The entire history of the Spanish Civil War is treated as a footnote in U.S. high school history courses, or worse, the conflict is conflated as being a part of World War II. This isn’t entirely the fault of the education system. Unbiased information about the war was hard to find, because while the Francoist State decreed that all the documents pertaining to the Spanish Civil War were to become state property, those archives weren’t freely accessible to researchers until after Franco's death in 1975.

This is in direct contrast to the abundance of research focused on Hitler, the Third Reich, and how [seemingly] an entire nation turned into goose-stepping maniacs, thrilled to see their neighbors shipped off to "work camps," or as we now say in America "ICE detention centers." The German documentation of their war crimes provided an incredible resource for scholars, whereas in Spain, Franco’s Nationalists persecuted Republicans long after the war, so wherever possible, people destroyed any records linking them to the Second Republic or the leftist parties of the Popular Front.

So, unlike the profusion of texts about Germany and World War II, which were published in the years immediately following the war, research on the Spanish Civil War in English hit America at a much slower pace, and actually became more prevalent in the 1980s (notwithstanding Hugh Thomas’s tome, The Spanish Civil War, published in 1961).

I’ve been asked to make the Spanish Civil War easy to understand for American readers, but that’s a hard curve to follow. It’s difficult not to get bogged down in cultural and political intricacies, which are the nerves and veins of any body politic.

Wars don’t instantaneously combust out of the ether. They are planned events that are the result of years, sometimes decades, of emotional fermentation that is sometimes stroked and provoked by outside entities with a vested interest in the outcome.

What I’ve done in this blog post is written a very basic and I do mean M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E basic rundown of the major events leading up to and through the Spanish Civil War with some 21st century comparisons to help American readers understand.

* * *

During World War I, Spain was neutral, which turned the entire country into a covert tug-of-war between the Triple Entente [Great Britain, France, and Russia] and the Central Powers [the German Empire and Austria-Hungary]. Espionage was the preferred mode of operation, and the British, French, Russians, and the German empire were all eager to get in on the game, because Spain controlled natural resources and both the Atlantic and Mediterranean waterways.

The forms of espionage utilized by the Germans was to stoke civil unrest through the unions and newspapers. If you’re looking for a 21st century comparison, think of the Russian infiltration of Facebook and Twitter to manipulate racial tensions in the U.S. since 2015. It’s a textbook case of knowing how to exploit the weakness of one’s enemies and doing so while flying under the radar.

Some histories will tell you that Spain got rich by providing arms to the WWI combatants. That’s kind of true.

A few very rich magnates ... let's call them the 1% ... benefited financially from the neutrality. As with the U.S.'s foray into trickle down economics, nothing trickled down to the workers in Spain. The general populace was dealing with high inflation and stagnant pay.

Some of this might sound familiar.

So there was plenty for the Germans to exploit. And let me pause here to say I’m not absolving the Entente of their exploitation of the situation, but this is a blog post, and I am keeping it simple.

Spain had two major workers unions, the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), which was probably comparable to the United Auto Workers in the U.S. in terms of politics, and the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), Barcelona’s anarcho-syndicalist trade union, which was somewhat more into setting things on fire. The Abwehr (German intelligence like our CIA) worked hard to infiltrate the CNT with petrol and matches in the form of angry rhetoric.

Needless to say it was a politically charged time-period.

In Spain’s 1933 elections, the political party that won the most seats was the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA), which was a right-wing party that wanted Spanish law and culture shaped close to Catholic doctrine. CEDA was willing to use authoritarian measures to achieve their goals. For my American friends, think the Christian Nationalist movement in the U.S., which like CEDA, is slipping into fascism.

CEDA wanted to rewrite the constitution to defend “Christian civilization” from leftism. (See the 21st century definition of “woke” and all the propaganda that goes along with that term and you’ve got the general idea.) The left weren’t acting much better, because rather than following democratic values and constitutional law, they were identifying with specific policies and politicians (looking at you, Democratic Party).

The only thing trickling down to the workers was hate and a whole lot of poverty.

In 1934, miners in the Asturias formed a massive strike, which metamorphized into a revolutionary uprising known as the Asturian Revolution of 1934. I’m barely hitting the tip of the iceberg here, because this uprising deserves a blog post and book of its own. What you need to remember, dear readers, is the Spanish government put down the insurrection and it turned into a bloodbath by the military.

General Eduardo López Ochoa, known as el verdugo de Asturias (the butcher of Asturias) led the campaign against striking Asturian miners. His name is important, because in 1936, Spanish citizens elected a left-wing government represented by parties collectively known as the Popular Front*, which punished López Ochoa for his role in the Asturian Revolution. That punishment didn’t sit well with the other military generals, especially those who had also served in advisory or active roles in that conflict—one of those generals was a man named Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teódulo Franco Bahamonde, who we know as Francisco Franco.

In that same 1936 election, another group, the Falange, won a few seats. The Falange was an extreme nationalist party influenced by Italian fascism. In the U.S., we call them MAGA.

