October update

Hello, you readers.

Just today a story has gone up on Saturdaystory-time.blogspot.com, which is titled "Helpers LTD." This story came out of a strange event that happened to me a few weeks ago at the gym.

I was on a weight machine, some leg thing, and just as I was going to get done when a young woman appeared and sat on the machine that I was going to head to. As far as I could tell, she never actually used it, just sat on it for about ten seconds and messed with her phone. Then she exited the machine.

That  was my entire interaction with her. Her presence served to change my schedule by just ten seconds, which I spent sitting on the machine I had just finished. For some reason (I'm special!) I asked myself if that was her purpose, just to exist so I could rest. I asked myself what it would be like for a modern-day fairy godmother story. Thus, "Helpers LTD" was born. Not your average fairy godmother.

Two weeks ago, a story came out that is probably more violent than any story so far. I've written a good number of stories about people dying or getting hurt, even by other people, but this one is different.

It began as a story about a woman that is kept prisoner in her apartment by a man for some reason we don't know, but I decided to make it a shorter, sort of one-off story with a quick sequence of events. A man is in her room, he attacked her, she escapes. It can be found here. I realized that the threat of injury must be real to make the story work so, without a better option, I googled "rape survivor stories" to get some research on what a woman might think during such an event. I was extremely surprised at what I found. I expected to find horrible stories, and I did, but I didn't expect to find a story that sounded like it had taken place at my college. It told a story of a woman that was molested after a date by a boy that said things like "God wants us to be together." (The story can be read here, it is the one that begins "I just recently graduated from a small private Baptist college in Minnesota" . . . which perfectly describes the college I attended).

I felt sick, shocked, and dizzy. I am not a fan of rape (duh), but I can't say I enjoy rape jokes, either. Then this story appeared, and I felt out of breath. It didn't just hit close to home, it was close to home! It was at my home, somewhere I had lived for almost four years!

Worst of all, Jenny -- the woman who wrote the story -- said that she knew of other woman being raped, and the school doing nothing. Bethel, my college, was a place where wrongs were to be righted, or so we were lead to believe. I sincerely hope that this place wasn't Bethel.

And so, with just a story like this, "Intruder" went from a story about rape to a story about near-rape. How could I, in the state I was in, convey what the horrible feelings Jenny had onto a fake person? I could not. The story has a tense moment of molestation, perhaps, and the woman only escapes by delivering a brutal hit on the man's . . . sensitive area, but even getting that close was difficult for me.

Art used with permission by Bevan-Ravenswing and r-fl from Deviantart accompany(ied) the stories, in that order.