Tag: writing fiction
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From Blood to Whispers: The Appeal of Quiet Horror
I used to live in the guts of horror. By that, I mean the kind of horror that stains your palms and tastes like rust. My other books — especially the Bloody Series with its love for graphic detail, human monsters, and the unforgiving anatomy of violence — live in the places where flesh tears,…
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Story Structure for Horror Stories: Part Two
Continuing my last post on story structure for horror, I wanted to take another look at structure, this time dissecting it using the 10 steps to story structure from K.M. Weiland. Let’s first take a quick look at those steps and then see how they can be applied to horror. 1. The Hook What is…
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WRITING AS CATHARSIS
Hey! I publish horror shorts about fictional Valmar here on Threads because my lovely author fam is nice enough not to toss me out yet. My latest one Monday involved a teenage boy and a machine, and a search for the Unknown. It goes wrong, though. It’s horror. Sorry. it’s how the machine works. I…
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Completely Different Than Anything We Can Imagine
Have you ever wondered why book, movie, and TV depictions of aliens are almost always human or human-like? I have. And I wonder, if there are alien life forms, what makes us think they’d be like us? My guess is that we find it very difficult to imagine life outside of what we can perceive.…
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Don’t Know Science
What do you do when you love science fiction, want to write science fiction, but don’t have a degree in any science? What do you do when you’re not the typical geek who loves nerdy stuff but never had the focus to get through college? Or struggled with a learning disability that killed that dream?…
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Crossover Characters
Ever since I was a kid, my friends and I would play games where we asked what would happen if characters from different fictional universes met. What would happen if Batman met The Green Hornet? What if Captain Kirk and the Doctor from Doctor Who shared an adventure? Who would win if the Predator and…
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Nothing to Say
“How the hell can a person go to work in the morning, come home in the evening, and have nothing to say?” – the late great John Prine. There are many reasons why this happens in a relationship, most of them unpleasant when it applies to couples. But it only applies to my book writing…
Threads that Bind 