When She Was Bad....

Daily Writing Exercise: Bad Girl On The Block
http://www.dailywriting.net/ColouringStories.htm
Completed on 2-22-06

I’d like you to meet a few Bad Girls who have worked their evil ways into my life and made it a bit more fun to be a writer.

First there’s Borgia Sainbury.

Her family owns and operates a cemetery in a place called Duwamish Bay.

Duwamish Bay is rather infamous for it’s cemetery…the one called Leaning Birches. It’s the only cemetery on the west coast that has an extensive system of catacombs under the cemetery. The cemetery above ground is so vast that there is no way to tell how many graves there are and they find more almost every single year. They’ve even found bodies entombed in fallen trees and buried in creek beds.

The Sainbury Cemetery on Mourning Ridge is small and exclusive and isn’t as well known and belongs to the Sainbury Family.

The Sainbury Family practices a somewhat dark trade. They are executioners. They’ve always been executioners and Borgia tends their resting place.

When she was a young woman she had the nasty habit of poisoning people she didn’t like, animals who annoyed her, and she wasn’t above making her way into Leaning Birches to disturb the final resting place of individuals who really made her angry.

You couldn’t escape Borgia’ s wrath…even if you were dead and buried and sealed in a vault. She’d dig you up with her bare hands and finish you off again.

And she’d do it with a smile.

I could list some of her less then savory attributes: she’s driven, vindictive, she’s probably a cannibal and she’s not human. Oh, and she likes to kill things…dead things or living things. It doesn't matter which.

Now I’d like you to meet Suicide Bridge.

Suicide Bridge lives in a very ritzy neighborhood. Politicians and Diplomats and Judges and people who come from old money drive over her to get to their very big houses on the hill.

You don’t notice her because she’s not a very long bridge and there’s nothing remarkable about her except for the fact she makes it possible for you to drive over a very deep ravine.

I’ve been to visit Suicide Bridge and I can’t figure out why anyone would choose to spend their last minutes or hours with her but they do.

You have to drive up these narrow twisted little streets to get to her. If you walk you’ll be lucky if you don’t drop dead from the climb up. When you finally reach her you get a view of the shipyards and heavy machinery.

It’s all pretty bleak and impersonal and the air smells funny when the tide goes out.

For a while I saw Suicide Bridge as a Funeral Home right in the middle of a cemetery.

Those houses could easily pass for tombs and mausoleums because you will never see people out walking around in front of them or near them and when they do they do it with reverence.

How clever and cunning that Bridge is.

I wonder does Suicide Bridge enjoy what she does?

Of course she does.

She’s taken over 300 lives in less then 30 years and that makes her one of the most prolific serial killers that ever existed. And she’s done it without raising a hand.



Those are my Bad Girls and I really enjoyed talking about them.

When I do character profiles I have one main goal, I want to personalize my characters. It’s easy to write about people or places or things that I know about, that I’m familiar with. The more I understand Borgia or Suicide Bridge the easier it will be for me to discover their secrets.

In turn you’ll see Borgia in her Cemetery as clearly as I can and you’ll know for certain Suicide Bridge is just waiting for that one person to come along who’ll look over her railing into the shipyards and then…

I know these Girls and you’ll be able to take my word for it; they’re killers.

So go ahead and try listing anyway you like. Use words, phrases, and pictures or do what I do and pretend like your gossiping to a friend about this Bad Girl you once knew…