Oct 9: SÉANCE There’s only one way to elicit a good jump scare. You have to interrupt the mental flow somehow with fear. You can do it in movies pretty easily, of course. Build up sympathy for the character, increase the suspense…then release it by having someone pop out of nowhere and strike or […]
Oct 8: DAY OF THE DEAD The end of the world came and went with such a voluminous roar that it seemed as though everything that had happened in the before should no longer occur in the after. However, this was not the case. Where anyone survived to continue the old enmities, old
Oct 7: MOVIE MONSTER It’s a dirty job, managing movie monsters, but someone’s got to do it. Not the actual, you know, cleanup on set. They hire someone else to do that. And if anything gets broken in the course of the filming, well, that’s their problem. They want stuff to get broken,
Oct 6: SCREAMING I hate going to the grocery store. It’s the little kids, you see. Their parents wheel them around in the front basket of the cart, their fat little legs sticking out of the holes cut in the plastic. Or they trail along behind them like ghosts. And the crying? Always
Oct 5: MUMMY The plague came from the melting snows. They warned us about anthrax, the Black Death, smallpox varieties. They didn’t warn us about the dead coming back to life. The death metal bands had a heyday. Churches burned. “The end times! The end times!” You couldn’t call them zombies. They didn’t lurch
Still no further word…I’ll update if I find out, but otherwise skip it. Oct 4: SPIDER So I need to write a short horror story on the subject of spiders this morning. The first temptation is always to go for the cheap scare. Boo! To play on people’s typical childhood fears. And then you
I was kindly referred to the Dractober Facebook Group. I’ll see if I can find something more specific than that if they let me join 🙂 You’ll note the difference between the title and the assignment…I didn’t want to deal with copyright issues over the character. The parody song lyrics should be okay, though.
Caught up to the proper day. Will update with source when I find out. Oct 2: SKELETON Hugh’s limp had recently become worse, and he hated to say something to wreck his nieces’ and nephews’ fun, but he had to sit down. Every bone in his body ached. Everything felt slightly off-true. He needed
I just found out about Dractober today, so I’m slightly behind, but I’m going to leave the dates as is. I’m trying to track down the source, but so far no luck. Will update when I have it. Update: This list comes from Kirsten Easthope! October Nights #1 RAVEN Outside my hotel room window on
One of the worst parts about continuously growing as a writer is having to unpick lessons that I have oh-so-painfully learned. It would be nice if I could look at the situation as putting down a crutch I no longer need–but there’s far more work involved on my part. I have to do it slowly
