It’s no secret that I love anything in the horror genre at anytime of the year, but something feels extra special about writing (and reading/watching) horror at Halloween. I am always part of any horror writing event or contest that pops up that time of year and I crank out whatever creepy thing might fit into their guidelines—when I’m lucky those guidelines are simply ‘horror’—and wait to see what everyone else has come up with.

I will watch a horror movie any-day, any-time. But for whatever reason it feels so much easier to write it around the holiday. Maybe it’s because I know everyone else is excited about it then too. My shorts are often firmly in the horror genre but my novels have led me towards thrillers; which is fine. I love those too, but I would love to get my Halloween mojo up for a full on horror novel next.

Maybe I should just pull out my spooky decorations and do up my writing room. Would that be strange? Can I hang up a bag of candy and reward myself after each chapter...that might be a good motivator. If I knock on your door and say trick or treat in July will you find something to drop in my bucket? Too far? Fine. But If I get that horror novel going, will you be down for it? Let me know, do you tend to read horror more around Halloween, or are you a fright-a-holic like me?

OK, that may be a bit of an overstatement, but the em-dash is one of my favorite punctuation marks. However, the number of keystrokes for getting one was driving me crazy—the default on windows is alt 0151—and when I’m on a roll, I don’t want to have something so trivial slow me down.

I don’t know a ton about computers, but grew up as ‘the one who fixed it when it broke’ in my family, due only to the fact that I was the only one willing to google stuff, and willing to try it out when faced with the blue screen of death. So I went back to my old ways and hit up google. It turns out making a script for it isn’t all that tough. I downloaded AutoHotKey, attempted to learn how to use it—and failed—then hopped over to the forums instead and found my answer.

Once you have the program, open a new script. Right-click anywhere and it’ll be under the ‘new’ menu. Use this code:

:?*:---::{ASC 0151} ; em dash

Inserting whatever keystrokes you want to customize for the --- . I used a double comma since it’s easy and never comes up organically. Hit save, then double click the script file icon to run it. BAM em-dashes for all!

Here's the discussion forum link for anyone interested in more about how it works.

I’m halfway through the first round revision on my second novel, According To Plan, I know my characters inside and out and I thought I knew basically where they came from, until.... Lucifer returned on Netflix. Mind you, my story is a psychological thriller with no fantastical elements, but hot damn, my MC looks a hell of a lot like Decker. Huh. I had even paddled through tons of stock photos to toss up on my virtual vision board and found some I liked, but when Detective Decker came back on screen I laughed to myself, ‘cuz there’s Laura! I thought. My Laura is a bit more athletically built I would say, but her main, almost too sharp, features are all there.

Their similarities end at appearance. Laura is more reserved, more book-smart than street smart compared to Decker’s rather outgoing presence, and there is no handsome devil trying to win my girl over—she wouldn’t like that, anyway. Still, I thought it was so funny that she must have been hiding in the back of my mind as I impatiently waited for the new episodes to drop. But now I know who to use when I’m doing my dream casting for the movie version. I hope she’s available ;)

My Laura vision board pic (left) and Detective Decker (right)

So, I decided to extend my birthday Excite sale to include the weekend so. . .  It is currently up for just $0.99 (Amazon link: https://amzn.to/3wXSytt)

I have a couple *exciting* reasons for doing this:
1) A longer sale means more of you can grab it, and. . .
2) hopefully that will turn over into more reviews because. . .
3) I am considering sending out my WIP novel, According to Plan, to agents to give traditional publishing a go.

Now, it's a long shot, and one I'm not even sure I have the patience for—I am too excited (boy, I need a thesaurus) for it and I know that the agent/publisher/traditional route can take a LONG time. But, if I'm going to give it a shot I want to be sure my resume looks good, and having a debut novel out there with lots of reviews—that looks good. I will definitely have a time limit, I know I can self-publish to a pretty good standard so I don't see that as a 'second best' option. But with the reviews I am seeing from beta readers this one feels like something special. So, I'd like to see if there is any 'bigger' interest before I plow ahead on my own.

While cleaning I found more of my old notebooks and one had some early work from Excite in it. Stuff I had completely forgotten about. My notes are difficult to understand at best as my thought process takes place only about 40% on the page when I ask myself questions, so it was tough to decipher some of it, but I found my lists of names for the drug .

I’m going to share them since they are a fun insight into the process, but some of them are rough, as I believe I started the lists right at the beginning of the project. I learned the name of the drug just as Jon did; after a bit of consideration and bouncing ideas off of other people.

