"Another year down and I'm no closer to home," thought Barclay as he stared out from between the bars.

Lord Flippertrowel loved prancing about in his knickers before his household staff, but refrained from doing so in front of his cook, knowing from experience she would take culinary revenge if she ever saw him half-naked again.

The broken hero sat drinking that afternoon waiting for something to change.

Flying through the air, the heat searing his back, smoke and flames all around, he questioned his choice of jobs.

 Stark got royally drunk the day he got out of prison and woke up in jail.

As Joe threw his body against the defensive line, he realized just how long a yard really was.

The living room was littered with wrapping paper, half-assembled toys and exhausted children.

He wrote love songs for his dogs, odes to his wife, ditties for his friends.

 Theodora was a sly courtier who used guile and sex to make her way up the royal food chain.

When Marvin woke up the day after the world was supposed to end and saw he was still in his tiny draft-filled  bedroom, he refused to get out of bed, hoping the world would be ending tomorrow.

Left in enemy territory after a hastily-planned mission dreamed up by fools went sour, Tuttle promised himself he would either kill his superiors or write a tell-all book about the agency, or both.

The brothers sat listening to the old woman who in a shaky voice slowly told the tale passed down to her from her mother and back through countless generations.

Marlin was a counterfeiter with a conscious, using a vast amount of his funny money to purchase fake Malaria drugs that were flooding into Asia and even more cash to hunt down the men responsible.

They awoke from dreams of a happy life to the realization that their child was gone.

The buzzing in Sadie's ear was not the byproduct of an infection, as the doctor surmised, but rather was produced by a colony of bees that had taken up residence in her head.

They snickered at his taste in clothes and they laughed at his hair, but they couldn't make fun of George's voice, which sounded like a choir of angels and made all who heard it weep openly.

Tad felt like he was in a video game as he walked down the long halls.

He time traveled with every sip of the 20-year-old scotch.

The rotating cast of dictators and despots kept the country in a perpetual state of decay.

When the brush touched the canvas all else vanished.

With vampires, zombies and pet narratives all the rage Dell set out to write the next big hit about a zombie dog that must cross the country in search of its vampire owner.

Baffled by new technology, Sims was soon out of a news job.

They all preferred the drunken caddy since he was too blotto to care if they cheated.

The birth of his son and his own arrest for murder bookended a turbulent month for the hitman.

The case collapsed before the DA's eyes when the star witness had a sudden lapse of memory.

After the war, the city — formally an international destination — became a sleepy backwater.

He stood on the sidelines of life, a ravenous beast in the guise of a mild-mannered librarian, waiting for the opportunity to strike out against his perceived enemies.

Troy got tired of repairing his front door knowing the feds would just kick it in again during their on-going investigation into his business.

When his 10-year-old daughter's painting career began to outshine his own, Joseph's jealousy was unbridled.

The senator was always one step ahead of the mob.

The practical joke loving cryogenics lab assistant lost his job after Walt Disney's defrosted head was found in a colleague's locker.