Kill Cliff Brooks

hmmm... will ponder this particular South Bay notion...

yes, very interesting....

As I'm writing several novels within my novel, I get to kill Cliff several times! We should make our own Merit Badge for whoever kills him most creatively. Or something...

windy

Perfect first character to die in my novel! I have this weird idea about how there's this evil knife...and if you get stabbed by it your sole goal in life is to stab someone else with it, and then you are free. I had a dream about this and thought it was a great nano idea :D

I can't give the whole story off the top of my head, but I will offer a clip of NPR's Talk Of The Town from November 23, 2004 (?), featuring Chris Baty as well as the most frequently killed character in the history of NaNoWriMo at 8:52, explaining his own infamy.

Rob/Gallifreyan * Mountain View/San Francisco, California
ML for San Francisco and Peninsula Regions
Keeper Emeritus of the South Bay Bars of Power

My novel this year is about a novel within a novel. A proper English Butler who takes part in Nano and writes a murder mystery in which the victim is his real life employer. Hmmmm, why limit the body count to one?

One thing is clear, between Thursday and November 30, Cliff Brooks must die!

Melissa

Hee!

So, my novel is set partially at a college campus. Well, the girls have been experimenting physics (on their own time) by lobbing pumpkins at the boys' dorm with a giant rubber band chain. Cliff (who happens to be my MC's creepy, smelly, won't-go-away ex-boyfriend) gets himself somehow flung against the dorm, leaving a nasty, bloody, gray matter covered mess.

*grin*

That's much more creative than how Cliff Brooks dies in my novel. Let me just say that chapter six is going to feature a cow tipping gone horrible wrong, with a side of magical CSI aftermath. Which is mostly being inserted because as much as I'm enjoying YA Fantasy, I still have that itch for Suspense/Thriller. Better to take it out on Cliff Brooks than accidentally kill the whole cast off by accident!

Poor Mr. Cliff got tortured. He was strapped to a comfy armchair with straps around his forehead, chest, hips, arms and ankles. He had noise cancelling headphones popped onto his ears, and surgical clamps clipped to his eyes to keep them open. A TV in front of him. His torturer turned on the TV and low and behold, Jimmy and Tammy Fae Baker came on screen to spread the word, followed by Oral Roberts. He was subjected to all the televangilsts to ever host a show. His brain finally escaped by dribbling out of his ears.

I knew those guys were good for something!

Steph

Not only am I writing a nanonovel, but a lot of my characters are, too. And a lot of them are going to be killing Cliff Brooks, too.
So far, I've got plans to have him check out via:

Being a mad scientist whose time machine crashes in an unfortunately prehistoric past. When he takes shelter in a cave, he's devoured by a saber-toothed tiger.

He's a goalie trampled to death by an angry soccer mob after losing the game for his team.

He's a shady art dealer who's been stiffing his underworld associates. I think his drowned body will be discovered floating face down in a seafood restaurant lobster tank.

Melissa

Ah, so this is what that was about!

I just got back from the Books Inc write-in in Mountain View (which was awesome BTW, I got 4000 words done), and was wondering who this Cliff Brooks was that people were talking about. Sounds like fun.

I'm semi-sorta cheating, and recycling a death from the very first mystery I wrote; Cliff Brooks is a computer geek who dies because someone strings him up to a ceiling fan with a bullwhip. There's stuff he wrote on the screen of his computer, in which his friends online don't think he committed suicide, but they may not have a bearing on this year's murder mystery, since I already have an entire apartment complex full of suspects to work with...

-Traveller

Let's see... Cliff met his untimely demise in a square of street performers where someone started singing a ballad about Thomas Kinkade.

His face was also pasted over a wild boar due to hunger hallucinations (i think that's what it was anyway) and then disembowled in a very messy fashion.

I'm also planning a coffee shop riot instigated by an incessant ringing bell, during the course of which, Cliff will either catch a chair to the head, several bags of coffee beans piled onto top of him, or a spoon to the heart. Or maybe all three. I didn't feel like finishing that scene yet. Three down, One to go!

windy

okay, I really didn't think I was going to incorporate this into any of my stores, but....

you know characters, skeaky little buggers they are. Cliff just arrived, a 90-something old fart who is getting nowhere near Jess Davies' car.

now, how will old Cliff hit the bricks? maybe in his own car? only time will tell....

and the time now is 8.49... can I go to bed yet?

It's weird, but I find myself actually writing a novel with serious content to it. However, M. Brooks does receive an honorable mention in a newspaper article that one of my characters is reading, as having perished in a baffling dry-erase marker accident.

I've been told this is cheating, so I assume there is some form of merit badge I can get for it.

-= miles =-

Actually, the killing of Cliff Brooks is one of the important bits in the novel because it gives my non-human-killing vampire severe angst and a suicide wish when she realizes that she killed him by accident. Therefore, Cliff Brooks died by vampire, or so she thinks. The way the plot is going right now, he was never killed after all, but his death was reported in the newspapers, thus triggering a whole series of events; he was sent by the Anti Vampire League to guard her as part of a pact between the vampires and the AVL (it makes moderate, but not entire, sense in the novel) and if the current thread goes on, he and the vampire are going to fall madly and passionately in love.

