“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou
What if my friend followed through with his plan towards our boss?
So, as I’ve stated before, all of my short stories have a “What If” scenario that I’m playing out in my head. Some of them are a bit…far off. And then, there are some that work better when it’s grounded in reality. Revenge or Justice? is one of the stories.
I got the idea after my real-life experience working with an actual genius who wanted to take a break from a “thinking job” and work as a salesman. I even gave him the nickname “DeVoe” because of his genuine intellect. Everything that I wrote in the story about him was actually true. The only different thing is his actual actions towards his plan. He doesn’t actually go through with it because he got a six-figure salary job but what he taught me has stayed with me. This! This is what gave me the inspiration for this story.
The theme of this story plays on the idea that nerds should be feared because their intellect is something that can be weaponized. Usually, nerds become a beacon of progression as they used their knowledge and willingness to learn as a way to move the world forward. However, some embrace the darkness that others have cast on them, and I wanted to show that in this story.
But, as I was writing the story, I was losing my theme of duality as I was making the “Nicholas” character into an actual DeVoe which wasn’t working for me. See, Nicholas was nothing like the supervillain. He was kind and educational to others and worked to make me a better sociable person while sticking to my core personality. Plus, I already had one villain, who was also based on a real person but dialed up to an eleven, in the story; I didn’t need two. So, though I’m usually against this practice, I put myself in the story to show the real duality of intellect.
Now, normally, I put one thing about myself in everything I write but never my actual self because I found it a bit too cliche. But, I broke this rule to have a character be on the outside looking in. An innocent viewer, if you will. I gave the character my name and personality but changed his ethnicity. My favorite thing is that we hate wearing suits, which is so fucking true for the same reason that I stated in the story. It worked for me and made the story move along quite nicely.
The story was always meant to be read as a diary with breaks in-between. That part was always a no-brainer for me. But the interesting part of it was remember everything he told that he was going to do while adding the things between it all. He only told me what he wanted to do. He never actually followed through with it so I only had his endgame to work it. But I think I did a pretty good job with what I had to work with. It gave my editor the chills.
The only thing that I wish I could have done was to add more journal entries to the diary. I feel that I could have added more weight to the evitably of the climax but had to be reminded that too much can be a bad thing, especially for a short story. But I feel that I should return to this story in the future. Maybe as an Audible or something like that; I can’t picture it as a novel.
You can buy the book on Amazon. The link is here.
You can also learn about it on Goodreads. The link for it is here.
