…where skunks are having sex outside my window. Yes. Skunks. So far this week has been both hearteningly familiar and inspiringly strange. My face has developed a permanent flush from all the blood feeding my brain. I have not thought so many thoughts all at once since university; nor have I laughed so hard so many times in a day. Our major writing assignment for the week has been a 5000-word dark fantasy story with an American Gothic theme. I have almost completed it and I’ve managed to grow it from a seed planted almost twenty years ago. Big Note to Self: Keep those seed files. And add to them more often. In addition to the length requirement and the theme, I was given a word that must be included in the title. Add to this my seed file idea; a conviction that all of this had something to do with Riley Child-rhymes with Hoosier Pictures, a book which I have not even seen since I was perhaps twelve years old; a few gestures toward Poe and Baudelaire, and the knowledge that the latter had a strange relationship with his mother. Behold: a story. My first genre story in twenty […]