Jaycee Woods

While working on editing one of my humor stories, I altered it into a horror story.

After drafting, it was a humor about mistaken identity. What type of humor? Bawdy? Ribald? Sophomoric? Juvenile? Yes.

Later I realized that it shared an element with a Japanese story which I read about the lack of individuality in postwar Japanese life. As an example, the main character returning from work mistakenly entered the wrong apartment where he and the lady of the house ate dinner together before either realized his mistake as the apartments, husbands, wives, and lives all appeared the same.

In my story, the man thinks that the woman he returns home to is his wife both based on appearance and because she is always angry with him. However, she insists that she isn’t the same woman who he loves. As the conflict will be edited to take place in his dream, the two women are his image of the woman with whom he fell in love and the other is the woman she had become in the marriage.

How does this become horror? The edit will be the exploration of a man’s subconscious the night before he self-deletes after a marital fight. This will link it to another story I already drafted using my Angry Wife archetype character; now I just need to make the character names the same in both stories.

As a pair, this story will illustrate his subconscious turmoil while the other dramatized hers both before and after his self-deletion.

Why write about something so horrible? National security. According to SecondClassCitizen.org, 40% of military self-deletions are related to divorce and child custody conflicts. Meanwhile, divorce is a significant cause of troop retention failures and costs as divorcing men leave the military to be closer to their kids. Meanwhile, in general, men are 4x as likely as women to self-delete and 8x as likely during divorce.