Some of the other names that little pink pill might have had:
Scorch—I’m not sure where this one came from; possibly early on I wasn’t sure what the ‘science’ behind it would be, so it just sounded cool.
Misfire—likely one about nerves misfiring while under the influence. Again early on, when I wasn’t yet clear on the science.
Glut—I was getting deep in research now, short for glutamate, a brain chemical that I decided would be integral in the pill
Neuro—it’s neurotoxic, so this one made sense to consider.
ReUps—more ‘deep science’ (aka maybe correct, maybe totally wrong) the idea that the pill was a re-uptake inhibitor
GRI—Jon’s technical name for it, and the one he suggests to Kat; Glutamate Re-uptake Inhibitor
Excite—our eventual winner; the pill is an excitotoxin in the end
Binder—there was a science reason for this one too, but my notes are scratchy. It had something to do with taking the complete sensory input from an event. Which was what I was going for the high.

I’m pretty sure at the time I thought many of these were better than they are, but GRI, Excite and Binder seem to be the final round trio, with stars around them. I wish my notes were clearer, I hardly remember that part of the process.

The only thing I came up with more of than names for Excite were covers—just like the drug names some are pretty bad. Made by myself or author friends trying to give me ideas, I'll share some of those here too. I'm very visual so I tend to make a mock-cover early on in the process. They change as the story does, so here is a visual tale of Excite.

I love to write a few different genres, and to me they blend together sometimes—or at least the initial ideas for the stories do. I’ve always been a horror fan. The creepy, strange, freaky stuff; not so much the blood and guts (that’s fine too though) My mother is a horror fan too so there were also Stephen King stories in my house. And as surprising as it was to have an 8th grade English teacher assign us Ray Bradbury short stories rather than the popular school standby of Fahrenheit 451, it was stranger to many that I had already read them. And loved them. October Country is probably my favorite collection for the views into the bizarre and eerie. The too dark for a Twilight Zone episode feel was my wheelhouse even back then.

I’d like to think that I can fit some of my stories into that vein (on a good, optimistic day) Funnily enough my novels have leaned toward a more traditional thriller narrative. I never really intended that but, using Excite as an example, the almost throwaway prompt that started it was something like ‘A doctor discovers how to counteract the placebo effect and the patient won’t stop screaming.’ Now, that screamed (hahahaha. . . sorry) horror, and I started writing it that way, but as I went on, I got more taken in by what might happen if it wasn’t so serious. What if they had some fun first? Thus Excite the crime thriller was born. My new WIP is similar, more psychological thriller, but thriller none the less. The shorts I am playing with- more horror and sci-fi, so the roots are still there.

I don’t think you have to be limited to one, or two, genres. If the story is good and dying to be told, I’ll tell it. When I was ghost writing I did a few YA’s and have played in sci-fi YA for myself as well. It’s all about what you focus on, I could take the same characters in the same plot and focus on the relationship instead of the party and it would be a romance. I’ll keep following the story and I hope you will come along for the ride!

I love visiting creepy places, haunted places, old buildings, anything of the sort. When my family vacationed in Pennsylvania I had to make a stop at Eastern State Penitentiary. While we weren't able to get a night time ghost tour the regular tour still ticked all the boxes for me. The self guided audio let you feel alone in the decaying halls even as other visitors milled about.

There were cells that you could step into, and feel the isolation. Although as an introvert, I kind of liked it in a strange way. I wouldn't want to be forced in there, but the quiet was appealing. The history of the place was obviously dark, but the original intent, a search for penitence of those incarcerated intrigued me.

At first it wasn't crowded, prisoners were kept anonymous so that when released there was no stigma round them. It wasn't a terrible system; until they lost that ideal and turned the place into an overcrowded dungeon where multiple prisoners were crammed into cells made for one.

In the end the visit inspired my short story Penance; it can be found here.

What kind of places inspire you? Stick around for more posts of my inspired locations.

I found We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson on a list of ‘great short novels’ I write short, and so was struck by this list. I wanted to see how the best do it, and Shirley Jackson is certainly among the best. I think though, my expectations were off going into it. The Haunting of Hill House has been on my TBR list since the series came to Netflix, and the spoiler-free reviews I read of Castle were intriguing—lots of ‘OMG that twist!’ So I was quick to pick up a compilation of this, along with her other short stories and Hill House.

First thing that threw me was the book itself. It is a literal conglomeration of her works, Castle is the last story in the book, and 300 pages into the volume, it starts back on page 1. Very strange, but anyway, back to content.

