Gettin' creepy...

Lately, I’ve been wanting to do more with my fiction blog, but I’ve had trouble coming up with anything. This is because I forgot one of my writerly axioms: when in doubt, dash off a nasty little story about a sex fiend. I got this one down in about an hour and a half (and it shows the rush, to be honest), but I’m hoping that it’ll help open up the floodgates over there.

As unpleasant as it may be to admit, I sort of have a thing for peeping toms. Over the years, I’ve probably written about a half dozen stories about them. Also, this title is a peeping tom axiom that I found in a true crime book a few years ago. And, finally, the idea of people sneaking into other people’s windows finds its way into my fiction with a fair degree of regularity. Violation and invasion are, apparently, two of my favorite motifs.

It’s been this way for a long time. When I was a kid, my bedroom was on the second floor of our house and its windows looked out on the roof of our porch. I used to dream that there was a strange man standing on the shingles out there. He was so tall that he had to stoop to peer into the gap between my curtains and, when I knew he was looking at me, I had to try very hard not to move. With his eye always on me, he would take hold of the window and pry it up. Then, slowly and silently, his leg would come snaking through it. I remember he was barefoot, but not much else. That’s because I’d always wake up just before his heel hit the carpet, which was probably lucky for me.

I was a weird kid who read too many scary books. Now I’m a weird adult who writes too many scary stories. Oh, well.