Everyone,

I keep not posting. Carol might kill me. I don’t know what she’d use–poison? sword? love?–but I think it would be subtle. Planned. Calculated. Let’s all imagine how she’d do it for a moment. Make it good. And interesting. 

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about Halloween and scary stories. Here is a very important and authoritative link on how to write scary stories. 

It is an art form, I will tell you that. You have to create characters readers will care about. You have to have the stakes be very very high. You have to get the pacing and tension spot on. And you have to end with a bang. 

So a contest. If you’d like to enter, we’ll do it on Halloween. You have exactly one week (actually a little less) to work on it. The stories have to be 100 words or less and should be original (no pulling from last year, people). I’ll post the entries Wednesday night late so you’ll have to email  them before that. And we’ll all vote on our favorite. Use a pen name so that it will be anonymous and we’ll have a scary good time. 

Questions?

Happy Haunted Writing!