Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-29969337-20161104130817/@comment-29969337-20161106153904

Hi guys, thank you both so much for taking the time to write such thoughful, articulate and lengthy responses.

It seems I lost you both at the same point, that the ultimate reveal is that the narrator is performing these acts on herself because she hates herself so much. She is 'the girl' that she refers to. She is simply staring at her hatefully because she is harming herself infront of a mirror. She is attacking her own hatred.

Jason is a red herring, I use the name and reference to a killed baby at the same time to attempt to mislead the reader into believing that Jason was the name of the protagonist's son. The truth is that the narrator fell pregnant and then terminated the pregnancny. When her partner, Jason, discovered this, he left her. The narrator loved him so deeply that she has now suffered a psychological breakdown and suffers such intense self-loathing that she viciously mutilates herself (the title is a clue to the twist, other titles I entertained were also words that could be prefixed with 'self-': Mutilation - although that felt a little too on-the-nose, and Harm, perhaps naming the victim/narrator Harmony to play on this further). Ultimately, as horrifying as I intended the gore to be, I wanted the most horrifying aspect to be the reveal that somebody was insanely committing these acts on herself.

It's strange, the story is far and away the most upvoted I've submitted on nosleep, yet it's also received the highest number of downvotes. Honestly, I'm not sure where the gore and violence came from, I've never written anything like it and was a little appalled at myself after I'd finished.

The aqueous humour passage was used purely as an excuse to re-use the same description of 'stringy, sweat-soaked hair', another hint that 'the girl' and the narrator are one and the same. It seems I need more such hints late on!

So to conclude at the very least I need to rewrite that last couple of paras to clear up the ending, then, hopefully, all will become more clear.

Thank you so much for your feedback and assistance, i'll post the updated draft here and, hopefully, you guys will get more from it this time.

MisterStuff (talk) 15:39, November 6, 2016 (UTC)