It's the end of the month, already! July has just flown by... I've gotten over the chaos caused by the nursing shortage, at least for now. I've moved to a new agency, Maxim. Maxim has filled most of my shifts, except for some 12-8 shifts that were left open by a male nurse who bailed out at the last moment. Sound familiar?

Tonight is the final class for "Writing the Horror Story." As a final project, I'm turning in my 4550-word, 25-page vampire story, "King of Lies." I hope Nancy likes it! As one of the assignments for the class, we had to use 10 class-generated "horror concepts" to come up with 10 story ideas. So, here are mine. The ones marked with a * are the ones Nancy said were "great" or "good."

10 Story Ideas

1. Helplessness: A man lies paralyzed in a hospital ICU. He wakes up one morning and discovers everyone gone. What happened? How does he get out? (NB: Not a zombie story!)

2. Unexplained disappearances: Passengers on an Alaska cruise ship begin disappearing mysteriously. A retired cop and his wife begin to suspect the cruise line is covering up a secret government gene-splicing project.

*3. Delusional obsession: A woman’s son is tragically killed in a distant war. One day at the mall, she meets a young man who strongly resembles her son (or does he?). She drugs and kidnaps the young man, taking him into her home, where she attempts to remake her formerly happy family life.

*4. “Just disturbing”: An Internet predator is stalking a woman. She uses her computer savvy to trace the stalker, only to discover the predator is her husband (who doesn’t know it’s her he’s stalking).

5. Contamination: A man with an obsessive-compulsive fear of touching others, suddenly and miraculously receives the gift of “laying on hands.” But when he cures others, he takes their maladies on himself.

6. The unknown: After a meteor strike in New Mexico, a young couple on vacation begin to suspect each other as not being “human.”

7. Agoraphobia: A man suffering from a debilitating, progressive eye disease begins seeing demons in large crowds.

8. Panic: Locked down in the basement under fear of an immanent terrorist strike, residents of a plush apartment building begin to turn on each other.

*9. Reincarnation: Ever since he was hit on the head with a baseball at age six, Charlie has had flashes of insight—visions—of a past world. Now as an adult he realizes that a crime unsolved in a past life might help him prevent one in his current life.

10. Secrets: A moralistic and talented doctor gets involved in a profitable, large corporation’s organ-harvesting business. When pushed to find more and rarer organs to harvest, he finds he must make a horrifying choice: sacrifice one member of his family to save the rest.