Writing Exercise: Fear

There are a lot of ways to interpret today’s exercise. You can go the Halloween route if you choose, or respond to the horrors of recent news headlines, imagine yourself the victim of a hurricane (or if you are one, recount your experience). Whatever you write about, today I want you to write about fear.

No quippy lead-up today, no time limit. Have fun with it or use it as therapy. And this time, I’m not going to ask you to share with me, nor am I going to share mine.

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Reading Goosebumps as a Grown-Up

I was far too much of a chicken to read Goosebumps as a kid. I think I read most of one and decided it wasn’t my thing–I was more into The Babysitter’s Club and such. I did enjoy Are You Afraid of the Dark? on Nickelodeon and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, so maybe I wasn’t really chicken. Or maybe Goosebumps was just super scary.

The last time we visited my in-laws, my mother-in-law sent us home a stack of Goosebumps books. I shoved them in the bookshelf and then forgot about them, saving them for the day when my kids would be old enough to enjoy them.

Last night, I was digging through my paperbacks in the hopes of finding a few cool, creepy titles to share with you–not thrillers or anything directly relating to Halloween, but stories with a strange or creepy vibe to them (Karen Russell, Kelly Link, Aimee Bender, et al–I’ll do that blog post later) and I stumbled across the Goosebumps books. The first one I pulled out was The Werewolf of Fever Swamp. I thought, well. I have to read that.