The Third Time
The writer’s mostdreaded question is “Where do you get your ideas?” The answer, of course, iseverywhere, but people hate this answer. They want to believe there’s avery specific mechanism to idea generating, one that they can learn. But thetruth of the matter is, if you have to ask where ideas come from, you'll never understandany answer, not fully.
Popular media often portrays horror writers drawing onone traumatic experience in their past for their fiction. When Stephen King wasa child, one of his friends was killed by a train. Supposedly he witnessed theevent, but he has no memory of it. Over the years, a lot of armchairpsychologists have suggested this one event led Stephen King to write horror,but even if it did affect his creative life, it’s far too reductive to ascribehis prodigious output to one event in his life, no matter how tragic.
Still, there are times when writers can point tocertain events as being pivotal in their development as both a person and anartist, and two such events happened to me in 1973, when I was nine years old. MyGreat Uncle Red (whose real name was Lawrence, but he hated being called that)died unexpectedly of a heart attack in February of that year. Uncle Red waslike a second father to me, and I often spent weekends at his house, along withAunt Becky and Great-Grandma Mast (Becky’s mother). He was the first closefamily member of mine who died, and the event was a highly traumatic one forme. Then in the summer of that year, my family went on a week-long vacation atRocky Fork Lake in Ohio. We had a small camper we stayed in, and during theweek, I met a kid who was collecting cans to recycle for 5 cents apiece. I’d neverheard of recycling before (this was 1973), so I decided to help him. Myparents had told me that I could wander around the area anywhere I wanted(like, I said – 1973) but I was forbidden to go near the lake since I couldn’tswim. Of course, Recycling Boy wanted to look for cans by the lake, and since Ididn’t want him to know I couldn’t swim, I said nothing and went with him. Wewalked out onto the boat dock, and as I was looking down into the water, hepushed me in as a joke. I, of course, was terrified and I panicked, thrashingin the water, going down, coming back up, convinced I was going to drown. Backthen, it was common folk knowledge that if you went down for the third time,you would never come back up. It’s not true, but I believed it then, and I wasgoing down for the third time when the kid grabbed my hand and pulled me ontothe dock. As we were leaving the lake – me sopping wet and reeking of lakewater – he said, “I’ve never been a hero before,” and all I wanted to do wassmack the little bastard in the face since he was the one who’d pushed me intothe water. But I said nothing because I knew what happened was my own damnfault for not listening to what my parents told me.
These two events – Uncle Red’s death and my near-death– sent me into a two-year existential depression, and when I came out of it (asmuch as I ever did) I was a different person. I’d been a monster kid all mylife, loved every horror movie and comic I could get my hands on, but Iunderstood then that pain and sorrow were part of horror too, and it changed myrelationship to the genre forever.
I’ve drawn on my near-drowning in my fiction, whetherdirectly or indirectly, many times over the years. Here’s a list:
Short Stories
· “BlackwaterDreams.” Bruce Coville’s Book of Nightmares 2. Scholastic Books, 1997.
· “TillVoices Drown Us.” Apprentice Fantastic, DAW Books, 2002.
· “WatersDark and Deep.” Masques V. Gauntlet Press, 2006.
· “SwimmingLessons.” Delirium Books website, 2006.
· “SurfaceTension.” Queen Anne’s Resurrection. Dec. 2011.
· “Lover,Come Back to Me.” Tales from the Lake. Crystal Lake Publishing, 2014.
· “TheNature of Water.” Children of Gla’aki. Dark Regions, 2016.
· “FathomlessTides.” The Beauty of Death. Independent Legions Publishing, 2016.
· “EveryBeast of the Earth.” The Beauty of Death 2 – Death by Water. Independent
· LegionsPublishing, 2017.
Novellas
“Deep Like the River.” Dark Regions, 2014.
Novels
The opening chapter of We Will Rise. Flame TreePress, 2022.
A drowning incident is a major plot element in mycurrently unpublished psychological thriller novel Pretty Like Butterflies.
In 2018, I collected a number of my water stories forthe collection A Little Aqua Book of Marine Stories, which came out fromBorderlands Press. Here’s the introduction:
Introduction: Water, Water, Everywhere
I don’t believe in astrology, but my sign is Pisces –the fish – and I’ve felt a psychological connection to water all my life. Ilove water.
And it terrifies me.
When I was nine, I almost drowned. This happened notlong after my first experience with death, when my Uncle Red died unexpectedlyof a heart attack. These two events were a double punch to my psyche, a pair ablows that in some ways I’ve never quite recovered from.
When I was eleven, Jaws came out. I was amonster kid who read horror comics and watched scary movies on Shock Theaterevery weekend. The previews for Jaws made it seem like it would be afantastic monster movie, so I begged my dad to take me. I had never seen amovie like that before – so suspenseful and intense – and while I loved it, Iwas also traumatized on some level. The idea that a monstrous, ravenous thingcould be concealed beneath the placid surface of the ocean and burst forth toattack at any moment was terrifying. Just like how Death lurks behind thesurface of everyday life, ready to claim us when we least expect it. Just as ithad claimed my uncle two years earlier.
