Over the winter I noticed a pattern in much of my writing A lot of it was centered around the night and darkness. I was also using the word night a lot, leaning on it for easy rhymes. The same went for dark. So I’ve been challenging myself to write about night and darkness without actually using either word. Recently I passed through my first haunted house of the Halloween season, and in taking my own advice, jotted down some notes on what parts of the experience left the strongest impression. It’s one of my favorites, a haunted trail that with elaborate scenes and structures. By far the part of the night that stuck with me the most was two completely contrasting scenes paired together. The first was a wooden shack, pitch black inside that, as usual, I found myself leading my group into. As I groped through the darkness, feeling the walls for a door to escape to, I realized that we were actually in a slowly narrowing hallway, the wall on my right …