The populace found themselves in the crosshairs of violent leftist protests while the right carried out its own violence against leftist organizations. Churches were burned, strikes were ongoing, riots and violence became commonplace. The polarization in the country became so intense, children didn’t play “cops and robbers,” they played “leftists and rightists.”

Again, some of this might sound familiar.

In the government, the lack of trust between the right and left created a situation whereby both sides were convinced that the other side wanted to destroy them. In all this chaos, President Manuel Azaña and Prime Minister Santiago Casares Quiroga ignored rumblings of a military uprising.

[The organization of the military uprising went through several stages of its own from roughly 1931 through 1936, but we’re going to skip over that and move directly ahead to …]

Although the Spanish Civil War officially began in 1936, it wasn’t until 1937 that General Francisco Franco managed to forcibly merge several right-wing groups: the Falange, the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA), and two rival monarchist claimants: the Alfonsist Renovación Española and the Carlist Traditionalist Communion into the ...

... wait for it ...

… The Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista, or the FET y de las JONS for short.

Needless to say, these guys had marketing issues, so they shortened the whole thing again to Nationalists. That one seemed to stick.

Franco and his generals quickly established military control over the outposts where they were stationed. However, reaching into the peninsula proved to be a problem. The only major city they managed to initially take was Seville.

They needed planes to move their troops deeper into northern Spain, where they were meeting heavy resistance, and this is where Hitler comes in. Franco sent a delegation to Germany to request aid, and Hitler saw this as a ripe training ground for his troops, as well as a place to give his Luftwaffe pilots some much needed experience. Likewise, Mussolini was all in, so with the help of Italy and Germany, a military uprising that could have been put down relatively quickly turned into a brutal four year civil war.

The rest of the world refused to engage and turned a blind eye toward Germany and Italy's involvement in Spain, because no one wanted another world war, but lo and behold, we all got one anyway, because the Popular Front fell to a combination of Nationalist aggression and dissension within their own ranks. Paul Preston makes a good case that the communist infighting with the socialists is what brought the Popular Front down in one of his books, but I can't for the life of me remember which one (he's written several histories of the Spanish Civil War).

As the war came to its grisly end, thousands of Spanish Republicans fled across the border into France while German planes gleefully bombarded them. The Republican army also moved troops into France in what is known as La Retirada (the retreat). Note that’s a retreat and not a surrender. The army hoped to regroup in France and return to fight. Instead, they found themselves disarmed and placed in French concentration camps. Franco revoked their citizenship, thereby making them stateless.

Later on, when the Germans invaded France, these Spanish troops were instrumental in helping the French, both by joining the French army to fight and also in helping with guerrilla warfare against the occupying Germans.

A quick note on the International Brigades: I did have one woman make a statement to me that just blew me away. She said that America helped the Spanish during the Spanish Civil War by sending in the International Brigades.

The International Brigades were NOT sent by America.

The International Brigades were organized by the Communist International (Comintern) to assist the Popular Front. I’d suggest Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell is a good place to start if you want to read more about the International Brigades.

__________________

*The Popular Front was made up of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), the Republican Left (IR), and the Republican Union (UR).

Bibliography

I’ve only listed books here, because some of the articles that I’ve found are accessible only through JSTOR or other academic resources. I wanted this list to be as accessible for the general reader as possible.

The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 by Antony Beevor.

The Franco years: the untold human story of life under Spanish fascism by Jose Yglesias.

Hell and good company: the Spanish Civil War and the world it made by Richard Rhodes.

Homage to Catalonia by Geroge Orwell.

The life and death of the Spanish Republic: a witness to the Spanish Civil War by Henry Buckley.

¡No Pasarán! writings from the Spanish Civil War, edited by Pete Ayrton.

Spain in our hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 by Adam Hochschild.

The Spanish Civil War: reaction, revolution, revenge by Paul Preston.

The Spanish Holocaust: inquisition and extermination in twentieth-century Spain by Paul Preston.

The Spanish labyrinth: an account of the social and political background of the Spanish Civil War by Gerald Brenan.

I patterned the plot and tone of the stories after the pulp fiction in the 1930s and ‘40s when the lines between good guys and villains were clear. It all seems a bit naive today but I guess this explains why I burned out on the so-called realistic fantasy with morally gray characters. Don’t get me wrong, I totally enjoyed a lot of the grimdark novels I read, but after a while, I needed my stories to be more morally grounded.

Being “good” doesn’t mean one doesn’t struggle. In fact, those struggles become more intense because the character is trying to overcome the evil, or even the banality, within themselves, and that, for me, has always been what the Los Nefilim series was about—people trying hard to be good, even when all the world around them has turned evil.

I began this series when I thought my writing career was over. I thought that I’d write one more story, but this time, I decided I’d write the kind of story I enjoy reading. That story was In Midnight’s Silence, the first Los Nefilim novella. I had zero plans of continuing the series, but to my shock, the novella sold, and I was asked if I had more planned, so I made up the plots of the next two novellas on the spot, and those novellas gave me the map to the novels.

I regained rights to the series over the summer, and I intend to reissue them with JABberwocky. The novellas are a little rough, so I’m editing them and realigning the motivations of some of my villains. The overall stories will remain the same, and I have no intention of giving them the same heavy revisions I gave Miserere. This is more of a fine-tuning.

