Category: writing
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The Thermostat of Terror, or Climbing the Ladder of Dread
HP Lovecraft had a notorious, borderline pathological hatred of the cold. When the thermometer dipped in New England, the gentleman from Providence didn’t just bundle up—he practically withered away. He became physically sluggish, deeply miserable, and convinced that warmth was synonymous with comfort and life, while the frigid cold was the domain of absolute evil…
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Stepping Off the Beaten Path: Why My Next Book Launch Is Bypassing the Retail Giants
If you’ve followed my regular posts here on Threads that Bind, you know I usually dig into a wide variety of things related to the dark and spooky. But today, I want to take you behind a different curtain: the actual business of getting a book into a reader’s hands. For over fifteen years, the…
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A Visit to Poe’s House
Last summer, I came across a couple of family trees online that indicated I’m directly descended from Edgar Allan Poe’s grandfather David Poe via my great grandmother, Sarah Elizabeth Poe. If true, this would make me a cousin of one of the most famous writers of dark fiction. I’m a little skeptical that this is…
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“HELP ME!”
Do you remember the fly with the human head trapped in a spiderweb and screaming for help in the 1958 horror film THE FLY? Well, we writers are becoming increasingly trapped in a web created by Artificial Intelligence. Should we also be screaming for help? You see, AI is now writing books. I imagine you…
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Introspection For Writers and P.I.N.K.
A famous businessman got some unkind attention lately when, during an interview, he claimed he never practiced introspection. He said introspection is a silly modern affectation, invented only in the 1910s in Prague. (Hold this alleged factoid in your brain, we’ll come back to it.) Before that, nobody got curious about their own minds. When…
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Making Playlists For Horror Novels
Hey readers and writers! Do you listen to music while you’re reading or writing? For me, it’s almost essential. Music helps me slip into the right headspace while I’m sitting at the computer. It also helps me tune out the rest of the outside world. It’s almost like dimming the lights in a theatre before…
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Vampires Through the Ages
Last week, Jack Tyler gave us a great review of the movie Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. The movie is a good example of a genre known as the “secret history.” Secret histories are a close relative to the alternate history genre, where the author might ask you to imagine what would have happened if history…
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How Do You Get To Carnegie Hall?
If making New Year’s resolutions is cliché, surely it’s also become a cliché to declare that resolutions are silly. “95% of resolutions fail by January 7!” we might say, smugly. “Glad I never want to get better at anything!” Except, of course, most of us do want to get better at something. Maybe you want…
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Ghosts of Christmas Past
When people think of Christmas, I suspect that ghost stories and paranormal literature are not the first thing that pop into their minds. Despite that, one of the most beloved works of paranormal literature is indelibly associated with Christmas and, in many ways, shaped the way we think about the holiday. I’m referring, of course,…
Threads that Bind 