Project

I must admit, when Mr. Mitchell first handed out the assignment sheets for the end-of-the-semester creative writing project, I inwardly (and possibly outwardly) groaned with extreme displeasure. I’m a second semester senior and my work ethic has been dwindling since the calc AP I took last year. This seemed like just another piece of busywork that was destined to suck up my free time and sleep hours.

However, as I started to look into possible topics, I found a lot of interesting historical anomalies that I’ve heard about but never really looked into before such as the notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper or the Zodiac Killer. I ended up spending a lot more time than I intended reading into and researching these cases and thought about how fun it would be to create identities for these shadowy assassins. After all, who doesn’t want to write a good detective story? Later though, I found yet another topic that piqued my interest—American CIA intrigue. Everybody’s well aware of the poorly executed Bay of Pigs and most people have heard of United Fruit etc etc. That led to me thinking: could there have been any other cases of CIA influence, just like in Libra? 

After doing a bit more research, I discovered Operation Northwoods (a secretly planned CIA operation involving Reichstag-burning-like false flag events designed to incite national violence against Cuba) and sort of just built off of that from there. Eventually, I decided that a good interlocking topic for all these CIA intrigues would be the Cuban Missile Crisis and my story just sort of wrote itself from there. 

Turns out, I did end up losing a good amount of sleep but it was more or less worth it in the end.