Blog

The allure of Black Friday—a day marked by frenzied shopping, midnight doorbusters, and crowds that swell to the tens of thousands—provides a fertile ground for horror narratives. This annual event, teetering on the edge of chaos and consumerist obsession, can serve as a compelling backdrop for a horror novel that delves deep into the human psyche and societal norms. At its core, Black Friday is a phenomenon that magnifies human desires and fears. The anticipation builds for weeks, with advertisements fueling the urgency to seize the best deals. This collective eagerness creates an atmosphere…

Voice is one of the fundamental elements of narrative in the vast landscape of literature that sets one narrative apart from the other. It’s not only the words used in a story, but the unique voice, tone and style that an author or character adds. Voice is the heart of storytelling, the pulse of narrative that brings a story to life and makes it tangible on a very personal level to readers. Think of the inimitable voice of Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain deftly utilizes the regional dialects and colloquial speech of the American South to realistically evoke the stories…

In keeping with our Halloween theme, this post will concern bugs. Full disclosure: I absolutely hate bugs, and squeal like a little girl (literally) if one gets close to me. I don’t care that they’re useful or that spiders aren’t technically insects. I spend hundreds of dollars each month on a pest control service alone to ensure that no bugs enter my home. I bet we all can safely agree that the average sane person does not take too kindly to bugs, making them a good plot tool in scary stories getting the creaks into us and adding to the anxiety of the picture at hand, causing even the…

The only thing scary about the horrible store-bought Halloween costumes of the 70s and 80s was getting cancer from everything toxic you touched. It always just felt disgusting to me, the way they slapped pictures and logos on the awful polyester shirt and didn’t even try to make a kid look like a character. The masks were badly made from a single piece of plastic and the feeblest rubber-bands in our known creation. However their appearance was often very disturbing… even if the character was adorable and cuddly. I have wanted to weave these awful costumes into a story somehow, but haven’t been…

With all the exciting projects he has going on, we are very grateful that David Badurina has taken some time to contribute to the blog as a guest writer to help inform his fellow writers about self-publishing. If you want to know about real-world issues when considering self-publishing versus traditional publishing, read on. You can find out more about David and his fantastic work on Twitter/X, YouTube, Facebook, and on the web. I’d like to take a moment to highlight a few points about ROI for the self-published. Many authors measure their success in the metric that’s most common - cold, hard…

To continue in our series of working with book coaches and ghostwriters (very different things), we take a deep dive into something called Spiritscribing. We are excited to have Rich Rubio talk about this fascinating approach to ghostwriting. Spiritscribing; it’s ghostwriting. It’s the lesser-known dojo of the schools of writing (Email writing, copywriting, songwriting, underwriting, etc.), and yet one of the more powerful ones. “Why would ghostwriting be that?” you may ask, and with good reason. “What is ghostwriting? Is it horror? Are you referring to that early 90s show?” may be others you…