Shaun Horton's Blog, page 10

Short Story: Collaboration

Collaborationby Shaun Horton


Everyone has at least one good story in them. I've made my living based on that idea. Unfortunately, my own story was told a long time ago, so now I tell other people's stories. They show me their ideas, their fantasies, and I put them down on paper. I think the correct phrase is 'ghost writer'. I don't particularly care for such a macabre term though. To me, it'll always be a collaboration.

I've been sitting at my desk writing the most recent book for the better p...

Review: Jurassic World

For what it's worth, I'm now pretending Jurassic Park: The Lost World, and Jurassic Park 3 never happened.


Seriously, if you haven't seen this yet, stop reading, turn off your computer, and go see it. I'll wait.
Nobody ever listens to me. Well, as usual, I'll do my best not to do any big spoilers, but you had your chance.
When the original Jurassic Park was released in 1993, it was a milestone. It was an incredible movie in terms of story, casting, and, of course, special effects. Dinosaurs in m...

Review: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

You want a game with some longevity? From start to finish, this one took me 256 hours. And I missed a bunch of stuff too.


The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is, unsurprisingly, the third of a trilogy of games. The first was released in 2007 for PC, while the second was released in 2011 for PC and Xbox 360. The games revolve around Geralt of Rivia, a Witcher. As a boy, he was taken and given multiple tests, trials, and training, which results in a being that is more or less a superhuman. It is then their...

Writers Need to Write

A while back, I did a blog post on one of the big things that a writer needs to do to be successful. That is, to read. Now, that is a biggie, and something that everyone that wants to write needs to do, but there is something else, just as important, and that, as obvious as it may be, is to write.


Fair warning: this is going to be a bit of a rant as well as a regular blog post. 
I haven't been writing much lately. My blog posts have been very inconsistent, and that's just a small example....

Review: Poltergeist (2015)

Remakes can be very hit or miss. I was actually very excited when I heard this was getting modernized. I looked forward to seeing what they did with it. 
If you're unfamiliar with the original Poltergeist, the story centers around a family in their typical suburban home. Strange things start happening, until, finally, their little girl, Carol Anne, is sucked into her bedroom closet and disappears. Paranormal experts are brought in to investigate and do battle with the forces, to save the...

Review: Daylight

Daylight is a first-person survival-horror game from 2014, currently available on Stream and PSN.

The story to start is pretty simple. A young woman wakes up in an abandoned hospital with nothing but her cell phone for light and to map her progress. Many doors are locked, so she has to make her way through, constantly seeking a way out. Eventually, she comes across a mystic seal, that can only be undone with a specific key back somewhere in the maze.

Of course, you're not exactly alone in there...

What's in a name?

A rose, by any other name, would still smell as sweet.

Not if you called them stench-blossoms.

Heh. Simpsons. It's certainly something to keep in mind, though. It would probably be a little awkward to tell your friends your boyfriend sent you a dozen stench-blossoms.

So you have your book. It's been revised, edited, re-revised, beta read, re-edited, and re-re-revised. You're getting closer to publishing and then you hit the one question you hadn't given much thought to yet.

What's the title?

Now,...

Bait-and-Switch

So, a few weeks ago, I went to the meeting of the local writing group. It's not a big group, just a handful of people really that get together to read bits and pieces of their works in progress for feedback.

Last time I went, someone brought in the opening for a book they were working on. Before reading, they described it as an intricate sci-fi story, bridging religion and science, centered around an autistic man discovering a way to bridge the regular world with another dimension. The later p...

Review: Alien: Isolation

So, I just finished streaming my first play-through of the incredible horror game Alien: Isolation. What follows is my review of the game, so I am giving my general fair warning, this review may contain spoilers for the game, as well as for the movies. So if you haven't seen either of them, you may want to skip this blog post. Or keep reading. You know, whichever.


This game fits in between Alien and Aliens. The Nostromo is gone, and Ellen Ripley has been missing for fifteen years at this point...

The Well of Horror Ideas

If you're working in any kind of creative field, the one question you are absolutely going to be asked at some point is "Where do you get your ideas from?".

The answer is going to change based on the person and the genre they write. It can come from inspiration, imagination, perspiration, or even inebriation. It could even come from any combination of those things and even more.

This is a Horror blog though, so that's what I'm going to focus on, otherwise I'm probably going to start rambling on...