Big Idea: Secret of the Chicago Pedway

For the month of October, my friend and fellow ChicagoNow blogger Kim Z Dale is featuring posts related to or inspired by Halloween on her is Listing Toward Halloween blog.

I wrote one called The Secret of the Chicago Pedway and I suppose technically it was my first published short story.  If you don't count anything I wrote for school newspapers back in the day.

The idea came to me since I take the Pedway back and forth between the Blue Line and my office.  I wanted something twilight zoney and came up with the idea of a bar that is hidden within the tunnels of the pedway. I had the thought that this friends go into a bar they never noticed before and something happens there that scares at least one of them, causing him to escape.

An alternative title was The Bar That Time Forgot.

I had the idea that certain songs would play and the lyrics would have double meanings.  Hence, Fallout Boy's My Songs Know What You Did In the Dark.

I didn't get to expand on that but another idea was Matchbox 20 Back 2 Good and the line:

Everyone here, knows everyone here is thinking about
Somebody else

So I had the beginning and the end written, but needed something in the middle.  I also had space and time constraints since this was for an expanded blog post.

I decided that something has to happen in the bar that makes our protagonist realize that something isn't right and causes him (or her) to leave his friends behind.

I thought maybe have everyone meet a former flame that got away and they are compelled to stay at the bar instead of going back to their normal everyday life that is missing something.

 The ending could also have been that when the protagonist finally leaves the bar, a lot of time has past, like decades.  But that would have required a lot more set up and I didn't want to put a novella on Kim's blog.

Happy Halloween


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