Facing What Haunts Me

If you missed this morning’s prompts post, I am responding to the prompts from Haunted.

For today’s images I wanted to create that feeling when you’re alone at night and you think you see someone out of the corner of your eye, or you hear doors creak and cupboards bang. Today’s photo shoot was a lot of fun.

OctPoWriMo 2023:Facing Our Fears

Today is open link night at dVerse Poets Pub, so don’t forget to link up your poem, and read and comment on the other poets’ offerings.

For today’s poem I looked back through my poems at the beginning of the month and decided to write a new poem to revise my poem in response to the Fear of Monsters prompt. I started with a new metaphor and didn’t use a form. I then tried to force it into a Mirror Sestet, but I didn’t like it, so here’s my free-form monster metaphor poem.

For the Monster’s Pleasure

This decade is the Bride of Frankenstein
grave-robbed pieces and parts
forced together and electrocuted into life
by a mad scientist for the pleasure of a monster

The frightened masses with pitchforks
and torches filled with hate
for what they don’t understand
are right to plead for it to stop

The doctor knows what he’s doing is wrong
but he can’t undo what he has created
and the monster must be appeased
His only hope is that a woman’s touch
will calm the violent heart and appeal
to what’s left of the rational mind

Writober 2023

Today’s prompt for 13 Days of Samhain is “Rest in Pieces” which should work well with the visual prompt.

Here’s the beginning of my new story:

They Broke Through In Pieces Needing Faces

I took the night janitor job when I realized I couldn’t be around people anymore. Every single thing someone said to me was so banal and asinine, I just wanted to slap them, which really isn’t good for a nurse. I knew if I didn’t quit I would do something horrible, so I moved to this rural hole-in-the-wall and took the night janitor position at the middle school. I figured less puke and piss clean up and not old enough for serious vandalism or weird sex shit, so the easiest night janitor job I could find.

When it started, it was an almost imperceptible flaw in he paint in the gym. It looked like someone, some kid who didn’t like exercise was just standing in one spot picking at the paint. I found a can of a matching color in the basement supply closet and touched it up, and left a note for the gym teacher in the office mail slots, and thought that would be the end of it. But the next week, the spot had become a hole and each day it grew. I continued with my cleaning duties, waxing the gym floor, staring at the growing hole but trying to ignore it, until one night the walls around the now large hole started pulsing and the space behind the hole glowed with a white light which appeared to pulse into the walls like blood in veins. The white light pushed through the hole like dust or fine sand arching through the air and landing on my newly waxed floor becoming dress shoes, socks, slacks, an entire sleek black suit with white shirt and skinny black tie. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

I know I should have been afraid, but I was too curious. When the last of the other-worldly light sand stopped flowing, I was staring at a very well-dressed faceless man being. It turned toward me, and with what looked like two steps crossed the entire gym, put its hand on my face and took my features then left through the gym doors into the school just as quickly. I touched my face afraid nothing would be there, but he had only copied not stolen. My relief didn’t last. While I was worrying about what the skinny well-dressed copy me was about to do in this world, the hole began to pulse with light again, and the veins reached further along the walls. This time I ran, not wanting to have to deal with more than one copy of me out there doing who knows what.

Like last year, I’ll be continuing daily posts through November. The Writer’s Digest November Poem a Day (PAD) Chapbook Challenge provides daily poetry prompts which I’ll combine with my continued study of contradictory abstract nouns. I’m creating a contradictory abstract noun pairs calendar for November’s Photography Challenge. Each of the pairs is connected to my Big Five to explore them more thoroughly throughout the month. Last year I found that this focus on contradictory abstract nouns helped with my novel writing, focusing the internal and external conflicts for my characters. I’ll also talk about new writing resources, and tips and tricks I discover while I write my new novel. I hope you’ll continue to join me.

Now that I have my idea for my story, I’m starting to brainstorm scenes. Once I have ideas for my main scenes throughout the story, I’ll plug them into a Scrivener file so I have a blueprint that I can keep feeling in as NaNoWriMo approaches. I didn’t find much information about specifically plotting for horror, but I found a Horror Beat Sheet from T. L. Bodine that looks like it might help as I’m starting my loose outline.

How’s your NaNo Prep going? Are you getting excited?