The first half of this was drawn out- I realize now that this short novel was not a novel written short but more of a novella written long. It’s atmospheric for sure, you are pulled into the daily life of the sisters, along with their monotony, and what we would call today some OCD and agoraphobia. They hide from the townspeople after Constance is accused of poisoning the family; she is deemed not guilty, but it still throws a dark shadow over her and her sister.

About halfway through, we get a shake up when cousin Charles visits and threatens to uproot their existence. The pace picks up and the sisters double down on their enclosed life. We see Constance give in even more to her sister’s rituals and fanciful imaginings. We do get the ‘twist’ but it doesn’t really hit. It was fairly unexpected, but the realization has very little impact on the story so, for me, it hardly mattered. I spent the last third of the book waiting for something that felt minor in the end, and that left me disappointed.

I’m not saying it was bad by any means. It is definitely an older style of writing, but I can see how she wanted us to feel the closeness of their lifestyle and almost make it seem normal until we realize just how not-normal it is. To join in their mental instability, I suppose. But it wasn’t what I had expected from other reviews. I’m all about correctly set expectations, and I missed the mark on this one. I'll give it three and a half stars- I was certainly engaged for the latter half of the book, but I don’t think that this is the work of hers to write home about. I still look forward to exploring the other stories in the book.

In school I was lucky enough to have lots of English teachers that encouraged creative writing. We wrote short stories, poems, memoir in many different grades (and thus with many different levels of quality) but I didn't have many teachers that taught us much about mechanics. I was on the cusp of the 'free writing' movement, by the time my brother hit middle school grammar rules had been thrown out the window and the feeling and intention was paramount. My teachers weren't that nutty, but there wasn't a big focus on where that comma should go.

I'll admit, that followed me. Sometimes commas feel like a mystery. I recall specifically my senior English teacher giving me a mini less on the back of an essay about semi-colons to get me to quit it with the run-on sentences. I love run-on sentences. In middle school I did have one teacher who would know 50 points (of 100) off our grade for a single offense. Luckily she split grade content/grammar. I got a lot of A/F's in her class. Obviously it didn't help because senior year I was just discovering the semi-colon. A lifesaver eventually. Thank god for Ms. Crago.

I realized that my big problem with those run on sentences was Latin class. I took six years of it, and let me tell you, those Romans liked a long sentence, and a comma (well they didn't have commas, but when you translated it, you used them). So Latin class was my grammar foundation. Id translate four lines and have just one sentence, and there it was correct. Back in English—not so much.

So, dear readers, if you find an extra comma that has escaped my edits; sorry, but blame the Romans.

Mixing it up this time with a short story collection. I stumbled across a list of best horror while procrastinating on FB (surprise) and 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill was on it. My library had a copy, so I dove right in. I’m a slow reader, so I always start off collections with the shortest stories to get a feel for the author if I haven’t read anything else by them before.

The one page flash Dead-wood was an obvious choice—but it wasn’t a good opener. It was more style than substance, which is fine if it’s not all there is, so I ignored that venture and moved on. Last Breath, the next shortest, was right up my alley. A quick dive into a creepy setting with a ‘scientific’ bend and I knew this would be my thing. I can’t say much without giving it away, but the museum features a collection of ‘last breaths’ from people famous and not, and the doctor is always ready to show you around, or to keep collecting. Even so short there were a few different places I could have seen the story go and it did not disappoint. It was plenty to get me ready to pick my next victim.

Another of my favorites was Pop Art; it wasn’t horror by any means or even a thriller, but a strange alternate universe tale. In this world, some people are born inflatable. At first I tried to understand it in an earthly way; is this a ‘Bubble Boy’ type situation? But no, he is literally a plastic blow up person, filled with air instead of blood. Art can’t talk or make much for expressions, but he makes a best friend and they bond closely. Art often thinks about death and loves outer space. He’s eccentric beyond his plastic skin. It was a strange story, but one I couldn’t put down even once I realized it was not the genre I expected.

I finished, but probably didn’t need to, The Widows Breakfast. Another story that wasn’t particularity horror; maybe aside from the creepy last line. A homeless person is riding the rails after the death of his lover and stumbles upon a cabin in the woods with a widow and her children. She feeds him, gives him her husband’s old clothes and her kids play a creepy game.

The more of the book I read, the more I see Ray Bradbury influences and realizing that made me like the stories more. They are simply supposed to be odd; not necessarily all horror. I think having found it on a horror list set me up to dislike it, and it took quite a few stories to realize the better categorization.

Overall, it was a worth-reading collection, and I give it 4 stars. As always, some were stronger than others, but the range makes it so there is something for everyone who likes to venture outside the norm. Your faves might be some I skimmed, that’s what I love about shorts; they are an easy way to dig into lots of different styles and tropes.