I’d also like to release a new story or novella with the revised novellas. Knowing how much everyone loves Diago and Miquel (relationship goals, am I right?), I’ll probably do a story about them meeting in their current incarnation. I’ve already got an outline of it in my head, and I’m eager to get started.

I’m exceptionally happy with the novels, so there won’t be any revisions to them other than tightening some loose sentences. I’m hoping these will all be ready for rerelease sometime in 2026.

I’m also working on a secret project I’m halfway finished with, and a horror novel that won’t leave me alone. Both of those are major projects, but I’m looking forward to having more writing time later in 2026.

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate everyone who has stuck with me through these long silences, especially over the last year. We’ve had some health challenges, and I’ve finally begun stripping/repainting my kitchen cabinets (a long anticipated project that I’ve spent several weekends working on).

I’ve also found that I enjoy working with wood and refinishing the cabinets. I’m not great at it, but being great isn’t goal, the enjoyment is. Like all things, practice is the key, and I’m exceptionally lucky that my husband is great at woodworking, so he’s been coaching me through the project.

I hope in 2026, you find the things you love to do, and I hope you also have the time and energy to engage with your favorite projects and people. Be careful and keep your loved ones close, and please know I appreciate you.

Watch for me …

Mine is more of a Dear Erin letter, and it goes like this:

Dear Erin,

When reading your letter at File 770, I violated a very special rule of my own, which is to never to speed read another author’s work. Finding the right words to accurately convey our thoughts and feelings is a difficult task. Analytical theses are even harder, because these subjects can be dull by nature, and you want to hold your readers’ attention to get your points across.

What all that means is that out of respect for the nature of an author’s labor, I rarely, if ever, speed read another’s work. However, I violated this rule with your letter, because, Lord Jesus, Erin, it was long and boring and never actually reached a conclusion other than to say AI is here stay and if you don’t like it, sucks to be you, which, you know, if that’s your thoughts on the matter, then just say so. I initially thought the letter was written by a bot, meaning that there wasn’t a scrap of your personality in that letter.

I wondered if you were actually a real person. So I looked you up online and lo and behold, I found your blog and dear God, Erin, it’s as insipid as your letter. Since you confessed at the end of your letter that you used AI in your letter, I’m just assuming you use it for your blog and, Erin, after reading your blog, I want you to know:

You need to let that shit go or you’re never going to grow as a writer.

By now, I’m sure you think I’m a mean old lady who is punching down, but if you were sitting in my living room, I’d say all this to your face. It’s just that my writing voice tends to read much harsher than my speaking voice, and that is precisely what your writing lacks: voice.

An author’s writing voice is cultivated over years of practice. I saw this most clearly when I revised Miserere’s new edition. My eye caught stylistic issues, such as tautology and overwrought prose, throughout the first edition. The raw voice I wanted to use in that novel was there, but it was rough. My ability to see the novel’s problems came, not from relying on a computer, but from the experience I gained by writing the Los Nefilim series.

Those novellas and novels were written under the guidance of an agent and editor with excellent eyes toward story structure. Countless professional editors helped me refine my prose, and all these people worked with me to make the books better without changing my personal writing voice.

Honing one’s craft, one’s writing voice, is a cultivation process created by trial, error, and countless edits. Each author’s voice is distinctive. Remove the names and authors’ works stand out by story structure and prose. That isn’t machine learning, it’s done by human beings who know how to translate experience into words.

The brain is a muscle, Erin, and you must exercise it. You can’t do that by relying on a machine to manufacture your thoughts. I read your blog. Your sentence structure is that of a 6th grader, and those sentences are as bland as water. Your word count is prodigious but conveys nothing other than the regurgitation of the blandest of bland reviews over and over again, the same as if it’s all written by AI.

There’s no feeling, no EMOTION, no misplaced commas, no sign that you’re even human, because machines lack human experience, human voice, that writing voice so many authors spend years and years honing over countless drafts the same way musicians practice scales before moving to compositions.

Creativity is formed, first by understanding techniques, and then by applying those techniques to lived experience, not by stripping other people’s words and rearranging arbitrary phrases into a different form. Writers reach deep, not into a thesaurus, but into our souls, and we spend the necessary time to shape our ideas, our feelings, into clearly structured prose. In doing so, we grow as writers and as human beings.

Erin, my voice is hard, but I say this to you and all the young writers out there: don’t let AI steal your voice. You have life-experiences unique to you. Create them in words and don’t be afraid to fail. Learn from your mistakes and keep growing.

That’s how you become a writer.

P.S.: To the SFWA, for shame on you. You are professional authors and you should know the work necessary to become a writer. AI shouldn’t be a part of the process. Period.

I did want to pop in to let you know that during the month of December, Miserere: An Autumn Tale (the new edition) has been chosen for Kobo’s Best of the Year BOGO, so grab it cheap while you can! [Note: This deal is only good for the U.S., Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.]

