Written-Word Candyman

Today’s prompt: “Think of an episode from your life that you don’t dare write. Write it.”

Candyman. Bloody Mary. Voldemort. Say their names too many times, possibly in the vicinity of a mirror, and you risk them (or, in the case of He Who Must Not Be Named, some Death Eaters) showing up.

Those characters are the bogeymen of the spoken word, but there’s a less well known personage of the written word: Alice Hendrix. Alice Hendrix was a copy editor for a magazine in the 1870s. They say one of the writers there used “it’s” as a possessive too many times and she snapped. She strangled him with his own typewriter ribbon. Alice Hendrix was put to death in 1883. Legend has it that if you type “Alice Hendrix” five times in the same document, she appears behind you and stabs you to death with a sharp editing pencil.

During NaNoWriMo, you made the unfortunate error of naming your protagonist Alice Hendrix.