Chapter 7

Spoiler alert!  This blog will reveal some information that will ruin part of the mystery of a situation in the Nocent book which won't be revealed in the book until a future chapter.
  I just put out chapter 7 of the Nocent book.  I wanted to tell you a little bit about this chapter.  The last scene comes straight out of a dream I had years ago.  I was running from a killer in my dream.  I was in a house and it was dark.  There was a parrot in the living room that somehow knew wherever I would try to hide.  The most chilling part to me was when I went into a room to get away from the bird.  I figured if I could get away, then it wouldn't know where I was hiding.  I snuck into the closet and closed the door.  Even so, the bird screeched out, "He's in the closet!"  I froze and not two seconds later a pair of rough hands grabbed me and yanked me out of the closet.
  When I woke up from that dream I had to turn a light on.  I couldn't sleep so I grabbed a pen and paper and wrote down what had happened.  It wasn't until years later when I developed the characters in the Nocent that I found the perfect story to interject that chilling scene.  I hope it's as scary to readers as it was for me to go through it (so to speak).
  Speaking of scenes that came from dreams, the end of chapter 5 when the door closes behind Bill, that came from a nightmare of mine as well.  Nightmares are excellent sources for frightening scenes in stories because they're already tried and true.  That's why they're called nightmares.  Like when that one KFC closed down over on the 40.

Coming Up With Stories

  Every once in a while I'll be in the shower or eating or driving and an idea for a story will pop into my head.  Oh man, it's so fun when that happens.  What often ends up happening is that two or three of my story ideas will merge into one story with several facets.  Let's say that I come up with an idea for an interesting character.  Later on I may come up with an interesting scenario.  Maybe it would be really cool to put that character in that scenario and see where the story goes from there.
 That is what happened with my idea for the Nocent.  Several ideas dating back all the way to stories, songs and poems I wrote in high school to dreams I've had over the years, culminated into one huge story.  Many of the short stories and poems served as background for some of the characters.  Many nightmares I've had became actual scenes in the book.  I already knew it was scary because of how it affected me while I slept.