Due to the holidays, I’ve got a little extra time off work, so I’m polishing the Los Nefilim manuscripts to be republished through JABberwocky. For those who missed the news, rights to the Los Nefilim novels reverted to me over the summer, and I have every intention of rereleasing them. Like Miserere, they’ll be ebook only, but they seem to do better as ebooks and in audio.

Back over the summer, I started the great kitchen remodel. Okay, it wasn’t a remodel, but an update, because I was tired of living in a makeshift kitchen construction site. It was one of those things where it was an ugly room but any changes kept getting put off because there were more important priorities such as work and writing and other home projects that were more urgent. I’d been talking about doing it for years, and last summer, I finally got to it.

The entire project is complicated by the fact that the previous owners, in order to kill the very 1970s avocado green kitchen, painted white latex paint over an oil-based paint, which was simply another reason why I put it off for so long. When I finally decided to tackle the project, I thought I’d simple scrape/sand the white latex off the avocado green. Unfortunately, whoever put the avocado green on the cabinets failed to thoroughly prep the surface and now ALL THE PAINT comes off when I scrape in some places and sticks like glue in others.

What I’ve learned from all this is there is a reason pain is an integral part of the word paint. Anyway, with a combination of elbow grease, paint removers, and entire weekends spent on sanding, I’m about halfway through the project. I’m not even going to talk about the hardware (L-shaped hinges that I love, but some need 7 screws and others need 5 and all of them need to be spray-painted to match the brass cabinet handles, which are so tarnished they’re black). Let’s just say I invested $5.00 in a used crockpot and have spent more time cooking hardware than food.

While I rarely give endorsements, after much trial and error, I highly recommend Wright’s (by Weiman) Cream Copper and Brass Cleaner if you, like me, have brass hardware in your house. It’s a great thing for me, because in addition to the brass cabinet handles, I have numerous brass doorknobs in my old house and I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but I hope it helps you with any home related projects. Once the great kitchen renovation is done, I will move on to the living but will hopefully be retired by then, thereby giving me more time to devote to different projects.

But it’s not been all work and no play. I’m still working on a couple of projects and reading. I’ve read a lot lately but two novels stand out as winners: something old (Come Closer by Sara Gran) and something new (The Night That Finds Us All by John Hornor Jacobs) both of which I highly recommend. Come Closer is a terrifying tale of possession, and The Night That Finds Us All is Jacobs exploring chthonic horror as Jacobs does so well.

Non-fiction reads are: Vampires, Burial & Death by Paul Barber and Deviant Burial in the Archaeological Record (Studies in Funerary Archaeology) by Eileen M. Murphy. Both of these are for blog posts and works I’m currently in the process of writing.

If you can, please go and give the new edition of Miserere some love with a review or rating. Algorithms matter and all that. I’d really appreciate it!

I hope you’re all well and looking forward to the holidays, no matter how you celebrate.

Watch for me …

Anytime I do a workshop like this, I tend to begin with the big picture and narrow the scope as the workshop progresses. I try to keep in mind learning styles as I teach, but that is a little more difficult with online workshops, because I can’t see faces, I can’t tell if I need to expand on a topic or if everyone is getting bored and it’s time to move on to the next thing.

This is a rather lengthy post but it is what is, and as with all writing advice, please take what you need and leave the rest. —T

Introduction 

There are a lot of great resources both online and off on how to write horror, and I’ve listed a few links and a brief bibliography at the end of this post. Rather than give you a list of steps, I want to give you a broader overview of storytelling in general with some advice on how to write horror. We’ll go over story structure, pacing, and how to build tension in a scene, but these are things to do once you’ve completed your Zero Draft. 

What is a Zero Draft? Kate Elliott coined the term for the very first draft of any story. In the Zero Draft, you’re just getting your ideas, or the bones of the story, down. Fleshing out the story later will create the first draft, and this is where you’ll use a lot of the techniques we’re going to talk about in this workshop.  

I also use a lot of examples when teaching. That’s because while it’s highly important to read in your genre, whether it’s horror, romance, or fantasy, it’s equally important to learn how to analyze a story’s structure, not so you can replicate what another author has done, but so you can understand the basics of story structure, which will, in turn, help you develop your own style. 

For the purposes of this workshop, we’re going to pretend you’ve got the Zero Draft of your story written. In the Zero Draft we don’t worry about things like story structure, or finding the right rhythm in your prose, or even worry too much about spelling. What we’re worried about in the Zero Draft is just getting the story down, because all these other things can be fixed in the edits. 

To plot or pants? Each writer has their own style and preference. I like working from a loose synopsis, because doing that allows me to see if the story’s structure is working. Then I let each chapter lead to the next. This is a combination of using an outline (of sorts) and writing by the seat of my pants; however, before I begin any book, I already know who my protagonist and characters are—including their backstories, what they intend to do, and how I intend to get them to the climax. Having these details ironed out in the beginning will allow you to focus more on the story’s structure as you write.

Story Structure 

Horror is about building suspense, which is why so many horror authors can easily transition to the mystery/thriller genre. In some cases, the terms horror and thriller are used interchangeably, but I dislike that categorization, because the two are distinct in that at the true heart of every horror story is fear. 

