Shaun Horton's Blog, page 14

The Liebster Award (A blog-hop game)

The ever-gracious R. Donald James Gauvreau over at The Oak Wheel has named me and my sweet little blog here in his turn of the Liebster Award, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to take it and do my own little blog post on it. (As one is supposed to do.)

The main point of these blog-hop type games is to spread awareness of blogs you think people would enjoy and which are rather under-appreciated. I've been nominated in some of these in the past, and never really got around to them (or felt the need...

Character Arcs

Welcome, welcome, welcome. Please. Come in, have a drink, have a seat; we're going to be going over something very important to writing stories today. That particular topic is, as you may have guessed from this week's title, Character Arcs.

Many of you here today probably are already well aware of what a Character Arc is, but for those of you that don't, aren't sure, or just think I don't know what one is; I'm going to tell you up front anyway.

At it's most basic, a Character Arc is the journey...

Easter Eggs

I went and saw X-Men: Days of Future Past this weekend. Very good and I highly recommend it, especially if your a comic book/X-Men fan. Of course, you should stay after the credits too.

What does this have to do with Easter eggs?


Well, for those of you who don't know, an Easter Egg in addition to being a colorful spring pastime, is when there's something hidden in a movie, TV show, or even a book, which is an inside joke, or hidden message. In the recent Godzilla movie, for example, when the ma...

Review: Godzilla

Disclaimer #1: I have been a Godzilla fan all my life. I have Godzilla and Biollante action figures staring at me as I write this. Thus, this review may not be 100% unbiased.

Disclaimer #2: If you're any kind of Godzilla fan and you're reading this before seeing the movie. Stop reading. Get in your car. Go to the nearest theater where Godzilla is playing, and SEE THE FREAKIN MOVIE!

Thanks. Enjoy.

This is not Roland Emmerich's Godzilla. 
This is the real deal. Godzilla in all the glory and po...

Some Rambling, News, and Milestones

I'm not going to be too serious with this week's post. I've mostly just got a bunch of little things to mention, as opposed to one topic I'm going to go over. Some of it's writing-related, some of it's horror, some of it's just because I want to spit it out there.



For my fellow writers, I just want to toss out a reminder that if you check your reviews on Amazon, don't forget to scope out Amazon's pages for other countries. I was surprised to discover a while back that Class 5 had two reviews I...

Horror Shorts

In the mood for a good scare or horror tale, but don't feel like curling up on the couch or digging through your kindle to see what you haven't read yet? Well, there are other options. (Warning, lots of links and interactivity today.)

There's always video games. Series like Resident Evil and Dead Space are good for a few scares, and there look to be some real gems coming out in the near future like Outlast and The Evil Within.

I'm not focusing on video games in this post though. This week, what...

31 Blog Posts of Monsters: Nessie

(Sorry this is so late. Being sick and dealing with allergies at the same time BLOWS!)

So, it's not really 31 Days of Monsters at this point, but I would like to get through 31 monsters total at least, and there are some of the really famous cryptids that I was leaving until last that I didn't get through. The Loch Ness Monster was one I had originally planned to do as a kind of 'Grand Finale'. Well, we can all see now how that turned out. Anyway, I'm not going to do these one after the other,...

Underused Monsters

Looking for a good monster for your story, but tired of all the vampires, werewolves, and zombies that seem to be crowding out bookstore shelves? Looking for something to read that isn't a re-hash of Twilight or one of a hundred interchangeable undead apocalypse novels? Well, you should enjoy this week's post then. I'm going to be listing some of the more uncommon monsters that are out there. If you're a fellow author, consider that there may be a real lack of works out there for some of thes...

Building a Book: Choosing How to Publish

It's been a lot longer coming than I originally planned, but this past weekend, I emailed Hannah out to a small publisher to see if there's any interest in taking it. For those of you who need to catch up on my Building a Book series, you can do so here.

For the rest of you, you're probably either excited for me, or just relieved that this series isn't going to continue much longer. Probably. Hopefully. Anyway.

So what comes after writing, revising, revising, beta readers, revising, and mo...

On Tonight's Edition...

So, I've kind of been slacking on the blog posts the past two weeks. Two weeks ago I was running late by several days, and last week's post was so poorly thought out and written that I ended up deleting it before the day was over. To be bluntly honest, I didn't have much for this week either, but I'll be damned if I'm going to make you wait another week. So, here's what I've got for you. 
About this time last year, I found out a short story of mine that I had submitted to a writing contes...