When Author Scrapheap comes around, you’re often subjected to half-baked or off-kilter ideas that had little hope of turning into anything worthwhile. Well, this entry into the list is the end-all, be-all of poor ideas.

FOOPS.

It’s just “spoof,” backward. It only gets worse from there.

I was planning on a standard-issue heroic fantasy story with every trope turned on its head. It was going to begin with a prologue where I foreshadowed a bunch of plot developments and used flowery, grandiose language. That would have been immediately followed by an amaturelog, which would summarize the prologue in simple words and ham-fisted similes.

Throughout the course of the plot, the protagonist would snark along, defying odds and being predictably unpredictable. I think the core idea behind it was to be a sort of fantasy version of Douglas Adams. But without a deeper core underpinning it, the whole thing was doomed. At best, it might have turned into some amusing sketch comedy. At worst, it could have been an embarrassing pratfall of literary self-indulgence.

Trust me, we’re all better off without it.