A solid story structure can help build that fear and carry the reader through a story. Although any of the various story structures can work with horror, we’re going to keep things simple and just going to look at two for this workshop: 

1. 3-Act story structure - inciting incident > rising action > climax and denouement (see Caitlin Starling’s The Luminous Dead or Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter for good examples); or 

2. Freytag’s Pyramid - inciting incident > rising action > climax > return, or fall, where the tension builds and the story moves toward > catastrophe (see Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre or Stephen King’s Pet Sematary for good examples) 

The 3-Act structure is really quite simple, and I highly recommend it for novice authors, because that simplicity allows you to focus on other aspects of the story in your Zero Draft. Freytag’s Pyramid sounds more complicated than it actually is, and I’ll show you how it works with one of my favorite horror stories, Pet Sematary.

If I had to pick a horror novel that fully exemplifies the genre as a whole, Pet Sematary would be that book; however, that’s not why I picked it for this course. I’m using it because it’s an older work, and many people are already familiar with the plot, either through the novel, the films, or memes, so I don’t feel like I’m spoiling a recent novel for you.

Even so, I want to go over a quick synopsis to draw your eye to specific plot points before discussing how these are implemented in the story’s structure.

In Pet Sematary, we’re introduced to Louis Creed and his family, which includes his wife, their two young children, and the rather infamous Winston Churchill (aka Church), the family cat. Louis is an alcoholic who is running from his past in Chicago, and let’s just say that it’s established very early that Louis doesn’t always make good choices. 

Louis and his family are encountering a new environment, one that invariably contains a menace, which is a person, who isn’t evil, but who, with the best of intentions, directs Louis to an evil place. In the opening of the novel, Louis meets his new neighbor, Jud, who has lived in the area all his life. 

The supernatural aspects of the pet cemetery aren’t introduced until later in the story when the family cat, Winston Churchill, is hit by a car. When Jud suggests Louis use the pet cemetery to bring Winston Chruchill back from the dead, he gives Louis the backstory of the Mi’kmaq burial ground and tells Louis what to do. It’s been a while since I’ve read the story, but I seem to remember that Jud leads Louis to the cemetery that first time. Regardless, after being left at the pet cemetery overnight, Winston Churchill returns, but he is different. And here is where the story takes a definite turn into the uncanny.

It’s critical you understand that in writing horror, you’re building something weird, what Freud called unheimlich—that which is not familiar (which is an overly simplistic definition of the word)—while exploring a familiar fear. King uses his characters and the supernatural aspects of his story to explore the fear of death, but he takes care to entrench his readers in the real world before drawing them into the supernatural.

The first part of Pet Sematary is almost entirely a mundane story of a damaged man, trying to adjust to a new life. Then the deaths begin and just keep coming, and the story grows weirder and more uncanny with each trip to the burial ground.

So, in writing your own work, you want to keep your reader off-balance by first redirecting their focus from the uncanny to the mundane, and just when they think they know what’s going on, slip them into the unfamiliar in by degrees. Let’s look at how King progresses through the events of his story’s structure. Remember, this is an example of Freytag’s Pyramid: 

The inciting incident: Louis meets Jud, the old-timer who has always lived in the area. These two characters bond. Without Jud, Louis would never know about the Mi’kmaq burial ground. 

The rising action: Louis explores the woods, comes to the deadfall, but doesn’t dare try to go over it, because it’s too dangerous. At Thanksgiving, while his family is visiting relatives, Church is hit by a car. Agonizing about telling his daughter about her cat’s death, Louis talks to Jud, who then offers a solution by leading Louis over the deadfall with the dead cat. Here, Jud introduces Louis to the haunted burial ground on the other side of the deadfall. 

The climax: The young son, Gage, is killed, and Louis digs up his son’s body so he can take it to the burial ground and bring his son back to life. Those chapters are an absolute masterclass in tension and supernatural horror. 

The return, or fall, where the tension builds and the story moves toward: Gage comes back to life, but Gage isn’t Gage, and now he goes on a murder spree that includes Louis’s wife, which leads Louis BACK to the burial ground with his wife’s body. 

Catastrophe: Louis is at the kitchen table with his hair gone white and his wife comes home. 

Establish the Threat at the Beginning 

Once you’ve finished the Zero Draft, we’re in my favorite phase, the edit, where we make sure a reader can follow the story, but where we also check to make sure we’re hitting all the right notes. This is where I want to talk a little about your opening paragraph because it is important. 

Unfortunately, I’ve also seen authors twist themselves in knots over it, and having survived that phase of my writing career, I want to assure you it never gets easier. However, you will survive it. Just remember: 

The opening paragraph doesn’t have to be melodramatic, dark, or evil. The trick is to use clear, concise language. 

Let’s look again to Pet Sematary. King shows you the threat in the first paragraph, but it’s not clearly apparent Jud is a threat. This is the sleight of hand I talked about earlier. King quickly establishes the following things: Louis Creed makes a new friend, Louis has a family, and at the very end, we learn of Winston Churchill, who is a pivotal character: 

Louis Creed, who had lost his father at three and who had never known a grandfather, never expected to find a father as he entered his middle age, but that was exactly what happened... although he called this man a friend, as a grown man must do when he finds the man who should have been his father relatively late in life. He met this man on the evening he and his wife and his two children moved into the big white frame house in Ludlow. Winston Churchill moved in with them. Church was his daughter Eileen’s cat. 

