because I was blocking the hall. Their eyes follow me, but I make them all go back to their owners. I was not going to be one of those simpering Yes-men who insist that the eyes have it.
This eying-up of females has been going on since time immaterial, particularly for people in my fiction, who refuse to use eiderdown because of it, but amazingly enough it isn’t going to be an issue anywhere in this fiction at any time, not even amongst the lowest louts in the entire story! I know, incredible, isn’t it? Why is that?
The Feculent have been putting out news releases about Abjection, and it has begun to affect the way we relate at school. The wearing of clothes, the gray hair we insist upon having, and the asinine behavior of my fiction are supposed to subdue me, but now they excite me.
I halt by a computer by the Windows, and wait endlessly for it to boot up. I do this every morning. No one thinks of leaving it turned on. At exactly 7:23½am, the Gormless prove their mettle by jumping from a moving train. They have to do this because the trains have never been known to stop for anything. No one knows why. No one knows why. Why? It might have something to do with the fact that there are signs all over town declaring:
NO ENGINE BRAKING by city ordinance
My father calls the Gormless ‘nincompoops’, because no one has ever seen them poop. Their job is to guard the fence that surrounds our city, but why should they? No one even wants to steal the fence. None of the Gormless is ever seen actually performing that duty, and I’ve never heard of any of them taking fencing lessons. They quite literally do nothing, which makes their very existence questionable. But no one is suspicious. No. One. Is.
This is really important, but as usual, anything suspicious, I blow off completely. I mean, I should wonder what blind recklessness - which is the trait they embrace - has to do with a pretty tattoo. Instead my eyes cling to them wherever they go and I’m always running to go get my eyes back, but they don’t take a blind bit of notice. Gormless is heavily into it with the Feculent fiction. They make a great pair, or some word with four letters. I forget which.
The train whistle resonates in my heaving chest, my heart beating a tattoo even though tattoos aren’t allowed in Abjection fiction. I feel hot and cold at the same time. I toss my lunch pack out the window. That felt better. Now I just feel hot.
The train hurtles past the school, the driver trying to take out as many kids as he can because that’s the way we do things in D’Troitus, kids squealing on steel rails. A mass exodus of fine young cannonballs hurl themselves from the moving cars; one of them misses the ground and goes floating off into deep space.
Some of them drop like flies, others drop with their flies open. One of the boys drops his pants, another drops his arm around a girl’s shoulders. She beats him to a pulp with a convenient juicer, and they all laugh heartily. Those Gormless goofs! What fun they have.
I turn away from the window computer which still hasn’t booted up (it’s now installing endless security updates downloaded from the Feculent servers) and I push through the crowd, entirely unlike anyone should in my fiction, and try to remember where the hell the fricking fricassee classroom was when I last saw it. That’s the problem with contemporary bildung roman – too many roaming charges. It’s a hard cell.

Whence Dire Virgins?
To be continued!