Talk:Flu/@comment-24066703-20140619013951/@comment-25021720-20140619120111

Thanks a ton for the comment. I know that this site is designed for "fictional" stories, but I've always found reality to be much more terrifying. I suppose you can say this story hit me in the spur of the moment. I'm an interent whore, and usually I tend to do a lot of research on pointless things. However, what I wrote here wasn't pointless. My intentional goal was to make the reader realize life is so fragile, and that just a single thread pulled can change everything. I spent quite a while making sure I produced correct facts on the disease (H5N1); and it's unnerving to think that something like this actually exists. And because a story (at least none I've seen) of this caliber has been written before on the Wiki, i decided I might as well give it a shot.

At first, I was wanting to only talk about the disease in an informative way--throw in a bunch of facts, and unnerve the reader about how death is closer than we think. But then I thought: "That's just not right. Too boring." And so after a few minutes of thinking and going over myself, these two journal entries about a young boy whose older sibling caught the illness was what I came up with.

There's only been around 700 people to actually been affected with the disease, but more than half of them died (60%). Truth be told, scientists have spent years trying to treat H5N1 so it won't spread, and by my knowledge they haven't gained a lot of ground.

The main goal to this story wasn't to try and terrify the reader into paranoia like all the others written here. The goal was to inform the reader, make them see a new light--a true light about our world. That's what scares me the most. I'm not saying the stories here aren't good (some are extremely well written) but they've never frightened me. Same thing with horror films, games, etc. I find that the most terrifying things are the things that are true.