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mysticsparklewings · 4 months ago

Text

Terror in Six Words

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He didn't know

she'd been bitten.

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Hey, this isn’t an Obscutober piece! 😦

No, but you’re getting 2 art things from me today because there were some community events on DeviantArt I wanted to partake in, & as it happens a “scary” 6-word story in poetry magnets felt like a good way to do that. 😉

Same as the Obscutober pieces, if you’re curious to hear more about my process for how this all came together—and I promise it was much more involved than you’d think!—Click the "Keep Reading" and we'll talk a bit more about my general thoughts/process. ✨

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So, again: Hmm. This doesn't look like an Obscutober piece, and yet...it looks kind of familiar, doesn't it? 😉 We all probably should've known that I'd break out the mini-magnets at least once this month, sooner or later. 🤭

This was actually supposed to be kind of a 2-in-1 piece, but this has been such a busy month and busy week in particular that I got my days mixed up and thought I had more time than I actually did...So it's no longer a 2-in-1, but it wasn't totally a waste, either.

DeviantArt, in typical fashion, is holding a Badge Event this month, and loyal Sparklers will know if it's a badge I like I have a hard time turning those down—We went through something similar last year! And on top of that, @CRLiterature was also holding a Tiny Tales of Terror Challenge...which ran through the 24th, and you'll notice today's date is the 26th. 😅

And to be clear: I'm mentioning the Tiny Tales Challenge not because I expect any kind of exception or what-have-you to be made for me, but just to be transparent about my motivations. It's my fault for missing the deadline and I accept that. The only reason I'm going ahead and posting it now, so soon after the missed deadline, instead of holding off until Halloween is because I am hoping to maybe squeeze in something else just for Halloween, and I've got a bunch of other things to try and scramble to get done on my to-do list before then; If I don't post it today, it may very well not get posted at all. 🫠

[Plot twist: I was thisclose to posting this yesterday, even, but yesterday was a particularly chaotic day so it just wasn't possible—yet more evidence that if I'm not careful and quick about it this artwork may be doomed to live behind the scenes forever.]

It would also be kind of disingenuous to discuss what I made without mentioning that challenge as that's where I got the entire idea to make this specifically a six-word-story from.

DeviantArt's Badge Event, for those who don't know, is encouraging people to make something inspired by some short stories they commissioned. So there was my starting point, and I had been considering breaking out the poetry magnets for a Halloween-ish one-off piece anyway, since I have really been missing them this month while I handle Inktober/Obscutober in a magnet-less way for the first time in years.

While I had those two thoughts at the back of my mind, the Tiny Tales Challenge came up, which asked people to write a scary story in six words or less. And since I'm personally most familiar with six-word-stories from magnetic poetry, it all just kinda came together as a perfect storm in my mind: A six-word story, told in magnets, inspired by one of the stories for the badge event. 💡

Now, that said, if you've read the four short stories for the badge event, you might be scratching your head and trying to figure out what my six words here have to do with any of them. I won't deny for a moment that any connection to the story I picked really isn't obvious, but all I can tell you Sparklers is that my brain is a strange place and you never know what off-the-wall connections are going to be made in there. 🤪

Of the four stories, the one that stuck with me the most was Survivor's Guilt. It has a kind of somber, Twilight-Zone-esque quality to it, and that's more what I personally favor in "horror" story over the typical heart-racing-scream-your-head off variety. [As I've probably talked about a bit before but I don't remember where.]

Somehow, I left that story with one of my favorite My Chemical Romance songs in my head—Early Sunsets Over Monroeville, which itself was inspired by Dawn of the Dead. And I was also reminded just a little of Carmilla, a vampire tale that actually predates Bram Stoker's Dracula.

As I said, my brain is a strange place that makes strange connections. 🥴 My best guess is that my subconscious really hitched onto the ending revelation of Survivor's Guilt, which I won't spoil for you here if you haven't read it. (You should though, it's good!)

Suffice to say: Something about how we don't know what we don't know and we want to understand, but sometimes gaining that understanding is it's own special kind of horror.

But just having those inspirations and making those strange connections alone wasn't enough, of course. I still had to string some actual words together, not just feelings. 😆 So I broke out my notebook for mini-magnet brainstorming and started scribbling.

Well, okay, first I had to search up and read some existing six-word-stories from across the internet because it's been so long since I last tried to write one that I was having trouble getting in what felt like the right headspace to work with so few words. Then I got scribbling.

In said scribbling, I was reminded very much of a few years ago—ironically, the first time I followed an Obscutober list—when I made another one-off mini-magnet piece that was also meant to be a scary story in few words. Granted, that was 50 words or less, so still a very different experience.

That is to say though: I was reminded that "scary" writing is not my strong suit. 😅 I just can't even seem to quite grasp the "punch" to properly shift the words from ominous into actually spooky territory. And that was not made any easier by having to work in so few words.

