Nate Southard – Brave Man
This is the fourth stop on Nate Southard’s blog tour. Take it away, Nate!
FIGHTING IMAGINARY INTRUDERS
By Nate Southard
Hi there. My name’s Nate, and Tim was good enough to let me use his place for a day. I’m guess he did this because I’m another bald horror writer. Or maybe he’s just nice. Who’s to say?
Whatever the reason, I’m here as the fourth stop on my week-long blog tour. I’ve already made stops at the blogs of Lee Thomas, Paul Tremblay, and Brian Keene. Go check ‘em out, if you’re so inclined. I spent those essays discussing various aspects of the horror genre and the craft of writing. Now that the week’s coming toward a close, I thought I’d have a bit more fun.
In fact, I thought I’d take this time to embarrass myself. I do this because I care.
A few years back, my girlfriend Shawna and I lived in a duplex. One weird aspect of our home was a sliding glass door in the master bedroom that led to the backyard. Usually, this door was useful, especially if we were having a party and I decided it was time to pass out. One time, however, it led to a rather awkward situation.
See, I was sleeping soundly late one Friday night. I’m sure I was having a very pleasant dream about either food or a brunette, but that all ended when Shawna screamed. Now, she screamed because she’d had a nightmare, but I didn’t know that. Instead, I jolted awake and decided at once that we were in terrible danger.
As these thoughts were running through my head, our dog Greta started barking at that sliding glass door. Greta’s a pretty ferocious-sounding dog when she really wants to be, but at that moment her barks just aimed me like a gun.
She was barking at the back door, and to my mostly-asleep mind, that meant an intruder was trying to get in the back door. This, of course, made complete sense to me, and I formulated my battle plan in an instant. I would leap over Shawna and perch on the corner of the bed, aimed at the door. When the bastard who was trying to get in threw open the door, I would hit him with a diving tackle, and Greta would help me save both Shawna and the day (er, night) in general.
That was the plan, at least.
I made my jump, but I forgot that I’d been awake all of three seconds. That mean both my balance and aim were off. Instead of landing on the bed’s edge, I sailed right past it, hitting the bedroom floor in a heap about one nanosecond later. That was when Greta decided I was the intruder. She jumped on me, and suddenly I was wrestling our German Shepherd. There was this tangle of limbs, and it took me a few seconds to realize Greta wasn’t barking, but was instead making her happy little playing sounds. Okay, so maybe that was a relief, but I still had an intruder to worry about.
Only there was no intruder. Hell, there was no sign of anything out of the ordinary. Shawna, I noticed, was sound asleep in bed. Greta hopped up on the bed and snuggled up beside her, successfully stealing my spot. After shooing her away, I crawled back to bed, embarrassed, tired, and maybe a little bruised.
Shawna stirred. “What were you doing out of bed?”
“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”
Ain’t love grand? I don’t suppose she’ll ever fully appreciate how brave I was that night. You’ll note that I said brave and not foolish. I’m telling the story here, and I get to decide if I was brave or not.
So there.
Next Monday, November 1st, my debut novel Red Sky will be available for pre-order. It’s a gritty, grisly tale of a bank heist gone wrong and the terrible things the perpetrators find while trying to flee through the deserts of New Mexico. If that sounds like your cup of tea, I hope you’ll head over to Thunderstorm Books (http://www.thunderstormbooks.com) and reserve a copy. It’s a limited edition, so there may not be copies available when the book is released early next year.
Thanks for coming out, folks. If you’d like to follow my blog tour, you can find me tomorrow at Norman Partridge’s casa ( http://americanfrankenstein.blogspot.com/ ) where I’ll fill you in on the first time I went to a haunted house, and why today’s haunts just don’t measure up.
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