CHESTNUT-ON-THE-GROVE, ENGLAND – 1867 – Local novelist Henrietta Norwich caused a stir in the Chestnut-on-the-Grove Chronicle this morning when the five-hundred-and-seventh installment of her serialized novel, The Abandoned Plot, was published. The main storyline of The Abandoned Plot was resolved in Chapter 43, when the heroine, Genevieve, died clutching the locket she had recently inherited from her long-lost mother. However, Miss Norwich insists that the four hundred and sixty-four chapters she has added since then are completely relevant to the plot.

“Many of my critics complain that merely because I am paid by the word, I have an irritating, frustrating, bothersome, and vexatious predilection towards excessive and unnecessary verbiage of minuscule worth,” said Miss Norwich in a recent interview. “But to that I utter it is simply not true nor the case. I am merely exploring the full implications of the serialized form to stretch out the plot of my novel for as long as is humanly possible. Do you believe that my fifty-page meditation on the Battle of Waterloo was superfluous? Or indeed, that I should have excised all of my digressions on the biology of the American grey squirrel? Nay, what you call irrelevant, I call absolutely essential to the novelistic form.”

In other news, Miss Norwich plans to finish a future installment with a character hanging from a cliff and is unsure whether there exists a more evocative term for such a plot point. If any readers know of a term to better describe this character-hanging-from-a-cliff situation, Miss Norwich would be forever grateful.

Elizabeth Scribblesby

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