Yuri’s mama always made eggs and shkvarky (chopped and fried pork fat) for breakfast. As he sat on his bed the scent of fried pork wafted into him from the kitchen. They lived very good in Pripyat. Tato worked at the power plant nearby. He promised Yuri they would go and ride on the big ferris wheel in the city’s amusement park. Many people left the city on buses days earlier. Yuri wasn’t even sure how many days had passed. The city stood empty outside his window. Work kept tato a long time. Sometimes mama would turn on some music and dance around the apartment, or tell Yuri stories to help him go to sleep at night. She would sit next to him and stroke his hair with her thin fingers. Mama was so pale.

Adrian wandered through the decaying apartment block. The silence of this place was maddening. Most of the doors to the apartments were left open in haste to leave. Debris lay everywhere. Strips of paint peeled down the walls. The Geiger counter in his hand clicked away melodiously. Adrian donned a white protective suit, but even that was only so protective. He still needed to be careful what he touched. The more the Geiger clicked, the more radiation was present. Adrian felt hopeless when he reached the final apartment on the top floor. The door was shut. He carefully turned the knob and pushed the door open a small crack. A soft noise came from inside, “Tato?”

Dear God, Adrian thought. Speaking through the door, afraid of what he would find, “Bzovsky?”

Through the crack in the door, Adrian could see piles of discarded food tins.

“Yes. Where is my father?”

“Yuri?!”

Adrian was surprised to be talking to Bzovsky’s child. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but he died in the Chernobyl disaster years ago. How come you didn’t leave when everyone was evacuated on buses, and where is your mother? We just found this discrepancy in our census records.”

Tears welled in Yuri’s eyes, but when he put his hand up to his face, the skin of his cheek stuck to it and sloughed off. The pain wasn’t new. “We were waiting for him.”

Adrian opened the door the rest of the way with his foot. The smell of rotted flesh and excrement filled the space. On the floor of the kitchen was the decaying corpse of Yuri’s mother.

Oh God. Adrian’s heart pounded. She must have left the apartment to do the scavenging, killed by the radiation. Adrian noticed that parts of her were missing. Had Yuri eaten her? He fought the bile back in his throat.

He walked down the short hall into Yuri’s bedroom. Yuri’s face was melting off. Radiation had devoured him for six years. He was only twelve years old now. His right cheek had withered away to the jaw.

“Oh God, we have to leave this place. I can get you help. There’s nothing for you here.” Adrian said. His voice cracked in deep anguish, extremely frightened by the sight of Yuri.

“I want to stay.” A sadness filled his eyes.

“Mama will not be able to find me if you take me away, and tato will never come home.”

Adrian left the apartment, and called his supervisor.

“I checked on things here… and the entire family is dead.”

John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller will potentially change your life. You need this book, if you haven’t read it yet! His surgically precise analysis of story cuts deeper than what you would normally find in any other how-to writing book on the market. His industry knowledge will forever change the concept of three-act structure for the reader, and offer you 22 steps to a more masterful story. My copy of this book is underlined to death. Initially I found this mentioned in a conversation about screenwriting, but my thought was that anything which works for the screen can also potentially work for a novel. With a short story, as he mentions, you may not run through all 22 steps he lays out, but you may hit on the first 7 at least. Outside of his 22 steps, there’s a lot of other interesting concepts and analysis mentioned throughout the book that might activate your creativity in some new way.

Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is such an important book for any horror novelist or writer in general to read. It is part autobiography, part writer’s guide. In his book King discusses the importance of making writing a daily habit as well as the grind every author will go through with both failures and success. His is an amazing struggle-to-success story. Kings writing style is more intuitive, and his books tend to be based on situation rather than story. King says, “I want to put a group of characters in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free.” He never places demands on his characters. This book covers an array of information and insight that I think any writer would find useful.

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.