nightmares

Residents of a boarding house are haunted by freak occurrences - faces appearing in mirrors, doors slamming - typical poltergeisty things. But it's controlled by a young boy and when I say young, he's in his teens I think. Creepy looking. Also a little... off. Crazy maybe? Anyway he lives in the house too and has psychic abilities and he's the cause of the freakiness.

Story could center around one main hero/heroine in the house trying to suss out what's causing it after one of the kid's tricks causes a resident to tumble down stairs and die.

A start...?

"What's next?"

The question was met with blank stares from everyone around the conference table.

"Come on people, surely we've got some suggestions knockin' around those well-paid craniums. Someone just pipe up."

More blank stares. A few crew members looked away, like they hoped like hell Berman wouldn't call on them. They got their wish when the intern cleared her throat and spoke up.

"Hellingly." she said in a small voice. Everyone around the table cringed and groaned.

"What's that umm.. uhh.. Who are you again?" Berman asked.

"S-Sam. I just started here last week." she answered as her face flushed. Her nerves were getting the better of her. Berman's temper was legendary and Sam did not want to start out in her new job on his shit list.

"Ok Sam, tell me about this place that makes everyone here roll their eyes."

"Sir, she's new. She doesn't -"

"I'm taking to Sam here Sharon. Not you. Shut it."

Sam gulped. "I was just throwing a name out there since everyone seemed to be out of ideas. Hellingly's never been done, it's cost-effective since it's nearby, and well, the rumours about the place fit our criteria for the show." Sam could tell Berman was actually listening to her and that gave her the strength to continue. "Because it's isolated we wouldn't need to worry about the looky-loos, and I believe only a minimal crew is needed: 2 cameras, 1 sound tech and of course Jason and Emma. I had this idea that they could carry their own small digicams with night vision and we could intercut with their footage."

"Sounds like you've given this some thought." Berman said.

"A little. I've been working towards this internship for a while. I never really knew why Hellingly wasn't explored for the show since it's so close. I've been out there a couple of times myself and it seems perfect."

"Except for the part where it's possibly the scariest place I've ever seen." said Emma. "Look, do you think we've never looked into it? Of course we know it's nearby. We've scouted it, researched it and know what we found? The place has the most gruesome history I've ever seen. I'm talking experimenting on the patients. Mengele-like stuff only these experiments make Mengele look like Doctor fucking Sunshine."

"Emma don't you think enough time has passed-"

"No. The place is too disturbing. I felt it when I went out to scout it. I never felt such an onslaught of psychic vibrations. There is something there and it doesn't want trespassers. I already put my foot down about the place when it was brought up before. I'll do it again. I'm not gong there." Emma sat back in her chair and glared at Sam who looked taken aback.

"I didn't realize Emma. I'm sorry."

Berman watch the two women closely. He could see real fear in Emma's eyes. She was a good host. She downplayed her psychic abilities when she was on camera and he liked that. He didn't believe in that crap and he would bet his substantial fortune that most of the country didn't either. So he let her use her 'abilities' to pick out locations for the show, but when it came to hosting it, he'd made it clear that she should leave the theatrics to Jason. So to hear Emma play her psychic card as a reason not to go to Hellingly surprised him.

Practice

Jut a freewrite-y thing. I'm in the mood to blog but y other blogs aren't really conducive to it atm. I'm too rambly.

Still have ideas rattling around in my noggin. The idea of some kind of spooky story involving an abandoned building is the strongest urge. My favourite thought is that a group of people involved in one of those hokey Most Haunted type shows finally stumble onto he one creepy building that actually is quite violently haunted and their whole night of terror is captured live on telly. Big ratings! :)

Most Haunted does a live show every year and while I dig on that show for the silly entertainment value of having a tv presenter, a 'medium' sensing the past (or just doing a deep Google search prior to airtime) and freaked out 'crew' wigging out over bumps and knocks, I think it would be most amusing to see their litle adventures turn up something real and terrifying. I'd especially love to see Derek Acorah scream like a girl while being chased by some unknown entity.

There's a movie called Shadow Puppets that had an interestingly scary premise. 6 or 7 people wake up to find themselves in their knickers and locked in various cells of an abandoned mental institution and none of them have any memory of who they are or how they got there. Meanwhile, there's some weird entity loose that's trying to kill them. I think the movie could have been awesome had they left out the entity (very bad cgi there anyway. Totally want to laugh at it instead of feeling fear) and dealt with how they came to be there and why. Maybe instead of demonic energy or whatever the entity was supposed to be, they could have just had one of the 'inmates' be crazy and stalking them or something. The institution they filmed in was sufficiently creepy. I liked it a lot.

Anyway, that's something I'm kicking around. Still have the story of the missing peeps from the previous entry here.

I sort of got a brief taste of what it was like to get some ego-stroking feedback recently. Posted a few of my old fanfics on my board. Made perfect strangers cry apparently. I didn't write a lot of fanfic back in the day but what I did write tended to be dark for some reason. Usually killed the main character. But these folks who read my stuff seemed to like it. Sometimes you just need a shot of egoboost to get the creative spark going.