Water stirs imagination. It can take any shape, andanything can be concealed in its depths. Horrors, treasures, or things whichare a bit of both. I return to the water time and again in my fiction. I findit an unlimited well of inspiration for tales of horror and dark fantasy. Thesurface of the water is like a border between our world – the world of sunlightand air – and a hidden world of shadow and unseen creatures, a hostileenvironment in which we cannot survive, and which we can only experience inshort glimpses for as long as we can hold our breath. To me, this is theessence of existential horror. People swimming, boating, fishing, enjoyingtheir lives on the surface of a great mystery, trying their best not to thinkabout what might wait for them below.
I never learned to swim, not very well anyway, and Ihate putting my head under water. I can’t stand the feel of water on my face,the sound it makes in my ears . . . Because of this, I made sure my twodaughters had swimming lessons from the time they were toddlers, and now theyboth swim like fishes.
In the stories that follow, you’ll see echoes – orperhaps a better word would be ripples – of my experiences with water. You knowwhat they say: writing is the cheapest form of therapy.
So turn the page and dive in. The you-know-what isfine.
Opening Scene of “Waters Dark and Deep”
For this scene, I drew heavily on my own experience ofnearly drowning.
Water roaring in her ears, pushing heavyagainst her ear drums. Hands clawing for purchase, feet kicking, trying to findsomething, anything solid to stand on, but there’s nothing – nothing but water.She opens her mouth to scream, takes a deep breath first, but instead offilling her lungs with air, liquid rushes down her throat and a shower ofbubbles bursts from her mouth. Her lungs feel full and heavy, as if they’refilled with concrete and it’s weighing her down, down, down . . .
My camera! she thinks. I can’t lose mycamera! Mom and Dad will kill me!
She looks up, sees a scattered diffusionof light somewhere above her – five feet? Five hundred? There’s no realdifference at this point. There’s a whole world of air up there, if only shecould reach it. If only she was wearing a life jacket, if only she had learnedhow to swim . . .
A small shape slides toward her throughthe gray murk: sleek, scaled andstreamlined. It’s a fish of some sort. Daddy would know what kind, but shedoesn’t. It turns as it nears her face, displaying its flank, a cold black eyelooking at her with supreme indifference as it passes, and then it’s gone,returned once more to the darkness it came from, and she’s still going down,down, down . . .
I don’t recall seeing a fish when I almost drowned,but I had just gotten glasses, and I was worried that I would lose them in thelake and my parents would be angry with me. I changed that to a camera for thisstory.
I try to be careful about revisiting my near-drowningin my fiction, but sometimes I can’t help it. When that happens, I go with theflow (get it?) and let the story come out however it wants to.
Last year, I realized that 2023 would be the 50thanniversary of my near-drowning. In all that time, I had never returned toRocky Fork, didn’t even have a clear idea where it was located. I thought itmight be a cool idea to go back there, to reconnect to a pivotal time in mylife – at an age when I’m much more aware my own mortality – and as a giantfuck you to the lake that tried to take my life but failed. (Or did it? MaybeI’m a water-logged corpse typing this right now.)
Yesterday, my wife Christine Avery, and my littledachshund Bailey, accompanied me on my pilgrimage to Rocky Fork. I don’tremember the exact date I almost drowned, but it was in summer, and I figuredthe end of June was close enough.
So what was it like?
Weird, of course, but strangely peaceful in a way,too. When I got home, my daughter Leigh asked if I’d been scared. I told her, “Notreally.” And it was true, I wasn’t. What I felt was something deeper than fear,something beyond fear, something I don’t have a name for.
More of this later.
Rocky Fork is located about an hour east from where Ilive in Ohio, in the midst of farmland, woods, and old, decaying small towns.Christine didn’t grow up in the state, but as we drove, she said, “Now Iunderstand why so many horror stories are set in Ohio.” I couldn’t remember whichspecific part of the lake I almost drowned at, but since it had boat docks, wefirst headed for an area called Fisherman’s Wharf. The day was cool and overcast,and felt more like September than late June. It seemed like a perfectatmosphere for the kind of adventure we were on.
When we got to Fisherman’s Wharf, it didn’t look familiarto me, nor did it resemble the scene I’d painted in a number of my stories overthe years. The shape of the far shore did seem kind of familiar, andChristine and I wondered if the area had simply changed a lot in theintervening years. Because my family had stayed at the campgrounds all thoseyears ago, Christine thought we should try there next. We drove to the area,and as soon as we were there, I recognized it. The Welcome Center was in the samespot I remembered it (although the building was light brown and I remember it aswhite), and the boat docks were there, looking exactly as they had fifty yearsago. Even the few rental pontoon boats moored there looked much the same. Inone way, the area looked smaller than I remembered, but in another way itlooked much larger. For fifty years I’d imagined the scene up close, without thinkingabout how far out the lake went, the trees on the far shore, the expanse of skyabove. We walked onto the dock and I led Christine to the decking (the part thatsticks out from the main dock which boats are tied to) where it seemed to me Ifell from. If it wasn’t the exact spot, it was close. I’d forgotten this was afloating dock, and when I stepped off the ramp onto the decking, I was startledwhen it moved beneath me. I’m a lot heavier now than I was at nine, so maybethe decking didn’t move much back then. Or maybe that detail was lost to mymemory, driven out by the experience of falling into the water. The unsteadinessof the decking made me a bit nervous, and I thought it would be ironic if Ilost my balance and fell into the water on my first visit here in fifty years.(I wasn’t worried about drowning, though. I can swim a little now, andChristine used to be a competitive swimmer who at one point was being scoutedfor the Olympics, so I knew I was safe.)