My main take away from my efforts in the notebook is that it's not actually that hard to come up with six word (or less!) sentences that sound spooky...if you think of them within a scary context. For example, "They ignored the warnings," can be scary if you're thinking of it as people ignoring warnings that will inevitably lead to something dangerous/harmful happening. But it can just as easily be not very scary at all if this "they" is just ignoring warnings of "Oh don't touch that, the paint's still wet and you'll get paint on your hands."

Context is also very important in the words being anything close to a story, and not just...well, just words, if that makes any sense. "There was a body," is a sentence, yes, and it could definitely lean scary if you picture "body" as a non-living person. But it's still a relatively "flat" statement of fact.

I think that's a large part of why I kept thinking of Early Sunsets, and kind of songs in general as I was trying to figure out where to go with my ideas and feelings. Good song lyrics can squeeze a whole lot of story and metaphor into just a few words, and I feel that's especially true with My Chemical Romance. [One of many reasons why they're my favorite.

"They're building a coffin your size," is what I would consider a pretty much perfect scary six-word-story, straight from their song Mama, to give you a better idea of where I'm coming from. And if this could have just been a recycled song quote, I totally would've used that—but this was not the time nor place. 😆

To be fair, despite everything I just described about my thought process, in the end I'm not sure I totally succeeded in getting everything I wanted out of my six words, but of the options I wrote down (that were actually my words to use), this was the one I kept coming back to.

It puts vampires in my head first and foremost—Most certainly because that's my favorite "traditional" monster archetype, and if you know me at all that comes as no surprise at all, I'm sure. But there are plenty of other instances where the answer to the unwritten question of "Bitten by what?" Would be rightly terrifying: Zombie (as more directly related to Early Sunsets), Werewolf, even non-Halloween-ish things like a rabid animal or disease-carrying mosquito.

...Okay the rabid animal could still be Halloween-ish if it was a rabid bat or something, but you get the idea.

Yet there are still ways to put a more metaphorical spin on it; That this "she" could've been "bitten by a bug" as in something that changed her way of thinking or motivations in life and made her into a scarier person than she was before, or something like that.

So perfect, no, but it was the closest to striking the right balance of all the different things I wanted that I was able to come up with.

Which leaves us with the visual component. The magnets are what they always are, but what is this background?

Well, if you remember when I mentioned I've done this short-story-in-few-words kind of thing before, there's actually a touch more irony there. Last time, I used a photo is from a "Tezza College Kit" that I actually won from a past DeviantArt contest as my base and made some additions and modifications to better fit the mood I was going for. Since I knew full-well I wouldn't have time to come up with something from scratch for this, that was the first other option that came to mind.

So I sifted through those photos for something that felt like either a good fit or at least a good place to start.

And I must disclose that at that point, I was actually still strongly considering one other assortment of six words—I was thinking of "cheating the system" and submitting two separate six-word-stories that kind of went together. I ultimately decided not to because the more I thought of the two together, the weaker the other one felt compared to this one.

But I mention that because my initial photo pulls from the kit were pretty different because I was hoping to get two photos that seemed to go together and still felt right thematically. As much as I love the base photo I picked here—so much so I strongly considered it at the time for that 50 word story I keep referring to—It wouldn't have worked for the two-story idea really at all because I just didn't have another photo that would pair well with it for what I wanted.

That said, the photo was a little plain—pure black and white—on it's own, so I ended up fiddling with the colors a bit and bringing up the reds for some more drama.

I will note though that dramatic red wasn't actually my first choice. I had planned to just use the fact that photographing black and white things without a filter is challenging to my advantage, but the photo that was the best of the ones I took in other ways didn't have much color alteration going on. Originally, I was just going to add a little warmth/hints of sepia like happened naturally in one of the other photos I took, but since I had Photoshop open anyway I decided to play just a little, and the red came about as a result of that playtime.

I very nearly actually went with an all-over red tone (except for the white space in the middle), but thought the look was ultimately too dark. I did the spot red after thinking things over and deciding I really didn't want to artificially brighten the image up and mess with the black contrast if I could help it.

Whew. 😮‍💨 ...Leave it to me to make six little words so complicated and particular, right? 😆

I think I ended up trying to make up for "lost time" in not doing more with magnetic poetry this year, even though they're only a very small part of the process. My subconscious thoroughly missed the memo that that wasn't necessary. 😅

Still, frustration at myself for getting the timeline jumbled up aside, I had fun. 🙂 The length of this description might speak more loudly to that than anything else. 🤣

Speaking of, I hate to end this kind of abruptly, but I think I have finally covered everything I wanted to about the art at hand and I still have to cross-post this and do the Obscutober piece for today, too. So if you Sparklers don't mind, I'll leave you to ponder these words, encourage you again to go check out Survivor's Guilt—and the other 3 Terror Tales, too!—and be on my way.

Don't you Sparklers get unknowingly bitten by anything in the meantime, alright? 😉

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Inspired by FridgePoetProject

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⭐️ Like My Art and Want to see more of it? Here's All My Links! ⭐️