This thing isn't evn close to being done. But I need to get the timeline and the points that I want.
The Dark Woman is about this woman who lives on this street and kind of seems to be an aloof seductress. This smoker named David walks by her place daily and sees her. She is always watering her plants on the windowsill.
I had originally penned her as your traditional blonde bombshell, but then I thought to myself that it would be much more interesting and sexy if she were the swarthy dark woman of mysterious origins, rather than Bel-Air.
So here is what I am really doing: I want to write a violent, blood-soaked sequence that will be so visceral and frenetic that it will be the climax of it all. So I have to work out a combination.
#1. The woman is a monster.
#2. I have to make the guy likeable, but also hateable. Why? I want to kill him at the end. I need some sort of acrid nature about him. I need to do this in order to justify his takedown. This comes in a few different ways.
a. He is a smoker. I have him in the final throes of his addiction. He is down to 3 cigarettes a day. he is constantly reminiscing and flashing back to how much he has smoked in the past. I think that his lack of control here can be played to explain how the woman gets him into her lair.
b. He is fantasizing about her. I want to be inside of his head. I want him to cross lines in his head that make him less appealing and forgiveable as a human being.
I also have to make this thing fair to the woman in a way. She is what she is, but she shouldn't be a traditional "maneater". Like maybe I will have David talking to a different neighbor in her vicinity and he says something off-color about her and then it turns out that she is behind the fence or something. I have to be aware of the sexual tones in this and not make this into a chauvinistic manifesto.
Obviously, I had to arrive on the name of DAVID for this guy. There are many different reasons, but I could think of at least 1 David from my past that I could really see disemboweled.
What I like about the short stoiry is that I don't have to explain her origins so much as I have to make her believeable in the place where you currently find her.
So there are twists and turns in the story, but I did some pretty solid noodling last night and came up with some smoking ramblings, and setting ramblings that I will dissect and add to and spread about.
Here:
David hit the bigtime. He'd secured his promotion and now he could work from home. This was good for David, because David was a smoker.
He'd never been able to give up the habit. He knew it was killing him. David was only 28, but he felt that he'd smoked more than most. He'd weaned himself down of late to just three cigarettes a day. At his height as a tobacco king, he had "strung" packs of cigarettes in an afternoon, lighting the next cigarette off of the last until all 20 were gone. David had strung 3 packs in an afternoon once, and the effect was so unique that he couldn't taste his dinner afterward, but the cigarette after dinner was better than the first of the day.
David had loved the sensual throes of the nicotine addiction. He knew what it was like to wait until the last possible moment until he lit up. He knew that urge. That whisper. That twitch. That inner-request line that constantly yammered. He knew the switch in his brain. He knew when he threw it, and when it was now moments before the nicotine would rush through his blood and calm him again.
Coffee.
A strong dark coffee. Hot, but not piping, just hot enough to swallow. A heavy, robust coffee. Pungent. toasty, roasted. Full of dark, and a darker exhale. Then, a puff of smoke, and the lungs pull the smoke down. Fueling the nicotine crave. It is such a lustful feeling. Your body demanding the smoke, paying you with a seratonin load and waking you up. Then, another swallow of coffee, and the loop is set. It wouldn't stop looping until the cigarette is done.
David loved to smoke. Now, he had a neighborhood to walk, with a Camel hanging from his lips.
David was a realist. He smoked Camel unfiltered. He knew that cigarettes were going to someday kill him, so why waste time with a filter?
Mrs. Andrea, the woman he was renting from had expressly told him not to smoke inside of the premises. David respected her wishes.
David, now down to three cigarettes a day, fancied an evening walk. There is a house up the street from him with a woman who lives in it. She is beautiful. Her face is dark, with high cheekbones and full, joyful eyes. Her sharp nose was actually soft, yet appeared severe because it was so perfectly symmetrical in the center of her face. Her lips were full, yet not overwhelming. Her jawline framed her face, making it an appealing mystery, shrouded by a thick, freshly combed mane of dark brown hair. The hair hung, heavy past her shoulders, long, with a loose curly bounce to it, that contradicted its weight. The woman had to hold her head slightly askew in order to see, if her hair was in front of her shoulders. She is full figured. Her shoulders were square. Her posture well-practiced. She was proper, and ladylike. Her breasts were under control. She neither flaunted them nor played them down. They were a part of her, and her proper posture was what actually accentuated them.
David had walked by her house many times and seen her lean out of her kitchen window to water plants don her windowsill. She seems to deliberately ignore him, yet is visible in this fashion, coinciding with David's walk two or three times a week. David remains aloof, but entertains the idea in the back of his head that one day he will win this stuckup buxom woman over [I need more of this kind of thought process. Dude is on some privilege*]. Someday they will be friends.
Someday, maybe even lovers. He keeps this card close to his heart because he knows that he doesn't want to get hurt like that again. She reached into him and tore it out of him, that last one. His heart still hurt. Goddammit and if she didn't take a bite out of it and throw it on the floor.
***More notes
I like the idea of David working through a heartbreak. I think of all times in my life that I have been most unpredictable and unstable, it has been in the middle of some form of heartbreak. So I like the idea of the wound being fresh. David is killing time trying to heal.
I am going to zero in on his malicious daydream. Perhaps that is what it is all about. Perhaps he has this intense monologue within himself and he gets caught in this horrible patterns and this woman is a part of the landscape. After he fantasizes about her wrong a few times, he enters his a weakness stage where she can mess with him.
I can also subtly imply that she knows what he is thinking. When she gets going as the machine that she is, it will make it more interesting.
Also, I had this thing that I was doing in part of my drafting that he has this "one card close to his heat that he won't play." I actually forget at this time what it is, but in the final killing, she mentions to him about "you shoulda played your card." So I have been on this thing about her being able to read his thoughts for awhile now.
I also have to have her ask him into her house so that she can take him apart. I have to do this in a realistic way. She is batining him, but he is ripe for the baiting.
What is that quote? The heart hungers for what it is fed? Something like that. Oh, I think it is the brain actually. What I need is a quote like that to set this whole thing off. Maybe I will look for one while I am at work tonight. I'll dig into the Latin and see if I can find something gothic yet on point.
Maybe the smoker pauses outside of her window and observes her silhouette and takes it all in. Lustfully drinking in the image and then she notices? That awkward moment. I mean, when I have walked the dog at night and come across the nude in the window (I believe that this in inevitable) I always make a point of NOT looking back. Did I see something? I don't care, I don't want to know. That person is uncomfortable, and I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Time to GTFO. But if I was to park it, pull up a lamppost and smoke, whilst ogling the shape in the window, well, that is a killable offense.
I think I have David pinned now. If I couple that one with his monologue, the reader is going to be glad to see him go.
I have to think of a sultry name MARLENA. Something like that. I also have to consider her monstrosities. They have to make sense. I will save that for a different post. I read through the killing sequence that I penned back in 2013, and I could do so much more. I am going to rip this fool limb from limb and pain the walls with him. The reader will recognize the buildup, and I am going to flower it up and make it look as potentially porno-sex as possible before I pull the rug. The twist will be multi-layered, because the shredding will not be what is being built towards.
HOWEVER, I am really going to have to make sure that the hyperbole is in place for the pain that he feels from his previous relationship. Yes, she ripped his heart out of his chest, and yes, that is what Marlenai (exoticafy it) is going to do. I am gonna have the telegraph set up on the first page. The literal shredding happens at the end. I have to keep this tight. Maybe under 5000 words.
I'll get back with you.