Horror Story

Friday I intended to resume work on the Ward Diary, the manuscript I’d intended to have finished editing back before we went on vacation. Instead, I crawled around in a crawlspace under the air conditioner repairing that leaky pipe all day.

That was a job for a guy skinner than I am.

A lot skinner!

Long, long ago our house had two bedrooms. Back in the dark ages, some former owner ripped out all interior walls and converted the house to three bedrooms. That meant that he constructed walls around the air conditioner drainage pipes so that they became inaccessible.

Bless him.

Over the years, these pipes became brittle. Now, they are leaking — or at least they were until yesterday.

I did finally get them fixed.

To do this, John Cowart, human contortionist, wiggled into the crawlspace beneath the machinery and sawed out a spaghetti bowl of old pipes, being careful not to move the brittle corroded sections for fear of breaking off something under the cement slab which the house sits on.

This is what writers do.

I’m sure Stephen King spends many of his days doing the same sort of thing. He must repair his own plumbing too; that’s why so many of his books involve people stuck in dark tunnels or caves or dilapidated houses.

While I found my plumbing experience horrible, I did not find it inspirational. I do not see writing horror fiction in my future.

In fact, I don’t see writing anything in my future.

All I see are ancient, corroded, dripping pipes with fittings so out of date that they don’t make them anymore.

That’s horror story enough for me.