The Ready Writer

First off, what do you all think of the new theme? I am liking it a lot better. Secondly, you get 2 posts this week! This one, and another shorter one on some writing updates this Friday.  I also have some suggestions, but I may put those in a 3rd post sometime next week (I have 2 podcasts and a documentary that are really great, and horror lovers will love). OKAY.  Now lets talk atmosphere. Last time, we went through the intro of Resident Evil 7.  Now I want to talk a little about a section later in the game. At one point in the game, you have to retrieve an arm in order to make a serum.  That's all I'm going to say about that.  I don't want to spoil more than I have to. What makes this part of the game so great, and so scary, is that it not only creates great atmosphere  but it draws on one of any horror lovers favorite tropes: Scary kid stuff! So to retrieve the arm, you have to go through the terrifying house that takes up 2/3rds of the game...

Hello Everyone! This is Part II of my Scary Video Game series.  We are talking about Resident Evil 7, which is one of the newest, and one of the scariest video games to come on the market. Before I go on, I'm gonna post this first: THIS POST WILL CONTAIN MINOR SPOILERS If you haven't played the game, or watched someone play it, you may not want to read on. Okay. So the reason that I want to talk about this game is because it surprised me. All I had known about the Resident Evil franchise was that it had zombies in it.  And while I am not offended or even dislike the zombie genre, a lot of it relies on the fantastical, gross, and the jump scare.  However, Resident Evil 7 doesn't rely on that. That isn't to say that it doesn't  have those things, in fact, it has a lot of those things, but when I think of "what kind of horror" this game is, I would have to say that, at least for the first 2/3rds, it is an atmospheric horror. Why? Because for th...

Hello! I'm back from vacation, my SO has a new job, Lent has started, so now life is ready to get back to normal. I'll write a post on writing progress later, but first, I want to write about....video games. I know.  I'm a librarian, writer, and reader, what the heck am I doing writing about video games? Well, I am all about the scary experience.  What draws me (and many others) to the genre is how it makes us feel.  Not like "the feels" but physically how we feel.  We may sweat, or get the chills, or goosebumps. Our heart may race.  We may see things out of the corners of our eyes.  And horror enthusiasts LOVE that.  That's what horror writers strive for.  That's what horror readers crave.  But there is one outlet that seems to be doing it the best.  Video Games. Video games are interesting because they give the player the first person experience.  When books are first person, you are reading from the perspective of s...

So last time I posted a horror blog I talked about the 3 main categories of Horror, but there are even more subgenres of horror that can fall under any of the 3 main categories.  I can't possibly list them all, but I will go through some of the most popular ones and some of my favorites. Rural Horror: This one is pretty self-explanatory but what makes this unique is it tends to also include local legends, or myths, or superstition.  I'm a huge fan of this one.  I'm sort of regretting having my current project be set in the city, but it just can't work any other way.  However, all of my short stories take place in rural America.  There is just something scary about the middle of nowhere country that I love, even though it's kind of a cliche. Apocalyptic Horror: This deals with the end of the world. Not much more to say about that.  My current project has hints of this.  It isn't apocalyptic in the sense that the world is destroyed and in ruins, but...

Fear is the oldest and strongest human emotion.  I want to reiterate this because on the most basic level, my job as a horror writer is to instill fear in my readers. This creates a very broad definition of horror and allows for the inclusion of other sub-genres such as science fiction, thriller, fantasy, or supernatural.  In fact, science fiction, fantasy, and horror overlap so often that i has its own literary term: The Fantastic Triangle (which sounds like a superhero that a 5 year old created, but whatever). In his work "An Introduction to Studying Popular Culture", Dominic Strinati defined horror as a genre that "represents the need for suppression if the horror shown is interpreted as expressing uncomfortable and disturbing desires which need to be contained."  I am not a huge fan of this definition because its wordy and confusing. I am much more of a fan of Tzvetan Todorov's definition of theory of horror. Todorov breaks down horror into 3 forms: The ...