Got that Tingly Feeling!

I sat down this week to sketch out some basic outlines for a couple of new fiction stories that came to me over the last little while. If you write, you know this feeling - it's this tingly excitement over the coming together of a new story. It's like preparing to set out on an adventure, only instead of packing the car with the cooler full of food and the sleeping bags and tent, you pack your imagination full of goodies and details that promise to develop as your fingers hit the keyboard.  And if you're a horror writer, like I am, the perks are thrills and shivers along the way. 

I almost said 'it's the time of year for that kind of story', but in reality, that's not true. You can find inspiration for horror stories in any season; the spooky stuff, the shivers, the dreadful anticipation of a scare that feels like the drop of a steep roller-coaster ride exists among flower beds as easily as it does within the realms of leaf-encrusted autumn pumpkins carved out along a frosty step.

Still, autumn elicits a special thrill, doesn't it? You crunch your way through piles of downed leaves, smelling their musty aroma, too aware of the lengthening shadows along the road at dusk as the cold season creeps nearer. The sky darkens to the color of cobalt, the air tinged heavily with wood smoke, trees raking the sky like livid, fleshless hands as they grow bare. You reach home, you open the door and step in, and as you turn to shut the door you become aware that a little of that night, that wind, that smoke, a leaf stuck to the edge of one heel has come in with you. Yes. You've brought a little of that cold season with its promise of dark things inside...perhaps you'll hear that first flutter of movement whisper its way along the floor near the edge of your bed hours later.

So the tingle of stories waits in the fingertips; waits to hit the keys and allow those shadows to take form.

Are you writing? Are you creating your own shadows, I hope?

Courtesy of Google Images.com