Going to write a TV column for the paper next week too. Think I'll take my time with it and make sure it's good rather than rushed to get it in by deadline. I just want to WRITE. It's like an itch that I can't quite reach and the more blog posts I make about my mundane life the ticklier the itch becomes. It's weird.

Wil Wheaton's a total inspiration to me. Granted he's famous and has contacts blah blah blah, but he's written 3 books now and I believe he self-publishes them. I know of a company that will publish to demand and so if I can keep that in the back of my mind, maybe I won't get distracted by thoughts of 'what's the point? I'll never get it published.'

Missing

"There's been another disappearance."

Smallish town - not too big, not so small everyone knows everyone. GI-sized would do. Over the course of a hot, sweaty summer, random people start disappearing. First it was the homeless man who lived under a bridge just outside of town. He was only missed because he would his daily rounds around the south end of town looking for cans to recycle and had made a few acquaintances on his rounds - people he would nod and smile at as he walked by, shopkeepers and the like. They noticed he stopped coming by but didn't think much of it figuring he'd probably just moved on.

Next person to disappear was a junior high student. A girl who walked home every day. She didn't have far to walk really, a few blocks, but on the last day of school she left the school and never arrived at home. There was a panic, a lot of new coverage and pleas for help or info but as the days turned into weeks and others began disappearing, her family began to lose hope and media attention always seemed to turn to the latest disappearance.

Two weeks after the student, a young man, 22-ish, goes missing on his way to his job at a construction site. He's relatively new in town. He came with his girlfriend who wanted to move closer to her family. He was going to propose the night of his disappearance.

The police have no leads. Absolutely no evidence at all to give them any kind of clue as to what happened. But while they treat both missing person cases very seriously, they haven't yet decided to tie the cases together. Instead they treat them as separate but coincidental cases.

Until the next person goes missing. This time it's an older man, mid-late 40s. A prominent real estate agent. He was on his way to show a house. The buyers waited as long as they could before they began calling the office to ask after him. Some confusion ensues as they try to retrace his steps. His wife is called and when it's established he's gone missing, she freaks out because she's been following the news on the other missing cases. She raises a huge stink with the cops and it catalyzes them into... I don't know but somehow the missing agent makes them realize they've got a serial kidnapper/s on their hands. But there has been no ransom demands. Nothing. everyone's distraught and frustrated.

Throughout the summer, periodically another person goes missing. And there's no apparent common thing to connect all of the cases. It's so random. By August and with 3 or 4 more missing cases to add to the count, the Police chief resigns under public pressure who deem him ineffectual.

But where I'm going with this... or where I WANT to go is eventually we come to the missing people who've all been snatched, drugged, and left in an abandoned but locked down asylum. Before you say a word, I've never seen any of the Saw movies. There's no psycho chasing these folks. Just a crazy asylum escapee who misses the former residents. Or something. I may have to give up on the asylum thing. I don't think I can work it into the missing persons thing. I just love the site opacity.us so much and I'm fascinated by his images of abandoned places. I want to work up a story for them.

But then GI currently has a young man who's gone missing and the story is just weird to me which got me thinking about a town like GI where random people just go missing. I thought about it to creep myself out a little but I haven't gotten to the point of where they disappeared to and how it all gets solved.

Anyway, this feels nice. Some ideas are kicking around the noggin and that is of the good.

Twice now I've written a few paragraphs in this big empty box and twice now I've deleted what I wrote. Funny how you get words out, a beginning, a bit of characterization and then, on a whim and with the push of a button, it's gone, as if it never existed. Just like that, Sam the girl who's lover had just been killed and Unnamed Character #2 who was in the middle of dumpster-diving and being jealous of people who threw perfectly good pizzas away are gone.

Weird.

I began this a few minutes ago with no direction or any idea of what I wanted to write - I only felt a compulsion to write *something* and those two characters emerged from the old noggin. Then I got to thinking that a) I don't want to write about love and loss, and b) neither do I want to write about a poor homeless waif struggling on the mean streets.

God I'd kill for a decent story idea. Can't focus. Part of me wants to write some mindless fanfic just to get back into practice. Part of me wants to not use fanfic as a crutch and just get serious about it already. Wonder if a freewrite would be helpful.

Oh hell I'll give it a go. The following babble is a result of 10 minutes of uninterrupted trains of thoughts and streams of consciousness. Feel free to skip it because my brain's pretty weird.

Aaaand go.

