Top Ten Things That Terrorize

THE TOP TEN COUNTDOWN 

10. STAGE FRIGHT –

This group would include speaking/performing in public; interacting with new people and other related stuff involving a large group people. A lot of folks are terrified to be under public scrutiny which is practically what it feels like to be up, front and center performing in public.

9. BETRAYAL/DISAPPOINTMENT/RESENTMENT –

I lumped this trio together because I suppose, in a queer kind of way, they’re related. They are all items you can tick off your finger as relations-oriented issues. People disappoint on a daily basis and though we wrap ourselves up in protective shells, we still get hurt. We walk into relationships half-expecting that in the next second we’ll be sweeping shattered pieces of our hearts off the floor with a dustpan and broom. This is basically, a fear of commitment.

8. HEIGHTS/DEPTHS/ENCLOSED SPACES –

They belong to a category of specific phobias, called space and motion discomfort. - Wikipedia

Fear of height probably includes fear of flying. And fear of depths could be further split into two;

1. The fear of volumes with large depths such as stairways and deep caves.

2. The fear of depths

- Wikipedia

7. ADOLESCENCE/PUBERTY (GROWING UP) –

Fear of growing up and fear of being displaced in your parents’ lives. Many of us had this fear and some never get over it, even though, the extreme case is what we’re really discussing. I once read some place where someone stated they were scared of growing up and their parents dying. This is another way to present this phobia.

6. ANIMALS/OTHER CREATURES –

Spiders, dogs, mice/rats, cats and the likes, and of course, snakes and sharks. Stephen King said he can stand snakes but is terrified by spiders! Fear is a mystery and it continues to baffle us through all generations.

5. THE DARK –

The dark throws a scare into millions of people (especially children?). In the dark is when our deepest fears grow talons and come out to play. Loneliness, depression, nightmares and of course, freaks and psychos wield their greatest horror in the dark. And so, people tend to see evil in every shadow.

4. STRANGERS/OTHER PEOPLE –

Roland Poppo is now a famous name across the internet as the homeless guy who got his face chewed off by a stranger. In matter of fact, we are much more terrified if the adversary is a thinking, calculating being. If he is one of us. A human can see into our thoughts and read our every move, which makes psychos more terrifying than uncalculating wild beasts. Fear of foreigners or strange people comes out when we are under stress.

3. THE UNKNOWN –

If the first rule of warfare is know your enemy, then not knowing who or what you’re up against tips the scale. People are afraid of entering and exploring a new ground, because they think they might get in trouble. They are afraid of losing what they already have by jumping into the unknown.

2. DEATH –

Everybody dies, eventually. Yeah, but I aint afraid to die, just trying to make sure I get it right. The fear of death is pervasive in a world where millions of lives can disintegrate at the touch of a button. Terrorists aint helping matters, either. But death is not (in my opinion, anyway and this is backed up by some research) the most fearful thing which is why I placed it in the number 2 spot.

1. FAILURE –

Why do you suppose the rate of suicide has tripled in recent years?

I just finished reading ROADWORK by Stephen King. Although, King doesn’t come right out to state it in black and white, Bart Dawes, the main character in the story offed himself because he saw himself as a failure.

First, he fails to secure a new place for his laundry company (on purpose) and threw away his job;

Secondly, his wife leaves him (in consequence of the fact that he failed to secure a new apartment for them. Again, on purpose.) and

Third, because he wouldn’t exhume the body of his son (who had died a few months before of a brain tumor) and rebury him (an ongoing road construction had forced him to relocate) he blew his apartment to hell taking himself along for the bumpy ride.

Nothing takes the sweetness out your mouth as not being able to discover the hidden you in a severely distracted universe. If you lose sight of yourself, death is only child’s play.

WHAT TRIGGERS YOUR DEMONS?

Without a doubt, this countdown would be different if you had done it. Failure is my number one and only fear cause I believe nothing is as fatal (not even death) as the unfulfilled life. And that’s probably, the reason I always see success as the sweetest revenge.

. . . AND HOW THE WRITER CAN THRIVE ON ‘EM

Check out this week’s edition of the New York Times Bestseller list and try to see how many of the story plots are triggered by any one of these fears.

As a writer, you can tailor your character’s pitfalls around one or four of these. You can be sure your story would appeal to someone out there. Bull's eye, mama!

Let your pen bleed!

Akpan

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DAY 30: Numbers Game

It is the most visited object in the British museum.

And now, the Egyptians want it back. The French on the other hand, lay greater claim on it stating it was Napoleon’s property before the British deprived him of it.