Whee.

I think that counts as dead enough. ;)

Linda

Anyone can kill Cliff Brooks--if they try hard enough. But it takes real artistry and deserves double dare points to make a Sexy Turkey Hat the agent of his death.

No, I haven't done it yet. Still working on the how. It may just show up in the newspaper as one of those "news of the weird" side lights. After all, I'm already going to mention his dead body showing up in the fish tank of a sea-food restaurant.

Maybe there's a serial killer loose in London who only preys on men named Cliff Brooks. Or maybe they're all accidental, but bizarre.

Melsisa

One of my characters has a flashback of one time when he was playing an online shooter, and one of his friends accidentally shoots one of those nast exploding barrels, thus killing the three characters, and Cliff Brooks.

I think that I'll keep that in the revised version, just for kicks.

found a link to this on the age group forum and i need someone else to kill. actually i need someone to drop hints that the person locked up for the murders didn't do it. So he can do that and then die. Mwhahahahaha

Hello, I'm a new nano, my husband did it last year, I never thought I could, but this year, on November 2nd, I appear to have joined in on the fun. I hit 50,000 about 3 hours ago. Last night, I saw the thread on Cliff Brooks, listened to the NPR clip and this morning, Cliff Brooks appeared in my story as a childhood friend of my male main character who was killed a few years ago when he was changing a tire and the car fell on him. It just kind of happened. :) I hope it counts, he's most certainly dead. :)

Welcome, 1RadChick, and congrats on the win and the death of Cliff!

%) Lisa
South Bay co-ML

Thanks much! I've been reading the threads here, wish I had found it all earlier....

Good luck all!

September
1RadChick

TWICE!

I just had my newly-made vampire kill Cliff Brooks as his very first kill, and he's NOT a killer, and even moreso, he never wants to kill a homeless guy (Cliff's homeless in my novel).

In mine, Morris (the vampire) calls 911 to come rescue him, but by the time they get Cliff to the hospital, it's too late.

And, sadly, it never makes it to the papers.

Well, I've apparently jumped on the time-travel bandwagon, too (although my characters don't use an actual bandwagon to time travel, they use a little gizmo called a 'ChronKite' - eh? Flying through time... Cronkite's show "You Are There"... eh? Ah, nevermind...).

Cliff is a time-travel researcher and happens to go back in time to the exact moment that a large amount of concrete is being unloaded to make the foundation for the building where he's researching time travel. Bye-bye, Cliffie...

- Meg

I love it, Meg! Creating a time paradox, but oh well, he's dead anyway. :)

%) Lisa

EDIT: On second thought, maybe there's no paradox at all. On third thought, I'm too full of leftover turkey to think!

Cliff, if you're still out there reading this thread, I really apologize for this. But so far, I and my Nanonoveling characters have managed to kill you twice in this year's novel, and the third has you handcuffed to a post over a piranha tank in a third nanonovel within a nano novel.

I had you, the goalie of a soccer team, chased and trampled to death by enraged drunken Scottish soccer fans in Glasgow after you let Argentina score a winning goal.

Another novelist character had you crash your time machine in prehistory, when you ended up as supper for a saber-toothed tiger and her cubs.

And, as I mentioned, you're POTENTIALLY dead if your James Bondesque persona's arch enemies hit the switch in the floor that will plunge you into a tank of hungry Amazon River piranhas. (If the Amazon doesn't have factual piranhas, pretend!)

You still haven't appeared drowned in a restaurant lobster tank, but I'm hoping to work that in before I validate my word count!

Melissa

Okay, I admit, I didn't even know about this thread until about 20 minutes ago. Yes, I'm in my last stretch, and I was kind of sad that I wouldn't be able to fit this tradition into my book since I am already hip-deep in an action sequence. However, inspiration just hit with my first cup of coffee (I start my day kinda late), and I realized as one of my main character confronts is mother as they repel together down the cliff face into the Dragon Vale, that I can actually participate after all.

Being a fantasy story where very few use their first names I will have to stretch this challenge a bit, but the basic premise is this: I am going to have Brooks be plucked off the cliff by a dragon. There's a cliff and Brooks, so that counts, right? Right?

Yup it counts!

GO go go!

You can do it!!

write write write!!

Yay team!

oh my I keep forgetting about Cliff! I love your idea... I think it's very integral to it all... :)))

last seen around these parts Cliff was washing his car on a cold frosty morning. Hmmm... heart attack out there right on the driveway?

gotta get that sorted!

I killed him during the write in tonight *grin*

He was killed by one of my characters that is blood mad and out for revenge. He was sliced with a knife. He had no chance even though he did try to get away.

okay I have been forgetting all about poor Cliff, but now that I am about done, I just got him axed off...

Cliff, a ninety year old neighbor of one of the MC's, who had a penchant for washing his car on cold mornings, keeled over and cracked his head on the driveway, and his blood flowed down the concrete along with the running hose...

ahh... now the end can commence! Cliff is dead.....