It is less than one week until I leave for Florida and I’m hard at work on two new stories. Here is a preview:
The first, Demons, is straight horror, a simple but powerful tale of a man who wakes up in his apartment one night to discover he has some uninvited guests…with torture on their minds...
The second, Five Shades of Leaving, is also horror but with a more psychological and literary bent. It tells the story of a break-up (based on my own experience from last March) between a young writer and his nursing student girlfriend. Before you reach for your keyboard - I know, having a writer as a main character is not the done thing, but since this is on some levels a personal story I am choosing to break the rule on this one occasion. Anyway, eager to return to work on his novel, he decides to speed along the grieving process (and this is where we leave real life behind for the realm of imagination, trust me, folks!) by re-enacting the break-up five times over the course of five nights, each time focussing on overcoming a different stage of the Five Stages of Grief (aka Kubler-Ross model). The results are unexpected and shocking to say the least - at least I hope they will be.
Now, here is a glimpse of the opening (remember, first draft):
She first left me on Sunday.
I rolled over on our bed and my outstretched arm met no resistance on its way to her cool, empty side of the mattress. I opened my eyes. The clock on the nightstand read 05:36. I had slept for a little over four hours, having chugged my way through enough high-energy drinks to see me reach that day’s target of fifteen-hundred words first draft. Should I ever finish the manuscript, Messrs Caffeine and Taurine more than deserved a co-author credit. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, and as I toed around the dark floor for one slipper then another, I heard from our living room the high-pitched snarl of a super-charged engine.
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3 weeks ago