All of this feels perfectly normal, because it is. One isn’t introduced into the uncanny aspects of the story until much later, and when that happens, the reader can go back to this paragraph and see what they initially missed: that Jud and Church are the linchpins that propel the events forward. 

Likewise, Stephen Graham Jones establishes his threat/foreshadowing/hook in the first sentence of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter: 

A dayworker reaches into the wall of the parsonage his crew’s revamping and pulls a piece of history up, the edges of its pages crumbling under the fingers of his glove, and I have to think that, if his supervisor isn’t walking by at just that moment, then this construction grunt stuffs that journal from a century ago into his tool belt to pawn, or trade for beer, and the world never knows about it. 

Neither of these things initially appear to be threats, but each author slowly builds their stories and the growing horror around the relationship between Louis and Jud and the found journal respectively. Both authors have pulled a psychological sleight of hand on the reader by having us focus on one event (Louis Creed and his relationship with Jud / a construction worker finds a journal) before settling us into their uncanny worlds and making the surreal real (that a burial ground can bring back the dead / the supernatural contents of the journal). 

Pacing 

Pacing refers to how quickly or slowly a story moves. You don’t want your reader to feel rushed through the story, but at the same time, you don’t want them to feel like the information you’re giving them is unnecessary. 

I like to think of each chapter as a mini essay, where I’m introducing information, which the the reader needs to understand either characterization or the next plot point. Ideally, each chapter should accomplish understanding in both these areas. 

Each chapter should carry your plot forward and introduce the next plot point by the end of that chapter. You want to leave a hook—an unanswered question or a cliffhanger of some sort—within each chapter if you can. These hooks keep your reader guessing and invested in the story. 

Think of your story as a haunted house or a cornfield maze. You want to lead your reader through without getting them lost, but you also don’t want them bored.  

In a horror novel, the chapters should become more and more threatening or uncanny as the story’s arc is completed. This is where your alpha and beta readers can be an immense help. They can tell you where the story is dragging or where they feel confused. 

HOWEVER, and I always add this as a caveat to any author: Your alpha and beta readers are not always right. Learn to trust yourself. You know what your story is about and how you need it to go. 

Pacing will greatly depend on what kind of horror novel you’re writing. A splatterpunk (slasher fiction) novel will move at a much faster pace than a haunted house novel, where the suspense and backstory unfolds slowly.

Don’t Use Fuzzy Language 

I’m going to hammer this point home: always use clear and concise prose. You don’t want your reader guessing what you mean, especially in a horror novel where you’re building suspense and making the surreal believable. 

For example: Take the following sentence: 

Rhi saw something spooky move under the soil. 

There is nothing wrong with the sentence, it’s structurally sound, and it does the trick. You’ve told your reader that your protagonist has seen something weird. But “something” could be anything and really doesn’t seat a clear idea in your reader’s mind. 

If you want to give the sentence a chill, be clear: 

Rhi glimpsed a pale tendril wiggle beneath the soil. 

The second version of that sentence directs your reader to a concrete threat, not some nebulous concept. Even so, notice I don’t go into a deep description of the “pale tendril.”  

Trust your reader to fill in some of these blanks. Rather than indicate a generic movement, I changed the word to “wiggle,” which evokes a specific image. Some will imagine a worm, others a snake, still others Cthulhu, all of it depending on their personal fears. 

The reader still doesn’t know the real extent of the threat, but they have a much clearer mental image, which will stroke their fears. 

Chekov’s Gun and Creating Tension 

I know you’ve all heard the rule of Chekov’s gun, which is “don’t show a gun in chapter X unless it goes off in chapter Y,” but in horror, you show the gun in chapter X so you don’t have to waste time describing the gun in the middle of the action in chapter Y. The difference is that the “gun” is seemingly mundane and introduced in stages. 

Likewise, you don’t want to plant all your “guns” in one chapter. Sprinkle these various items throughout the chapters, so you don’t fall into info dumping on your reader. 

Ways to increase that dynamic tension: 

• Use shorter sentences when you’re trying to ramp up the tension in a scene. 

• The environment can be utilized to increase tension (a storm that increases in intensity as the events unfold, a house that is slowly falling apart as the story progresses, glimpses in a mirror or window that startle the character). 

• Sounds, scents, lighting ... these are all good ways to help describe the rising tension. It’s not necessary to use them all at once but think of them as herbs in a recipe: a little enhances flavor while too much can overpower the dish. 

Since these things can be kind of spoiler-rific, I’ll give you a scene from one of my novels, which is dark fantasy. Here are the “guns” that were planted in the previous eleven chapters: 

• Diago and Lorelei are supernatural creatures—Diago is a nephil and Lorlei is a Rhinemaiden; 

• Music plays a large part of this story, and the violin haunting Diago is his lost Stradivarius; 

• The nephilim experience chromesthesia, sound-to-color synesthesia, which is a type of synesthesia whereby sound involuntarily evokes an experience of color, shape, and movement. The nephilim use the vibrations of sound to form sigils, which is how they work their magic; 

• The final line of this scene was established at the beginning of the book through Diago’s recurring nightmare of WWI; 

• They are sneaking into Germany under cover of the night, and the year is 1932. 

