Meme, day 29

[valarltd]

29. How often do you think about writing? Ever come across something IRL that reminds you of your story/characters?

I think about it all the time. If I'm not rehashing AIM scenes, I'm plotting new ones.

Anything and everything can make me think of writing or give me inspiration, from a deserted house or the state of the highway to a song on the radio.

I mean:

Once I did get on the road, I followed the directions very carefully. I did not want to get lost in the wilds of the Arkansas-Louisiana border.

Bobtails are easier to turn than a full rig, but still. I turned off the main state highway onto a numbered county road. My directions said it was fine.

It hadn't been used in a long time. The yellow stripe was faded to near invisibility and the grass grew over the broken edges of the road. No houses, no farms, nothing but trees and meadows lined the road. Every now and then, a bridge would take me over a broad cypress swamp. I could
smell the murky, stagnant water even over the air conditioning and the Spanish moss hung nearly to the eerie knees that poked through the scummy water. One patch of swamp was so thick and dense, and ran so long, that it was dark before I got out.

or

He made it as far as Greasy Corner, a crossroad where 50 and 149 came together. Years ago, there had been a couple little country stores. Now the kudzu choked the deserted buildings and the plywood over the door was long gone.

Places I've been and things I've seen.

Related Question:
is the title Dead Man's Wind really awful for a sexual horror novel about skeletal rapists?

Comments

I'm sorry, but...

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

Dead Man's Wind sounds like a farce about a flatulent ghost to me. ;)

Re: I'm sorry, but...

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

That's what I was afraid of.

What does Fruits of Thine do for you? (not for the skeletal rapists, this is a different one)

[(Anonymous)]

The D-Man Checks In: Eeew... Yeah. Dead Man's Wild does sound kinda like the title to a bad late nite game show or some little kid's made-up card game.

Besides... How can a skeleton rape anyone? It ain't got the fleshy parts no more. Fingering is about the best I can imagine, and without all the skin & connective tissue, I can imagine any serious struggling by an intended victim snapping said appendages right off.

If looking for a title, maybe go with where it happens as a hook instead of what it's about. Instead of a skeleton, maybe a ghost who jumps into the corpses of the recently (or not so recently) dead whenever a possible victim trespasses near the ghost's unmarked grave--out in a lonely stretch of nowhere. Someplace maybe near a quicksand bog and/or a sudden dangerous hair-pin curve on a lonely piece of road rarely visited anymore since the new highway got built & by-passed it decades ago. A really bad place to get lost after dark from taking a wrong turn somewhere.

(Bogs can naturally mummify the dead who fall into them, thereby maybe solving the lack of fleshy parts. The rapist might have been pursued into that bog by an angry mob decades ago, got stuck & sucked down to his doom... but now comes back to seek more victims near the anniversary of his demise, or whenever the moon is just right. Mummies are notoriously super-humanly strong, impervious to pain, and as a bog mummy he'd also be real hard to set fire to. After finishing with a victim, maybe he drags them back into the bog with him--both to not leave anyone to tell the tale & to keep him company until he might be able to rise again... and what then goes on under those filthy, black, stagnant waters is better left unsaid... although it might explain some of the bubbles that occasionally & strangely break the surface. Ol' Harvey be havin' himself a good time down under there with some poor soul, or so the local poor white trash like to say; maybe members of his twisted clan.)

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

Wind, not Wild.

And you've clearly never seen Victorian porn. Some of it is...disturbing.

I have a plan and bog mummies are entirely the wrong part of the world.