SO I want to write. Always wanted to churn out something wicked and delicious and that makes readers go 'guh' after they read it. But never felt like I could pull it off. I always feel unfocused. I've written fanfic in the past. Years ago in fact and only in a specific genre which I will not name here for fear that it's still out there on the net somewhere, floating and lost. And I'll say it. I was good. I had actual fans. Complete strangers would email me and tell me they loved my writing. People who had no connection to me, no reason to "be nice" because they knew me or whatever. Fanfic is dangerous in a way because it can totally feed a writer's ego. I became SUCH the feedback whore. I loved it and the more I got the more I wrote. And when I sort of grew away from that fandom and stopped writing fanfic, the feedback was the hardest thing to give up. So I started this blog oh so long ago in the hopes it would encourage m to write my own stuff instead of using established characters and putting them into whatever dark situations my mind could come up with. Tried nanowrimo, felt like too much work gave up on it. Couldn't get a workable story. that's always been my problem. Following a story through to conclusion. Mom used to write out elaborate character sketches. She filled notebooks with them and story ideas would be written in the margins of notebooks. I don't do that. That's what this blog was supposed to be really. My launching pad. And so, when the itch comes back to write I'll have a place to scratch it. I have stuff I have to get past though. See previous post about fears and obstacles that make me give up. And I have to condition myself to actually use this place for crap like this that will only be interesting to me to read. Know it's out there in blogland for anyone to stumble across but with all the noise out there, I hardly think this will draw attention.

Ok not quite ten minutes but I stopped because It ain't helping and this laptop keyboard is teh suck.

I'm giving myself an exercise though. I'm taking an hour, shutting off the XM, shutting my bedroom door, asking the kid to keep the cat away from me and I'm going to pour out as many story ideas i can think of in here no matter how lame and then sift through the muck and see if anything's viable. Will do this later today.

Long time

Thought I'd forgotten about this blog. Nope. Just have been completely idea-less for well over a year now. How sad is that? I do get vague, half-formed story ideas once in a while, but nothing ever comes of them. Either I don't pursue because I'm basically lazy, or there's just nothing to them.

So I can bitch and moan all I like about how "someday" I'll write my novel. But when it comes to actually doing it, I get hit with silly things like 'practicalities' and no story ideas. Practicalities like, I don't have the first clue how one goes about getting a book published. It seems like hard work. Pour your blood sweat and tears into your work of art, and package it up and bundle it off to publishing houses and hope it doesn't get lost in the mountain of other wannabe's works of art waiting to be read? Do you have to have an agent? How does one get an agent if one is, how shall we say, poor?

Do you go with the route that seems to be popular right now which is starting a blog about something quirky, get it popular, hope it gets noticed by the right people and wake up one morning with an offer to publish a novel based on your blogs?

See, these are the things that pummel my brain just when I think I've hit on a fantastic idea and the lazy part of my brain just says, "Oh fuck it. Too much work." And I give up.

Someday I will reconcile those parts of my brain and maybe get something accomplished. Someday. Until then, the lonely stragglers who stumble on this pathetic blog will just have to stumble onto the next one.

Thunk

As my daughter and I meandered casually down the milk and orange juice aisle at the grocery store last night we stumbled into one of those moments where you don't quite know how to react or behave.

Earlier in our visit I remarked to Shannon on the bravery of a fellow shopper for bringing four very small kids grocery shopping. She pushed one of those special kid carts shaped like a car and two of her kids sat inside that while an infant was tucked up in its carseat and another young girl of about 2 or 3 years buzzed around them.

We encountered them again in the milk and OJ aisle as they passed us. Well, we heard them first because the young girl was shrieking as if being chased and tearing down the aisle laughing in that innocent sort of way kids do when they're having a blast. I looked at her as she passed and was about to smile when it struck me that the look on this kid's face was rather demonic. Instead of laughing with glee she looked more like she was grinning maniacally and on a mission to destroy everything in her path.

Just as I was about to remark on this to Shannon, the little bugger tripped and face-planted right on an unassuming woman's shopping cart as she was turning the corner to enter our aisle.

The *THUNK* echoed noticeably followed by two seconds of stunned silence from the kid. Then came the pain as she began to sob. Her cries reached such a pitch that they weren't really sobs anymore. They were the silent (to us, I'm guessing only dogs and bats could hear her by this point) racking sobs of a kid who went from pure joy and laughter to sudden pain in a matter of seconds.

The odd thing is as I look back on this little incident in time is that I can remember lunging forward to try and stop her fall knowing I wasn't close enough and there was no stopping her momentum anyway, yet I can recall every detail of why she fell as if I was watching it in slow-motion (her little sandals just sort of stuck to the floor which broke her rhythm and down she went.)

The woman who's cart so rudely stopped the child's streak down the aisle and I looked at each other and I gave her a look of sympathy while she looked at me like she had just run over a beloved pet. She said, "I stopped my cart." And I just sort of shrugged my shoulders in a "What can you do?" sort of way while the mother of the child ran forward to console her.

Then we carried on shopping. What can you do? Kids fall down all the time but it's just weird when it's a random kid you don't know and they fall almost right in front of you. I'm sure the little girl was fine and will have quite a bump on the noggin to show for it - and will have forgotten all about it by dinnertime. But still. it was weird.