why would someone's ex-girlfriend disappear?

[vindemiatrix]

I have an idea for a story where this guy Sam's ex disappears and he sets out on a bizarre and surreal mission to find her. Apparently she was in a state of some distress when she left him; she didn't give a reason, just left and he never heard from her again.

What happened to her? Where did she go? I'm developing this myself, as it happens, but I really would LOVE other people's input!

[Aimless]

She Ascended and became a goddess-servant to a tribe of strange humans who use our reality as a breeding ground for gods and goddesses.

[AXJ]

It's always been a personal fantasy, during rough patches of my life, that I would just disappear one day. Take the clothes on my back on the contents of my pockets, walk to the nearest bus station and buy a ticket for anywhere, and leave everyone wondering. Just keep going until I ran out of money or found somewhere I liked, and start a new life.

Perhaps she stopped in Reno, Nevada, where she found a job tending bar at a seedy little dive where she could get paid in cash and not asked too many questions.

Could be that she's in Toyko, teaching conversational English to Japanese executives.

Or maybe she's doing hair braiding on the beach of Grand Cayman, soaking up rays and making a killing off the tourists.

Maybe she's become a nun, and is cloistered in a monastary somewhere.

She could always be hitchhiking her way across the US, just like Kerouac. Or maybe dusted off her whitewater kayaking skills and is guiding whitewater trips in Costa Rica. Or joined a troupe of top-notch French buskers.

Or hey, maybe she's broke and panhandling in Barcelona. Ya never know.

[vindemiatrix]

Great suggestions. *grin* But what I'm looking for is something inbetween the two. I can't write straight-up real-life fiction, but I can't write fantasy either, but I am good at horror and surrealism - I'm aiming at something inbetween the first two with a good deal of the third. In my head, the shape of the story starts off fairly normal, with Missy's disappearance likely to be something like AXJ's suggestions, but then it starts to get a little odd, and then strange, and eventually becomes utterly bizarre. Like any good horror, really. *grin*

[Aimless]

Are we talking, like, American Gods here? :o

Maybe she ends up repeatign her life no matter where she ends up? And soon has an army of ex boyfriends looking for her? :o :o

EDIT: And fighting each other, obviously, like animals.

[vampindelibleink]

Her extended family, about whom she's never spoken (and about whom he was never interested) live in Transylvania and are hereditary vampire hunters (with inherited powers, as well as passed on knowledge to splat bats). Her immediate family migrated to wherever your MS begins. Members of the extended family are disappearing, one by one and she obeys the call to return to do something about it (her immediate family don't want to talk about it and stonewall your MC).

Or her extended family could be into voodoo, ghost hunting, exorcisms etc

[AXJ]

Okay, any particular themes or brands of horror you want to use?

[SouthernTiger]

I'll tell you why I left a guy without a note or so much as a good-bye.

I just didn't want to tell him I wasn't exactly interested in him.

And then I moved to another state.

Although, I too, have often contemplated just disappearing. Cashing out just enough of the bank account to tide me over for awhile, getting in my car and driving until I hit a state where I meet up an old friend or two from college, who wouldn't breathe a WORD to my husband or anyone else about my whereabouts. Maybe a letter to my parents letting them know I'm fine, of course. Just so my mother didn't have a heart attack on the spot, though.

I'd go the camping route, but unfamilar darkness really freaks me out. I'd start sleeping during the day, for sure.

But there was a grad student at Notre Dame, who just up and left one day. They found him months later playing professional backgammon. True story.

[phage2004]

If your going for more of a horror/surreal thing, then there are a couple possibilities, the first being that she is being pursued by something, of course.

A more original possibility is that there is something strange about her, that her nature is changing. Maybe around the time of the full moon she goes a little nuts, and changes in some way, forgetting him and leaving him. Or maybe she's leaving him because she thinks she will hurt him, as opposed to someone following her hurting him.

[vindemiatrix]

Brilliant ideas so far! I am both incredibly grateful and very envious, since my creativity seems to have run dry lately. I've managed to do a tiny bit of developing, and I have deduced that Missy (the missing chick) was being chased (thanks Phage), but I still don't know why she was being chased, where she is now, etc, etc.

Okay, any particular themes or brands of horror you want to use?

Honestly? Not a clue. More psychological than gore and violence. I'm sort of aiming for the same sort of feel as The Ring and other Oriental horror movies and books - supernatural, but in a dark, unexpected, surreal sort of way. I'm still thinking up a premise, but themes seem to include pursuit, never being safe, distortion of reality (at one point Missy shows up on CCTV as an amorphous black shadow, christ knows why) and the whole normal things suddenly becoming frightening.

Are we talking, like, American Gods here?

Don't know. Haven't read it. ^_^

[Aimless]

READ!

READ!

[vindemiatrix]

I plan to. It'll probably be in my next bulk Amazon buy anyway. I read Neverwhere and liked it a lot, although it did seem like something I'd write, which also depresses me because Gaiman did it far better than I ever could. ;__;

[Ariella]

There's a sideways-sequel to American Gods out, too. So if you end up buying American Gods, get Anansi Boys too.

Because, hee. Anansiiiiiiii!

[AXJ]

Sounds like it might be fun to paint it so that the MC, and the reader, believes that she's undergone some sort of psychotic break and that she needs to be brought in for help. Maybe she leaves a note that sort of suggests she's having classic paranoid delusions, but keep everything very normal, so maybe the reader starts out believing they're reading a story about the unfortunate dangers of mental illness.

But as your MC continues on her path he keeps running into strange, disturbing clues. Maybe he tries to find the owner of the diner where she waitressed for a couple of weeks, but discovers that he died in a freak accident- he was overrun by fire ants while napping on his back porch, maybe, and nobody's sure why he didn't wake up at the first bite, since he was a teetotatler in the best of health. And/or perhaps he finds an employment record showing she had worked as a temp librarian for a couple of weeks in this vaguely creepy small town, but when he arrives he finds the library closed and padlocked, and he can't find anyone who's willing to talk to him about why its closed, or even admit that they saw his girl.

And eventually, that could lead him (and the readers) to wonder if maybe she IS being chased by something sinister... or... if maybe SHE is doing/causing these things... or maybe, just maybe, if the boyfriend himself is ultimately the one who has gone insane (or gotten possessed, or whatever), is chasing her, and not realizing that he's doing it. That kind of uncertainty can make for some really great suspense. 8)

[vindemiatrix]

That is EXACTLY the kind of thing I'm looking for! That's just sparked off a whole bunch of ideas for me. It also fits perfectly with a tentative sort of ending that I had. I'm not going to copy the examples you presented but I'll definitely go along those sort of lines.

I think I had the idea in my head; I just needed it clarified. Thank you EVER so much. Now I can get on with developing. ^__^