Otherworldly Words: Sorcery

If you don’t know which witch is which, then perhaps someone is using sorcery to cloud your mind. Sorcery is a word that comes from the middle ages, a time of strong belief in black magic and witches. It derives from an earlier Latin word for “one who casts lots.” What’s of particular note is…

Otherworldly Words: Ghostly

The origin of ghost is akin to the German word Geist for spirit. Spirit is such a more hopeful word, the essence or quality of someone or something. In many ways, our ghosts are that: we believe that the essence of someone still remains. We sometimes feel that the vestige is filled with dread or…

A Trip Down Scream Queen Lane

Few scream queens get the recognition they deserve, but most seem to have languished despite an impressive portfolio of horror. In this post, I share a few Scream Queens that have brought me joy. A few, I think, have been forgotten, and deserve a second watch. In the late 1970s, Katharine Ross added an impressive…

Author Shorts: How do you define suspense?

Author shorts is back! And this time, I want to know, “How do YOU define suspense?” Of course, the Author Shorts twist is that there are no long-winded responses aloud. All answers had to be no more than two sentences. Brevity presents a greater challenge.   “Suspense is the moment you reach when you want to…

Otherworldly Words: Spectral

Ghosts are around every corner! Hauntings are the most peculiar human phenomenon I can think of. It’s so easy to explain them away through psychology (loss, grief, regret) and physiology (gasses, etc.) or electricity (electromagnetic fields), yet something compelling keeps us cleaving to the idea. I’ve had my own rare, faint glimpses into something that…