Fingersnaps

On the heels of the last post, how about migraine symptoms as part of your story?  I ran across a mention of migraine aura being phantosomia (phantoms smells) and looked it up.  Turns out there are a TON of uncommon aura phenomena out there.  You can read a lot on them, including personal anecdotes, on Migraine Aura.

I'm not sure how to use migraines specifically in a plot; but the thing for me is that there are lots of uncommon symptoms and side effects.  I think that the last post has had me considering the possibility of murder/ suicide/ assination in the depths of my back brain-- stuff an urban fantasy or noir-type story might have in them. 

Perhaps you might get the Writer's Guide to Poisons and look up some intriguing symptoms for a poison victim; but you want to have the symptoms also be a red herring of some kind.  So you go look up medine side effects and symptoms of diseases.  Perhaps you have your murder victim have a disease, such as migraine,that has symptoms that mimic the poisoning symptoms.  Or perhaps the symptoms are really caused by some underlying disease and no one knew it because they were rare.  Or perhaps the person with hallucinatory aura symptoms (be they oral, visual, aural, taste) is eventually proven to not be crazy (or, as above, the reverse) and thus provides some critical clue or red herring.

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Additionally, an amusing (sort of) anecdote from helping a pal do a crossword puzzle.  He does them, for the most part; but I help out with spelling and soundingboard/word retrieval services.  (My vocabularly is, like many of we writers, ridiculously large.)  Today, he handed over the puzzle with a few words left, because something had been filled in wrong.  One of the issues was a word he'd filled in as 'fingersnap.'  It was a cookie.  Now, I ask you: what other cookie has 'snap' at the end?  Gingersnap, of course.  I insisted that he was a nutbag for using the 'f' there, it had to be a 'g'--and the cross clue proved me right.  But because I was so certain that there was no such cookie called a 'fingersnap' he looked it up...and Lo! there IS such a cookie.  (He'd never hear heard of it, either, but had to look it up just to be a jerk, lol.  And it's apparently a rare usage, involving biscotti, so I'm not sure it even counts, lol.) 

The point being, you need to open your mind and consider that what you KNOW may not, in fact, be TRUE.  Other options you refuse to consider might be valid. 

Comments

[fairyhedgehog]

Fingersnaps? Who'd have thought it?

You have so many good ideas!

[Charles Gramlich]

Auras are fascinating things. I'm especialy intrigued with epilieptic auras as possible explanations for some ghost phenomena.

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