Shaun Horton's Blog, page 17

Personal Rant #3: Support

In Stephen King's book On Writing, he talks about the early days, when he was still a struggling English teacher and his most lucrative work was a short story sold to Playboy Magazine. He talks about his wife, who also worked full-time and the glamorous trailer, dying car, and pile of bills they shared. He says at one point "If she had said to me, Steve, it's time to put the writing aside and take a position that can support your family, I would've put away the typewriter right then and there...

Building a Book: Part 3

Congratulations, if you're working on a book for NaNoWriMo or just as you read along with my series here, you should be at the halfway point, or just past by now. To remind you of where we are and how a book generally goes, I'm going to start with this image again.




Now, as we discussed last time, the middle of the book is usually the hardest part to write. The first 25 - 50% being the worst of the section. Now that we're getting into the meat of the story, things get a little bit easier. From...

Building a Book: Part 2

So you've got your characters, you've got your ideas, and you've done introductions all around.

Hi. My name is Jared, and I'm the antagonist. Although none of you know that yet.
This is where things start to get tricky. That funny little space between the beginning and the end commonly known as, The Middle. 
Now, for the purposes of this discussion, (and to make this little series last the whole month.), we're going to focus on the front half of the middle. Let's say, from 25% to 50%. A nor...

Building a Book

It's November, which means National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. To jump right to more information on what that means, click here.

The jist of it is this. You have the month of November, or 30 days, to write a minimum 50,000 word novel. It means writing every day and has become a fairly widely known challenge that amateur writer and professional novelists alike step up to. I signed up last year, but was distracted by too many other things to really take part, so I'm giving it a go this y...

Human Monsters

While there is always a lot of talk about the supernatural creatures of the night, and the abominations from outer space in horror, there is one beast that a lot of people don't like to talk about or admit exists, and that is the monster inside each and every one of us. We make light of them and try to understand them in the forms of Normal Bates, Hannibal Lecter, Dexter, and Jigsaw. We cheer as they get hunted down and brought to justice in movies like Se7en, Red Dragon, and Zodiac.


As you're...

Halloween Grab Bag

Yeah. I missed a week. Not that it seems to matter too much, my post two weeks ago about 2-sentence horror stories has over over 100 views since posting, which is a new record for my blog here. It is a pretty good one, so I recommend giving it a look if you haven't yet.

With October, comes Halloween. And with Halloween comes pumpkin carving. With that, comes my first giveaway contest.


I'm challenging everyone who wants to try, to a pumpkin carving contest. Email them to me here, post them on my...

2 Sentence Horror Stories

So, a while ago, the website Reddit had a little contest or something for its users to come up with two-sentence or less horror stories. The best of this contest hasn't quite gone viral, but it has popped up in several places that I've seen and while they won't keep you busy through the night reading them, there are some very nice little bits in there.


Of course, some have been around for a while now and turned into meme's. Ones which I think a lot of people have probably seen by now. These wo...

Class 5: Chapter 1

October is here, so let's start off a month of horror with a sample chapter from my latest book, Class 5 . Enjoy...



Jerry Davis climbed into bed, pulling the blankets up under his chin. He had never been scared of the dark and had never worried about monsters in his closet or under his bed. He knew there was nothing there during the day. It wasn’t like anything could sneak up to the house unseen, even at night. The most he had to worry about was the occasional scorpion or rattlesnake getting in...

A Feast of the Dead

So, I picked up a book, I'm about halfway through, and I don't really have much interest in picking it back up. Now, I don't mean this as anything bad about the book. It's decently written, with some nice cover art and a combination of elements I haven't quite seen yet. It's just those elements don't interest me much anymore. It's almost like they've (dare I say it) been done to death.

I think it's fair to say at this point, that the zombie has jumped the shark.

Or something like that.
Some of y...

Getting Published: Formatting for Kindle

October is just around the corner, and with it comes all manner of monsters, villains, disturbing acts and horrors. Also, Halloween is in there too. So, like I'm sure many of my fellow writers of horror blogs, I'm going to spend the entire month talking about horror. That being said, I'm going to spend this week and next going through a few topics I've had on the back-burner for a bit that lean more toward the business of writing.

Today's topic is that of formatting your work. This is somethin...