A Wasted Night

I don't know if it's because of the rejection I got today from Flash Fiction Online (for a story that no longer exists thanks to the recent crash), general laziness or something else entirely, but I got little writing done tonight on Deadliest Cachalot. The irony is that since this is one of the nights that The Other Half works doing taxes, I had no distractions. Hopefully tomorrow night and this weekend I can devote some time to it.

When taking the dogs outside earlier so that they could pee, I began thinking about the genesis of scary scenes in books. Often I have read a scene or passage where the character is doing something quite ordinary, but the creepiness and dread have been cranked up several notches. I started to look at the things I did in my day to day existence and tried to find a way to make them freaky and/or scary. Thus we come to the dogs' outdoor pee excursion.

We have the yard on one side of our house filled with small rocks. This is where the dogs do their "business." This area does not run the entire length of the house, only from the front fence to a point about eight feet from the back end of the house. To keep the dogs in this area, I constructed a small fence/barrier from an old doggie play pen. Thus there is a good stretch of dirt beyond that fence before you actually reach the end of the house and the back yard. That area tends to get neglected when I go weed whacking. Lately, a large weed has sprung up just on the other side of the small fence, and has grown rather large. Large enough for a cat or small animal to hide behind. At night, when I use a flashlight to help see out there, I see that weed through the small fence. When the wind blows, it moves and the dancing shadows always makes it look like something is hiding behind it. After noticing that, I decided that I just had to put a scene like that in a story at some point....but what will be hiding behind the weed?