Not long after it arrived at the British Museum, The Rosetta Stone was stolen. In other to conceal this fact from the public, the British government had a replica made and then had the inscriptions colored in white chalk and the remaining surface was covered with a layer of carnauba wax. (They claimed the white chalk was to make the inscriptions more legible and the wax was designed to protect The Stone.)

In 1999, the stone was recovered and the counterfeit summarily removed and discarded.

The original was never painted over.

It was widely believed by archaeologists and specialists that the stone was chipped off for reuse at a construction site but recent discoveries have proved otherwise. There was more to the damaged state of The Stone.

Napoleon Bonaparte first discovered The Stone. It is now believed he did not hand over all he possessed concerning The Stone. There were numbers and codes that he held back and hid at different points in the Land of the Ancient Pharaohs.

Where is Napoleon now?

Where are the locations of the hidden fragments?

Nobody knows, for sure. (About the location of the hidden fragments, that is. Of course, we know Napoleon’s long dead.) But, a search has begun, (especially, since the curator of the British Museum was found dead at the spot where the stone had once been displayed and The Stone? . . . you’ll figure it out, eventually.) a search that’s both a manhunt for the murderer and the thief and a quest for the

                        Fragments of the Rosetta Stone.

Notes to myself:

This is the last of ‘em. I survived NaShoWriMo! Yeah!

DAY 29: Number-One Fan

In the dark, our wildest fantasies gain substance and grow teeth. Especially, teeth.

My name is Narivé and I am Fiction’s Number-One Fan. I know you think I’m crazy as hell but, humor me, okay?

I was in college and going on 16 when the real thrust of my reality dawned on me. It was like sitting in the bleachers and watching yourself act; if that was possible. I was the punch line of every joke, at home and at school. My folks sort of like, their relationship wasn’t working out as planned after the proverbial ‘I do’. I arrived on the scene dead on schedule. Damn I couldn’t have happened on that family at a better, bitter time. They took their drama out on me. When talking wouldn’t fix his hitch, dad punched me around a little bit. He always made sure I stayed alive to regret it.

My problem kicked in when I began to take the taunts and razzes personally. Well, I couldn’t exactly do something about it, could I? I just turned 16 for shuck’s sakes!

Then, I discovered fiction-the door to another world. A place of hiatus. Heaven. I read wide, explored all the genres until the line between what is real and what is conceived blurred. Then, I met Razor.

Razor taught me all I needed to know about life. I met him in the 800-page tome, Raw Edge. And I couldn’t even recall the name of the guy who wrote it if my salvation depended on it. The guy was someone I could dig and I did. His world became my world. I found peace in the dark and the beauty of my universe sprung to life just after dark.

One day, Razor walked into my life. In living flesh and blood. Difference is, only I got to see him.

Notes to myself:

The story is about a fanatic who reads too much into a fictional story and is possessed by a secondary personality.

He hears his favorite character’s voice as much as anybody else’s voice.

The story in the final draft should lean heavily on the dark side of the human nature.

Answer questions like: what does Razor tell him?;

How much does Narivé depend on that voice to carry on his personal affairs?;

Is crime a content of his obedience?;

All-in-all does he subject himself to the dark side of this fictional character to be termed catatonic?

DAY 28: Bad Gone Worse (Mutant Strains II)

Zraeli’s neighbor has taken in a very unusual pet and it’s done something gross and unpleasant to both his lawn and his pet. Actually, it chewed off the head of Zraeli’s pit bull and somehow managed to spray the blood over the left side of Zraeli’s house at the same time. The walls on the left wing of his house looked like something had tried to repaint it and failed.

The lawn was a different matter entirely. It was the aftermath of a battle between a T-Rex and a triceratops.

Recently, Zraeli had been hearing strange sounds in the still of the night piercing the air with blood-curdling squeals. Zraeli’s neighbor had been up to something. It probably had a thing to do with his gene-splicing gig up at the MoGenetics Labs where he worked.

One night, (after the incident with his pet pit bull and the odd painting job which he washed off effectively and of course, his messed up lawn) Zraeli kept hearing noises coming from his backyard suggestive of giant slugs slithering around in the starlight. He’d never heard those sounds before and his mind went back to his neighbor especially, his state of mind after all these excessive experiments.

Zraeli got out of bed, fetched his torch and went to the window. He pointed to wherever he spotted movement in the shadows, trying to see what made such noises. He could barely make out the forms. Either they were too dark or too fast. Zraeli whispered a prayer; let it not be the latter. And whatever they are, let them not be dangerous.

