Is the glass half empty or half full?

Ask Tim Reynolds, the scribbler of “twisted history, fictional science, and everything in between.” He answered my Facebook request for camping details with this:

Don’t forget all of the discomfort of camping: wet sleeping bags, twigs, burned tongue from roosting marshmallows, crickets that get onto the tent and won’t shut up, the doing of a beaver soaking about at night, sounding like a monster on the shore.

He also noted:

As a kid, my backyard tent was a musty parachute silk draped over a 4-foot tree stump. Improvised, but stinky.

I like this. We romanticize camping partly because we want to “get away from it all.” But if you had to live in a tent 24/7, well, you’d long for your feather duvet pretty darn quick. So you can see why Tim won an Honourable Mention in Writers of the Future. I’m eyeballing his Houdini novella too, No Escaping the Blood. Houdini as a vampire. C’mon.

My husband, Matt Innes, had already put in his two cents:

Overflowing outhouses, uncollected garbage, drunken yahoos–that’s a smell as well as a sound–the howling of feral dogs, rain.

Oh, honey. You still make me swoon.

Our son Max is at a sleepover tonight with two of his friends. He’s the only one in our family who really loves to sleep outside. We’ll see if he makes it all night in the “cabane.” Fingers crossed!