An action packed and busy vacation week. It was the final gasp of summer before the kids go back to school so we made the best of it by getting out for a couple of camping trips. Comfort camping is now a ‘thing’ so we tried that in Banff. A couple of days in a luxurious yurt/tent cabin on the shore of Two Jack Lake. Fantastic. Then I took one of my sons on our traditional annual tenting/fishing/camping trip. It was a great time punctuated with one mishap. A snagged fishing hook came loose unexpectedly and became embedded in my arm. Given it still had a bit of a barb, it was a challenge to extract. I ended up cutting it out with a jackknife and a multi-tool. Battlefield surgery! I’m sure some of this will make it into a story or two.

I found time for writing every day. After chatting with my Mom and Brother I got ‘The Lord of Corn-Town’ written up and posted. It has some fun memories.

The third chapter my Frostbyte novel had been sitting there nagging at me so I finished a rough draft. It just needs some time to age and I’ll get it cleaned up and up on the site.

A dark sort of horror/crazy/bizzaro horror anthology I like is accepting submissions. I had a tiny bud of a story idea that blossomed. It practically wrote itself in a few hours. I love it when that happens. It’s twisted.
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It was a lot of fun writing my last short story The 8th Slice. I’ve been reading a fair amount of darker material lately. Tales written in a Lovecraftian style and others containing subtle understated horror. This is a genre that I would love to study in depth.

The story itself came to me while running. They often do. There is a point of singular focus on a long run where my mind clears and an idea appears. If I can pull it in and wrap some structure around it, I can spend the rest of the run writing it in my head. When I get home I dump it all into a file to work on. I know other runners take dictation devices. I think I’d feel self conscious talking to myself (as opposed to cursing or repeating a mantra) but it might be worth pursuing. It is the worst feeling to get to the end of a run, exhausted, and have the great bits slip away in the fog of pain and exhaustion. Like waking from a dream and grasping as the threads blow away.

Back to the story. A friend once admitted she had a dream in which she poisoned me. We played online games together and it became a running joke for years. It was her birthday and I thought it would be a cool idea to write her a story. Naturally it had to involve poison. I wanted it to be set in a dreary Scottish town and include other characters from our gaming guild. I worked in a few subtle references to various events and assassinated some personalities. I think it turned out pretty well.
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