Well, the high points of the night was when one of the creatures almost got into the house. It scared the living night lights out of one of his daughters who was sleeping in that room. She claimed she’d seen the creature, said it was a cross between a Dimetrodon (when Zraeli asked her what that was she said it was a prehistoric mammal-like reptile) and a slug-a giant slug. The emphasis here people is giant.

That was the final straw. Zraeli didn’t think it was wise to wait one of those things broke into the house and made a meal out of one his own before he gave their owner a wake-up call.

He got to the neighbors house which was just next door. After a few moments of knocking on the door and unable to evoke a response from the resident, Zraeli tried the knob. The door opened on the first try like it was still midday. More like it wasn’t locked at all.

            “Hello,” he called. His voice returned to him empty and pregnant with weird possibilities.

He stepped into the dark apartment. It was against his better judgment. The room reeked of ungodly odors-laboratory chemicals and a musty stench which meant the house had not been cleaned out in a while.

            “Kirk? Kirk! Are you in here?”

Notes to myself:

Zraeli found a note on the table from Kirk to whom it may concern. It described an experiment gone awry. He’d trapped DNA from fossilized skeleton of a Dimetrodon and tried to see if he could reinvent these reptiles by combining their DNA with slugs’. Finally, when he couldn’t control them anymore, (they reproduced quicker than he could keep count) he’d set them loose around the house. And now, something else had happened their bite was contagious. Anybody who suffers a bite from any of the creatures (his creatures) will be transmuted into one of them.

Zraeli had not finished reading the notes (there were about five pages in all. The last one could have contained a Remedy or a cure of sorts) when he heard a shrill scream. It came from the direction of his house. It was the voice of one of his daughters. It was the scream of someone who had just stumbled on their won obituary in the evening papers. It was the sound that only somebody who had looked their own death in the eye could make. Zraeli tossed the papers containing the last notes of Kirk away and scrambled for the door.

A monstrosity with a human head and a prehistoric reptile’s body slithered into his path and rammed into the door. Zraeli stared at it for what seemed like eons then, surprise tipped over to familiarity. Kirk? Kirk is that you?

DAY 27: Mutant Strains

The very first night Kirk decided to live the rest of the evening inside a bottle was by all means, the same he made the worst mistake of his life. The devil definitely knows how to catch us with our pants down. It was the worst of times for Kirk. Under the dim and convoluting lights of the joint, Kirk wasn’t quite what you would call at home with himself.

He’d had enough booze to sail the Titanic. In a few days, Kirk would hardly recall the high points of this night. After wearing himself out on the dance floor, Kirk took a stool by the bar. And somebody who’d probably being watching him for the perfect time to make his move took the stool beside him.

            “Hey, buddy. Wanna play a little game?” It was the devil in human cloak.

And the game was that the guy set up the worst pick up line and Kirk tried to see if he could get a girl for the night. The wager? Just 500 bucks plus the lady, if Kirk won. And if he loses?

            “Your soul would do just fine,” the man in the tweed coat said.

Notes to myself:

Does Kirk win?

What if he wins and the devil still takes his soul? (It’s The Devil we’re talking about here.) Can he be trusted to come through with his end of the bargain?

I’m tinkering with the idea of allowing the guy (Kirk) win and the devil comes back after him in the future out of vengeance for being outwitted. Possibly, after Kirk’s son.

But, there’s also the possibility (now, let’s say Kirk’s into biotechnology. Can I use that. Can The Devil use that?

How about the woman? What role does she play in the whole affair? Does she know about the game or is she a case of being in the wrong place at the right time?

DAY 26: Presque Vu

There’s a guy sitting on a park bench reading a newspaper. Our interest is the paper not the guy cause the paper got news for your soul. The Presque Vu (that’s the name of the newspaper) disseminates truth that cuts like a knife. And our guy, he’s smart to be reading such a paper at this hour of the evening. Oh yeah, smart as a cat in a trash can.

Let’s get on with our story shall we?  The man’s name is Zaire, by the way. It’s actually Zaire’s first time of reading this paper. He met a man sitting on that bench-that was a while ago before you came along, and . . .

            “Hey, well met fellow,” Zaire said.

            “Hi there!” said the fellow.

            “I see you got the evening paper. What’s news?”

The guy, whose name we shouldn’t allow to ruffle our feathers at the present, shoved the paper over to Zaire. Zaire took it, scanned the headlines, flipped it open and began to read. The next moment this strange guy got up and started to leave.

            “Your paper, sir.” Zaire thrust the paper which he’d hurriedly closed towards the stranger.

