It’s turned cold and has been raining steadily since early morning. My parents, who live in Kemp, Oklahoma, are iced in. The rain is not scheduled to cease until tomorrow morning. We teachers were given Martin Luther King Day off, and I’m grateful, but I’d enjoy it better if the weather weren’t so wretched. It also doesn’t help to know that I’m returning to a school building that hasn’t had heat in a week, and tomorrow it’s supposed to be REALLY cold. If we’re lucky, the ice storm will skirt north of us. Depressing weather.

On the other hand, cold rain always sets a certain other kind of mood. Right now it makes me want to write horror stories. I’ve mentioned in this blog before that one of my favorite books on writing is Writing Horror: A Handbook by the Horror Writers Association. In one chapter, Nancy Holder says, “The horror writer’s basic weapon is primal fear, which we either discover or develop in childhood–of the dark, of the bogeyman, of being alone, being hurt, being killed. People spend lifetimes hiding these fears, and hiding from these fears . . . .”

It requires personal courage and honesty to be an effective writer of horror. Holder quotes Clive Barker: “Horror writers are the ones who venture into the caves and dark places and return to tell the rest of the tribe what they saw.”

I guess it’s time for me to quit complaining about the rain and get to writing this horror story. Let me see if I can creep myself and my best friend (E. B., my reader) out.