Here is the section, and watch for when the sentences begin to pull up sharp to increase the tension: 

Diago and Lorelei had the cover of a moonless night, but she showed no inclination to begin their journey until midnight, when she gestured for him to follow her. Silently, they uncovered her boat. Diago helped her push it into the water. 

Lorelei rowed with long easy strokes, knowing when to pull hard and when to drift; she guided the boat as if she swam beneath. They were over halfway across when he heard the first siren’s song: a deep haunting sound, like the wind in pain, crying, crying . . . 

Lorelei hissed through her teeth. 

Another voice joined the first Rhinemaiden and they harmonized: “Come down, come down, come down into the river, into my arms so sweet . . .” 

He felt their song touch his will, but the effort was as tentative as a tug from Rafael on his sleeve. They think I am a mortal. They’re not trying very hard. 

Before the sirens could strengthen their song, Diago felt another assault on the back of his mind. The violin screeched in raw discordant notes. 

Someone dropped it. His heart stuttered at the thought. Fine. Drop it, destroy it. He didn’t care as long as the hateful thing finally ceased its hold on his mind. 

In the ensuing silence, something bumped against the side of the boat. He tried to convince himself it was flotsam. Then the sirens’ song came again, louder, more intense. He recalled the angel Candela and the golden snake she’d used to enchant him. I will give you a song . . . 

He resisted the urge to lash out at either the Rhinemaidens or the ghost-music from the violin. Even a sigil of protection could work against him by alerting the Rhinemaidens to his supernatural nature. On land, he might fight them and win. On the river, he would be helpless as water filled his lungs. 

Under normal circumstances, his voice was his life, but silence was his best weapon now. Lorelei was his protection. He had to trust in her. 

“Almost there,” Lorelei’s mutter caused him to open eyes he hadn’t realized he’d closed. 

No lights burned on the opposite shore. They might as well be floating into an abyss. 

He needed something to occupy his mind, something to drive the Rhinemaidens’ insistent song from his thoughts. Shutting his eyes again, he counted backward: five hundred, four hundred and ninety-nine, four hundred and ninety-eight . . . 

The first Rhinemaiden whispered, “Come into my arms and I will sing you a song.” 

. . . four hundred and ninety-seven, four hundred and ninety-six, . . . 

The squawk of the violin struck his consciousness. Diago envisioned a hand grasping the neck. Long tapered fingers—lovely hands—took their position on the strings—white so white could a mortal be so white? 

He forgot to count. Lethargy suffused his limbs. It would be easy to slide beneath the waves and sleep . . . 

“In my arms,” sang the second maiden. Cold fingers caressed the back of his hand. 

Then came the attack and punch against the strings—three quick jabs of the bow: strike, strike, strike—and then a pull, slurring to become the malignant leitmotif Diago now called his own. The violence of the music wrenched him from the somnolence induced by the Rhinemaidens’ song. Arpeggios reverberated blue and deep like the waves sloshing against the side of the boat. 

The tempo picked up speed, the beats coming harder, faster like the slap of fins (oars) on the water. The wind touched his face, and the promise of a melody was whispered to his mind. 

Return to me, and I will give you a song, wept the violin with long, sweeping strokes that floated over the night deeply, sadly, moving into a dirge. The notes faded, softer and softer, shifting into a tremolo so that the bow quivered over the strings until the water drowned the last of the chords, and five heartbeats passed with nothing but the splash of oars to fill the quiet . . . 

Then the bow resumed its attack and punch against the strings (strike, strike, strike) and the boat hit the opposite shore, and the night came down, and the world went black, and silence descended quick and hard, like the stillness that follows the falling of a bomb. 

Everything in this scene has already been established in the readers’ minds long before I hit the action. That way I can just refer to the violin, the Rhinemaidens, and the nightmare without having to stop and tell the reader what is going on. 

The tension is ramped up by shortening the sentences about midway through, but also through the rhythm of the various songs assaulting Digao’s mind. The story is about the power of music, so I tried to use rhythm in my prose. One of the best ways to see if a scene like this is working is to read it out loud, and then when you’re happy with it, turn it over to your trusty alpha/beta readers. 

Rules—When to Follow Them and When to Ignore Them 

Show don’t tell: Show don’t tell, except when you need to tell ... wait! What? 

Show don’t tell is some of the worst writing advice authors can get. Note that in the opening paragraphs of the bestselling novels above, the authors tell you what’s going on. There aren’t waves and waves of descriptive prose, because it’s not needed. The authors seat the reader firmly in the stories from the get-go by ... wait for it ... telling. And it’s quite effective. 

But even as King initially tells you about Louis’s eventual love for Jud as a father-figure, he goes on to show the reader how that relationship develops through the story, and when everything eventually turns dark, the reader is swept away in the narrative. Even as Jones tells the reader about the found journal, he goes on to show why it’s important to the narrator, and then he revels the journal’s contents over the course of the novel.  