            “Oh, never mind,” said the man. “I’m yet to see a story in the papers deserving a second read.”

And just like that the paper switched ownership. But, what Zaire was yet to find out which we’ll find out along with him was that there was more to the paper the stranger was not telling.

He opened the paper a second time and continued his reading. Of course, it was full of the usual stuff-sadist stuff. The stock market was a mess (as usual); a group of scientists proved rats descended from fleas (duh); and so on and so forth.

The part where the whole mess started falling apart was when Zaire started sensing something beyond the ordinary in the local news section. It felt wrong. He felt wrong.

Notes to myself:

What does Zaire do when he discovers everything he reads in the paper happens at the same time he reads it?

That the only way to stop those things is to stop reading the paper?

That he just read a while ago about the death of a loved one?

What if he’s got to find somebody else interested in reading the paper and pass it on or something fatal happens?

DAY 25: The Cestus Code

Willow stepped into her bedroom and made a dash for her cell. The screen was just going off. This was the cell with her more popular number. She gave the number of this phone out often as her business number. She hadn’t felt like taking it along on her walk in the park. Willow really needed to work her body and rest her mind so she would be ready for her muse when she by the time she got back to the house.

Perspiration stood out on her forehead and arms like great balls of crystal freckles. She looked like she’d done a sprint around the block not once but six or seven times. She picked up the phone and saw the call was actually a notification. Email notifications from social networks. She flicked through the messages and when she got to the third message she froze. The first was an update from a Facebook friend, the second message contained a +1 of her comment by one of her circles on Google +. But the third message grabbed her attention by the lapels and shook it until all the bones in her body rattled when she shuddered.

Willow was so excited she felt like biting a big chunk out of something. The #mention was from a guy who claimed to be a representative of a big time film production company. Willow had been trying (without success, if I may add) to get her book turned into a movie. She was well beyond the limits of her wits. And now this; an opportunity that could only be termed a breakthrough.

Willow couldn’t recall if she ever sent out her proposal to the studio this guy was representing but since the diner they were meeting at was close by and she probably knew half the staff working there by first name she agreed to meet this strange personality in person.

The meeting never happened. The diner was a decoy, after all. The guy, Homer Gates, was a chronic schizophrenic who had delusions that everything and therefore, everyone in the world was against him. Willow had written a book she titled The Cestus Code about a woman who finds her place in the family and decides to follow it but the man of the house would hear none of it. Trouble came when the lady who was a writer herself decides to walk away from the marriage. The hubby is enraged when he finds out and a fight ensues.

The lady has her way in the end and becomes the writer she hungered to be. A few years later, somebody finds the woman dead on the bank of a canal; her corpse washed up by the flood tide. It’s a kind of whodunit story. Naturally, all eyes turn on the husband as accusing fingers point everywhere.

This man (the fake publisher guy who @mentions Willow asking for a meeting) kidnapped Willow and took her to a remote location. His real life story is quite similar to Willow’s fictional plot line.

            “Where the hell did you get that story?”

Of course, Willow’s dumbstruck. If you’re a fiction writer and somebody picked you out and asked ‘Where the hell do you get your stories from?’ with a Glock 18 plugged into one of your ears and you know you don’t know then, you understand Willow’s dilemma.

Well, Willow tried to explain herself, it sounded a bit like a creative writing class in her own ears.

            “You write a hell of a story, you know that?” The man said. “I thought you heard my story from someplace and change one or two things to achieve your version. Man, I gotta admit I had plans for you.”

Willow didn’t dare ask what plans. She knew better.

            “I want you to write my story,” The man said. “It’s close to what you got in your book, novels you call ‘em right? I want to write mine. Like it really happened. Cause it did. But I never killed my wife, okay? I loved Amy so much but she just wanted to go on with her fiction stuff. So we parted ways. But I never touch a hair on her head. When they found her she was cut into so many bits they couldn’t recognize. But the bastards thought I did it. Of course, the jury didn’t buy their story. So, I want you to write my story. Tell the world the truth.”

            “Look buddy, I don’t know what you got in mind but I got a family waiting for me to come home and fix their dinner . . .” Willow stopped in mid-sentence. Now the Glock changed position. It moved to the bulge of her forehead.

            ‘Don’t play that card. If you ever want to see your family again plus, if you’re ever gonna convince me what you got in that freaking book of yours ain’t the story of my life then, write my story. This is non-fiction and this gun’s real baby.” He pointed the muzzle of the gun to her eyes so she could take a peek. To Willow it was 6 feet deep. “Now do as I tell you. Don’t make me tell you twice!”

