Monthly Archives: October 2022
Tom Gauld on the benefits of shopping at the haunted bookshop – cartoon…
Fear and Terror
Hello again, Gang. Craig with you once more on this Happy Haloween. This is one of my favorite holidays, as if you hadn’t guessed. I happened to draw this slot on the calendar and struggled with what to post.
We’ve had posts about horror, mystery, suspense and more over the years. I even trotted out my old joke on one of them. “How do you write suspense… I’ll tell you later.” Old jokes are still fun. Seriously.
I don’t really expect a lot of traffic today, but I’m going to lace up my boots and share something anyway. (The lovely Lisa Burton might draw a few readers.) This may be the big takeaway here: There is always another way to look at something. Writers should try to exercise this part of the imagination.
While we’ve read what I mentioned above, we haven’t really delved into the other side of this…
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Happy Halloween
Wishing one and all a very happy Halloween (Images below were found on Pinterest)
Happy Halloween
How to Write a Spooky Ghost Story – By Rayne Hall…
on Fiction University:
Ghost stories have always been reader favorites. They appeal to a wider audience than most other stories: children enjoy them as much as adults, and even people who normally cringe at the thought of Horror fiction gain pleasure from a good ghostly yarn.
How can you write an entertaining, creepy story?
Continue reading HERE
Using Weather to Convey Mood in Fiction – by C. S. Lakin…
on Jane Friedman site:
Writers are sometimes told not to write about weather. It’s boring, right? An unimportant element that adds nothing useful to a story. Dry details. Who wants to read about a dark and stormy night? No wonder Snoopy never got past typing that first line of his great magnum opus.
But weather affects us every moment of every day and night. We make decisions for how we will spend our day, even our life, based on weather. And weather greatly affects our mood, whether we notice or not.
Since we want our characters to act and react believably, they should also be affected by weather. Sure, at times they aren’t going to notice it. But there are plenty of opportunities to have characters interact with weather in ways that can be purposeful and powerful in your story.
Continue reading HERE
Demons Dance
When the moon rises
On Halloween night
The demons dance
Beneath its light,
Cavorting in unholy glee
And luring unsuspecting souls
To join with them
In their fun and play,
Keeping them
Blissfully unaware
Of any peril,
Before sending them
To their fates
Upon break of day.
This Is Halloween
When the veil thins, Spooks and spectres Cross the border To haunt the night. Witches and wizards Take to the skies And cast their spells. Ghouls and goblins Walks the streets In search of prey. Beware, should you Go out this night. Watch your step And say your prayers, For danger lurks In the dark; […]
This Is Halloween
Writing Delays: What You Can’t Control And The One Thing You Can
Even the most organized writer who puts words on the page and completes their writing to-do list every day runs into delays that drag out the process of penning a book.
Such obstacles can test the biggest optimist, and as much as we’d like to think we’re in control of them, the hard truth is that we aren’t, as the following will show.
Writing Delays: What You Can’t Control And The One Thing You Can
What You Can’t Control…
Working On Your Book During Times Of Stress
You won’t know when it’ll happen, ironically adding to the stress, but things will pop up that can make writing near impossible.
This could be on the one day you don’t have time for it, months on end, or even stretch out years (hello, worldwide pandemic!).
The mental toll of uncertainty is just one way to wipe out all of your creativity, and…
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Less Is More—When It Comes to Describing Setting – by C.S. Lakin…
on Writers Helping Writers:
If you’re writing fiction, it’s your job to create rich, descriptive settings in which your characters live and breathe. The challenge—as any seasoned fiction writer can tell you—is how to find the proper balance between over- and under-describing, between extensively showing the setting with sensory details and briefly summarizing.
With fiction, it’s best to take a “Goldilocks” approach—not too much, not too little. But how can we find that place where the amount of description is “just right”?
Jeanne Owens, author 