Stop at Nothing

Hey all,

True to my word, I have another story for you. This one will take a little explaining so bear with me, if you will.

This is actually a story I wrote back when I was a 1st semester freshman taking my first Intro to Creative Writing class. The assignment was to write a story based on a news story. This story is written based on the death of Dimebag Darrell, the lead guitarist for Pantera and Damageplan. The story behind his death is still a bit convoluted due to the very nature of the death so I felt it was perfect for a short story. The fact's behind his death are these: Darrell was playing with the band Damageplan at a venue in Ohio when a man, Nathan Gale, shot him six times from the audience before shooting wildly at the rest of the crowd. Mixed stories about the chaos keep us from knowing the truth about what happened that night but when the smoke cleared, "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott, Jeff "Mayhem" Thompson, Nathan Bray, Erin Halk and Nathan Gale himself lay dead.

Speculation about motives ranged from anger over the break-up of Pantera to stolen songs to simple insanity. Regardless of the motive, this act shocked the rock world and stole away one of the greatest guitarists of our time far before his prime. If you haven't heard this story before, just to give you an idea of how huge this was, KISS frontman, Gene Simmons donated his own specialized KISS Kasket for him to be buried in (since KISS was very important to Abbott) and Eddie Van Halen gave his own guitar to be buried with him (as Abbott had requested a copy of Eddie's guitar). THIS LINK will give you an idea of how many tribute songs were written by all types of artists about Darrell's death and Dean Guitars even created a special guitar in tribute to this fantastic guitarist.

I wrote this story from the eyes of Nathan Gale before and during the tragedy. It's not the best story ever and it's rather short (fitting the assignment directions) but I think it turned out better than I expected at the time so I figured I could share it with you all. It was my first attempt at depicting insanity and it was interesting doing it through the eyes of someone who fully believes they are perfectly sane. Anyway, enjoy! As always, I welcome comments! Oh and in case you were wondering, the title is actually just a placeholder title. Just throwing that out there.


Stop at Nothing


My next story I'm working on now is a more light-hearted story than the last few, starting to go further towards the fantastical while still being based in our world. The idea came to me in a dream (no joke...) so we'll see how that goes. I figure it'll either be awesome or really suck. If it's the latter, I won't subject you to it, don't worry hahaha. Just letting you know where I'm at right now. Peace friends!

EDIT: Sorry about the short bit of downtime. If you tried to download the story and couldn't, try again now. I accidentally put the story up in the wrong format but it should work fine now. Sorry for the confusion!