Can Fear turn into Fiction?

What scares you?

When I ask myself this question, I immediately remember summer camp, twelve year olds sitting around a campfire late at night listening to counselors tell spine tingling ghost stories with pitiful sounding titles like “Give me back my hand, or my liver, or my head.” That fear was so real I can remember it vividly – pounding heart and surging adrenaline; I outgrew most that childish type of fear – out grew but never forgot.

In the 70’s I read my first Stephen King novel and my fear again rekindled. This fear caused the tiny hairs on the back of my neck to stand up straight and gooseflesh to bubble on my arms as I read the chapter in The Shining where the hedge animals closed in on the main character . . . I swear I could hear leaves rustling behind me those words were so vivid, so compelling. These are two cool examples of things that have scared me through the years – there have actually been countless scary moments throughout my life.

For the past two decades I’ve worked to turn many of my own personal scares, fears, and nightmares into fictional short stories, flash fiction, non-fictional articles, critiques, commentary, and memoirs. Hopefully this is just the beginning, as I continue to work on my powers of observation.

Not only do I write about my own fears, I'm working on pulling in scary observations from co-workers, friends, relatives, and even strangers on the street, doctor’s waiting room, or at the mall.

My brain likes to play “what if.”

What if I was driving home from the mall and noticed a scrap of the loud plaid fabric skirt worn by my friend Silvia today hanging from the trunk seam of the beat up old Buick in front of me at the red light? What if that scrap of fabric was yanked from my site right before my eyes as I waited for the light to change?

What if the tiny, wrinkled, mild-mannered old lady at the end of our childhood street were really a practicing witch?

What if the unusual plant that you received for your anniversary were carnivorous?

What if . . .

Well, you get the idea.

With this blog, I hope to keep asking devoted readers
the ever-eternal question:“What scares you?”

Because that’s what I enjoy writing about.

The Shining

Can Fear turn into Fiction?

#fridayflash: Remedy

Lottie’s flawless white hands smoothed silky folds of pink satin undergarments as she placed them into her squat old brown suitcase. A cool spring breeze drew her to the open window where moonbeams shimmered softly through sheer lace curtains. A brisk knock on the door and Lottie jumped back from the window, her beautiful sky blue eyes darting anxiously around the soft pink haven she’d cocooned herself into for the past five years.

“Go away,” she whispered.
Instead, as Lottie knew would happen, the door swung inward and Frieda bustled into the dainty pink and white bedroom.
Frieda, buxom and shapely in her blue satin nightdress and reeking of the remedy, stopped short and stared down into the hastily packed old satchel on Lottie’s pink bedspread.
“What’s this? You’re not still seriously thinking of leaving, are you Lottie Dear?”
“I’m not thinking of it. I’m doing it,” Lottie said flipping back her long blonde hair and snapping the latches closed on her worn old suitcase.

“You know what will happen to you without the remedy,” Frieda said, reposing into a pink satin armchair, like a queen on her throne. She clutched an ornate silver flask in her lovely, perfectly manicured hands.

“I don’t care, I’m leaving and I’m leaving for good this time,” Lottie said, her pretty face puckering into a frown as she backed toward the open door. “What we’re doing is wrong.”
“What’s wrong with wanting to look our best? What’s wrong with bringing a little pleasure to some lonely men? We have to make a living, don’t we? What’s wrong with that?” Frieda uncorked the slender silver flask increasing the pleasant lemony, jasmine scent of the remedy. “Are you leaving without tonight’s treatment? It’s almost midnight, you’ll revert soon.”
“We’re not beautiful, Frieda. It’s wrong to deceive these men. It’s wrong to take their money. This remedy you created is wicked—it’s addicting and evil. The remedy—it’s changed you—made your face and your body beautiful, but it’s poisoned your soul. It’s made you cold, calculating, and greedy. I often wonder, is any of my sweet sister really still in there?”

Lottie smoothed the folds of her old gray cotton dress with warty, liver-spotted hands. Her face began to sag on one side, her top lip splitting into a hideous fixed grin as words became harder to formulate. Tears sparkled in sky blue eyes. Beautiful eyes now receding into lumps of bone and wrinkled flesh which sprouted haphazardly across Lottie’s ravaged skull.
“Cuh wid me,” Lottie begged.
Frieda laughed.
Lottie shrugged her bent shoulders, grasped the handle of the old suitcase with a twisted talon, and limped out into the fragrant spring night.
“You’ll be back,” Frieda shouted from the window of Lottie’s old room. “You always come back.”

End

Note: I’ve discovered, through a little blog research, a movement called “#fridayflash.” It’s to post flash fiction (stories under 1,000 words )on our blogs each Friday: the stories are then rounded up into a collector site to give fiction writers some exposure. At least to each other.

It’s sort of an excuse to get us off our butts and doing something that we all aspire to do – write.
I think it will be lots of fun. Remedy is my first “#fridayflash” piece.
--ld

Flash Fiction: Airdog

#fridayflash: Remedy

Was Nostradamus Yesterday’s Blogger?

In a recent airing of Nostradamus Decoded on the Discovery Channel, experts speculated that the Frenchman’s quatrains (circa 1560) appeared on the market of the day because they suspected Nostradamus wanted to write something people would read – much like today’s blogger.

I was fascinated by the assumption that Nostradamus, one of the most quoted writers of his time, may have simply wanted to write fiction that sold.

His predictions (quatrains), popular with French common folk and royalty alike, streamed doomsday historical clues to his public via early printing presses and small volumes sold in markets and apothecaries.

Unlike today’s blogging crowd, Nostradamus dealt with a public who could have literally served his head on a platter if they didn’t like what he had to say, or if they thought he leaned toward the supernatural or practiced witchcraft. Some believe this is why his written words appeared shrouded in anagrams and necessitate decoding by civilizations past and present.

In society today, writers may be shunned and verbally flogged for their beliefs and convictions, but blogging and the Internet give anonymity. This is a unique opportunity for the common people not readily available in bygone times. We have the freedom to marvel over whatever suits us and to place these written words on our blogs for the entire world to see. If Nostradamus were alive today, I predict that his rhythmic blog would be one of the most popular and largely viewed on the WWW.

So . . . how can I make my blog as popular as a perceived Nostradamus blog? Maybe some really cool and bloody predictions about Anti-Christ number four? How about another elaborate end of the world prediction?

I think not.

Written below is my first quatrain. It serves as my initial prediction for the future. My quatrains are written in English, of course, so they may not have quite the same ring to them as those of Nostradamus. Maybe you will know what I am predicting, and maybe you won’t.

Dragon Chronicles
I. An ancient Scribe came to pass
Scholars join through the looking glass
Voices hush across the land
Witness the miracle of the twisted hand
--ld

Nostradamus 2012

Was Nostradamus Yesterday’s Blogger?