I walked to the end of the decking and looked out overthe lake. I turned to my right because that’s the side I was standing on when RecyclingBoy pushed me in. I had been looking to see if I could spot any fish. I hadonce done the exact same thing at a lake in Michigan when I was four, but Ifell in all by myself then. I was wearing a lifejacket, though, and just bobbedin the water until my dad came to get me. I touched the lake water to reconnectwith it, and I flipped it off as a “Fuck you, I survived for fifty more yearsafter you tried to take me!” gesture. I had Christine take pictures so I couldpost them with this essay. That was a huge difference from when I was nine. Backthen, we didn’t think about recording every moment of our lives or purposelystaging them for the Internet.
Christine and Bailey came out onto the decking withme, and we hung out for a while. Then we left and visited the nearby campgroundstore. Christine got a refrigerator magnet. I got a coffee. I would’ve gotsomething to remind me of almost drowning there, but – unsurprisingly – they soldnothing like that, not even a I ALMOST DIED AT ROCKY FORK T-shirt.
Earlier I said I wasn’t afraid but I felt something beyondfear revisiting the place of my near-death experience. I don’t know how long I’lllive, but I know I’m a hell of a lot closer to my end than I am to mybeginning. The lake was my bete noire for so many years, but it cannot begin tocompare to Time and my own aging body. That feeling was, in an odd way, peacefuland came with a sense of rightness, as if this was how things should be. Mymaking peace with the natural cycle of life? Or my rationalizing my ownforthcoming end because there’s not a goddamned thing I can do about it? Maybeboth.
I told Christine that the spot where I almost drownedmight be a good place to scatter my ashes once I’m gone. Kind of a way offulfilling what the lake tried to do five decades ago, and maybe a way ofthanking it for letting me go. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day I write astory about a middle-aged man revisiting the lake where he almost drowned as achild. I don’t know what supernatural/surreal element I’ll add, but I’ll comeup with something. I always do.
I learned one other thing during my trip to RockyFork. I have a new answer to the question “Where do you get your ideas?" Idon’t get them anywhere. I am my ideas.
If 1973 was the first time I went down in the water,and 2023 was (at least metaphorically) the second time, what will the third timebe and when will it happen? I don’t know, but I plan to tread water as long asI can – and to keep writing about it.
Photo Gallery
"Fuck you, lake!"
I had no idea Christine took this picture of me touching the water.
Pensively pondering
Rocky Fork magnet
Bailey wondering what the hell is going on
My love
DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION
AHunter Called Night
A Hunter Called Night was releasedearlier this month in trade paperback and ebook formats.
If you’d like a preview of the book, you can listen tome read the first chapter here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlxK0PANa2g&t=1s
Synopsis:
A sinisterbeing called Night and her panther-like Harriers stalk their quarry, a manknown only as Arron. Arron seeks refuge within an office building, a placeNight cannot go, for it’s part of the civilized world, and she’s a creature ofthe Wild. To flush Arron out, she creates Blight, a reality-warping field thatslowly transforms the building and its occupants in horrible and deadly ways.But unknown to Night, while she waits for the Blight to do its work, a group ofsurvivors from a previous attempt to capture Arron are coming for her. Thehunter is now the hunted.
Order Links
Flame Tree: https://www.flametreepublishing.com/a-hunter-called-night-isbn-9781787586345.html
Amazon Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/Hunter-Called-Night-Tim-Waggoner/dp/1787586316/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1668832377&sr=1-1
Barnes and Noble Paperback: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-hunter-called-night-tim-waggoner/1142487192?ean=9781787586314
NOOK: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-hunter-called-night-tim-waggoner/1142487192?ean=9781787586352
Lord of the Feast
My next novel for Flame Tree, Lord of the Feast,won’t be out until April 2024, but the paperback is available for preorder.(The ebook edition should be available to preorder soon.) No cover art to share yet.
Synopsis:
Twenty years ago, a cult attempted to create their owngod: The Lord of the Feast. The god was a horrible, misbegotten thing, however,and the cultists killed the creature before it could come into its full power.The cultists trapped the pieces of their god inside mystic nightstones thenwent their separate ways. Now Kate, one of the cultists’ children, seeks outher long-lost relatives, hoping to learn the truth of what really happened onthat fateful night. Unknown to Kate, her cousin Ethan is following her, hopingshe’ll lead him to the nightstones so that he might resurrect the Lord of theFeast – and this time, Ethan plans to do the job right.
Order Links:
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/lord-of-the-feast-tim-waggoner/1143636012?ean=9781787586369
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