I know that writers tend not to talk about their books so as to not give any spoilers away, but I had a scene in my current WIP I was working on where there was this character who was going to commit suicide and everything about the scene just felt entirely wrong. It made it unbelievably difficult to write because it just didn’t feel like the right choice for that character. There were a couple other scenes leading up to that moment when she was going to drink a tea made of poison, but I chose to keep those other scenes – Why? Because they didn’t actually kill her, and they create just the right amount of tension for that character to be experiencing. In a poetic sense, she may have died a little on the inside, or even changed, but she’s still around to play another part in the story.

Generally, when things can still happen that aren’t actually, this is known better as alluding or implying something, which is done all the time in horror movies where they set the precedent for something scary to happen and you know that it’s going to, but they cut away from the scene before it can. All it takes is belief by the audience, or the total suspension thereof.

When I deleted those words, it was like cutting away from the scene, but she survived – so things do not always have the expected outcome. Sometimes hitting the backspace takes us down a more interesting, better fitting path.

So, I finally got around to building my horror author website. I’m pretty close to having book one finished. And also pretty close to having another project *finally* completed for my publishing house, Caliber Press. I decided to give myself the goal of trying to do most of the site’s main features in one day, that way I can begin to populate it with flash fiction, short stories, and other content as it happens. The main purpose right now is to have a networking fingerprint, but I also need a site for marketing when my books finally roll out one day. I like the idea of being able to share everything that inspires my journey into horror for now.

There was no long-term plan for me to write horror, though I’ve always been a fan of the genre. I knew since I was very young that I wanted to be a writer. When I was living in Germany as a child we had limited channels on television and relied pretty heavily on VHS tapes for American visual entertainment, though we did watch our fair share of German cartoons. My mom had a mountain of Disney, but she also had a lot of other VHS tapes. My favorite of these was E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. I used to make my mom watch it nearly every day. I knew I wanted to become a storyteller like Melissa Mathison and Steven Spielberg one day, even if I never caught that level of fame. Stories are a gift to share with others, even if its an audience of one.

I’m not really a ‘scary’ person by nature, so in the beginning I looked at this genre as a challenge ~ an Everest of sorts. I have a tote of unfinished manuscripts in other genres that might even be easier for me to complete, but horror seemed elusive, and yet I had a story to tell. Darkness had always been just at the recesses of everything in my life, and I’ve managed to live through some crazy experiences. My idea for my upcoming debut novel came one winter day in December. My father was looking for a place for us to get our Christmas tree, and he found a farm on Craigslist. The ad was sketchy. I thought, Great, we’re going to be murdered! And here was the start of my dive into a novel that has since grown horrors of its own. As I’ve been working on that project, I’ve been developing other ideas for future works in horror, so my arsenal is ready to go.