So, Willow stayed in captivity and wrote under the worst editor a man could ask for-a memoir based on the ordeal of this psycho (of course, she never mentioned the guy was a psycho in the manuscript). For the first time she’d come to see writing as a way back to life.

Notes to myself:

Much of the story’s told. Just work in the dialogue.

And the lady’s working conditions in hostage situation.

Does she finish the story?

Does the psycho kill her?

DAY 24: Next Door to Dead

A man wearing a polo shirt with an alligator on the tit strolled up the walkway, climbed the stoop in three quick steps and, looked both ways down the lawn to see if anyone was watching. Of course, no one was.

A knock on the door caught Lucy off-guard. Not surprisingly, when she checked the clock it said 11:45 p.m. Who in limbo would pay me a visit at this time of day? She wondered, not without a bit of necessary suspicion. Lucy was trying to make up her mind if she should just ignore the knock and go back to sleep (it was past her bedtime) when her uninvited guest got her decided by hammering on her door like a really upset kid who returned home from school to discover momma had left for work and forgot to put the key under the flower pot by the door or under the door mat.

If you don’t come answer the door miss, the pounding seemed to say. I’m gonna wake up all ya neighbors. And really, one of the neighborhood dogs had begun to let out a woof. What Lucy didn’t want was for Mrs. Rosa, the woman next door, to come tell her to answer her door with her sonorous voice. Lucy dragged her butt out of bed. She hated having to stay awake past her bedtime. It was one of her pet peeves.

Lucy hesitated for the space of 60 seconds when she got to the door. She was a single woman who lived alone; she was vulnerable. The consciousness of her situation came upon her like a heavy blanket. She almost turned on the lights but thought the better of it. I can’t imagine any of my friends visiting at this hour, she thought, as she turned and did a recheck of the time, picking out the clock, hung above her plasma on the wall by the streak of light that peeped in through the crack in the curtain. It is midnight! She exclaimed under her breath.

Burglars were unheard of in her part of town and that seemed to give her a little relief that whoever it was wasn’t there to rob her. Yet, she felt the alarm called sixth sense going off inside her. Could it be possible that? . . . The thought sent shudders through her. What if one her courtroom cases had instigated such hate to warrant an attempt on her life? (Lucy was a lawyer.) And now, that she brought her mind to bear on this new fact, terror seized her in a deathly grip. She’d won a case for a guy once. He was to inherit about a million bucks from his former boss. On his way home, the guy was paid a visit by the bomb squad-the mob’s version.

Great drops of sweat soaked into her pajamas that Lucy looked as if she had fallen into the bathtub while reaching for her robe. She reached for the door again then, as an afterthought picked up a side stool and held it up like a player set to receive a service in a tennis match. For some odd reason she couldn’t explain, she didn’t feel like calling the cops. Lucy unlocked the door by only a squeak leaving the latch on. And stepped back to about 8 meter safety radius incase the stranger decided to kick in the door.

Lucy called out in a voice that didn’t quite sound like her own to her ears, “Who are you and what the hell do you want?”

            “Just me. I got a message for you.”

Lucy tried to place the voice, where had she heard it before. She didn’t think she recognized it from anywhere. But, something else began to happen; her fears began to subside. Somehow, she felt she could trust this person even though she had never seen him before.

            “I got a message,” the stranger repeated. “It’s for you.”

            “Well, slide it in. I’ll grab it from here.” She still wasn’t too willing to give in to the prodding of instinct.

            “I can’t exactly do that, Ma’am.” Shuffling of feet like the guy didn’t know exactly how to proceed. “It’s not exactly a package. It’s a word-of-mouth kind of message.”

            “Can’t you just spit it out and get it over with? Do you gatto be inside to do it? And who sent you?” The last question came by a sudden bust of inspiration.

Eventually, Lucy let the guy in. He was from the future and he’d come to warn Lucy about a case. She was to pass it up or it might turn out to be fatal for her and her future family. But the guy who was bringing the case to Lucy was innocent and he would go to jail if Lucy passed it up.

Notes to myself:

How I work in the dramatic ending is left for the rewrite.

Will Lucy take the case or let it go?

Will the man from the future help her?

What relation does she have with the guy from the future? (Should there be any ties?)

Could I make him Lucy’s future husband but who is forbidden to tell her that bit of info on this assignment or she dies automatically in the future?

What if she’s in critical condition and her husband asked for one more chance to set things right and he is sent to the past to warn her by The Doorkeeper (a mysterious figure who appears and offers to help)?

What if Lucy doesn’t take the chance?