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use descriptive prose. What it means is that you, the author, need to find the right combination of show and tell that effectively conveys your story to your reader. This isn’t something you can do by following strict “writing rules,” which I tend to avoid. This is simply something you learn by doing, by writing, by making mistakes, and by learning from those mistakes to become a more effective writer. 

Less is more: Unless you’re writing body horror or splatterpunk (slasher fiction), in which case more is definitely called for. It all depends on the type of horror that you want to write, so read books that tell the same kind of story you want to tell. Folk horror is often tied to the land, haunted buildings and body horror tend to build suspense slowly. Haunted houses are more mind-games and body horror tends to be more graphic. This is the time to meet reader expectations.

Damaged People: Most characters in horror novels are damaged people. THEY think they’re fine, but the reader can clearly see trouble coming. One of the most poignant I can recall recently reading is Starve Acre. It’s about a family with a child they simply don’t understand, and that child is possessed by something horrible, and then the child dies, and here, two grieving people are each trying to cope in their own way while something evil slips into their lives. It was a hard story to read and one that is a perfect example of how the surreal can leech into the characters’ lives. 

Supernatural Rules: Just as fantasy has rules for its magic, supernatural horror has rules, and while these rules are sometimes defined by myths or established tropes, you need to establish your version of these rules in your readers’ minds. When does the horror begin in your story? When the rules get broken, or when the rules don’t?

Tropes in Horror – Know Them, Subvert Them 

There’s a saying that there aren’t any original stories, but don’t let that frighten you. (See what I did there?) 

There are horror tropes, and just like a romance novel where two people meet and after a series of unfortunate events they fall in love with a happily ever after, so too does horror have its tropes—they're just not as pleasant. 

Let’s look at a couple: 

• Summoning evil: This a great one and it’s used a LOT. You know the drill: teenagers get together and summon evil, usually accidentally, and then they can’t put the Ouija back in the board. One of the most effective uses of this trope is actually a movie (Talk to Me), which is about a group of teenagers who grip a severed, embalmed hand so they can become possessed by a dead spirit. It’s a party game that goes bad. 

Usually in these situations, it’s a Ouija board or someone finds an old book and summons a demonic being, but in Talk to Me, the writers flip the trope to become a severed embalmed hand. And it’s all fun and giggles until the wrong person gets possessed and someone else holds the hand too long ... 

What’s the rule and does it get broken? To prevent spirits from binding themselves to the hand holder, someone else must end the possession before 90 seconds by pulling away the embalmed hand and blowing out a candle, but when that rule gets broken, one teenager jeopardizes her own life to fix the error. The harder she tries to undo the damage, the more horrific the results, leading to the climax.  

• Found Footage: Stephen Graham Jones spins his historical horror with a found journal in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. It’s an easy trope, so an author needs to invent some way to tell the story coherently and a way to put the trope on its head. Jones does both by having the journal found by a woman trying for tenure, she reads the journal, which is written by a distant relative, who is writing the journal about how a Native American told HIS story to the journalist. Talk about your Russian nesting dolls ... and it works because Jones takes his time to build the story without sacrificing his pacing. 

What’s the rule and does it get broken? What the vampire eats, the vampire becomes and no, the rule remains consistent throughout the novel. Therein lies the horror. 

The point here is simply this: take a trope and have fun with it. Use your imagination. Read old myths and fairy tales, find a trope that works for you, bend the rules, and run with it. 

A Few Final Notes 

• New authors tend to get bogged down in writing advice, and writing advice is like any advice, it usually works best when it’s not followed rigidly (see Show Don’t Tell). That’s why I tend to focus on story and structure. Tell a good story. Once you’ve got the story down, then you can tweak it however necessary to fit into a genre. 

• Before beginning a story, write a sloppy synopsis just for you. You don’t have to follow it precisely, but writing a synopsis gives me a good idea of what works and what doesn’t before I get hip-deep into the story and then must backtrack to rewrite portions of it. 

• Agents, authors, and publishers will put a lot of emphasis on a story’s opening, and I’ve seen a lot of novice writers really freak out about it. I understand the desire to grab a reader’s eye from the first sentence but take a deep breath and just tell your story. 

• When writing the opening (of any story for that matter), keep the language sharp and simple. I’ve seen some novice writers trying too hard to be something they’re not with over-the-top flowery prose, or trying too hard to be dark, dark, dark, or cramming way too much action into a single sentence. Take your time. 

• Read and study successful novels to analyze the story structure. You'll learn more through that exercise than any other “how-to.” 

And finally, and most importantly, have fun. Write what you love, because you will be reading it again and again and again and again ... 

Online Resources 

How to Write Horror - With Cynthia Pelayo Cynthia outlines eight steps for writing horror.

Popular Horror Tropes at Writer’s Digest is a great list of tropes used in horror. 

The Reedsy blog has a great list of story structures with examples. (Disclaimer: I know nothing about Reedsy or the blog other than they have some nice charts which makes the various structures easy to understand.) 

Stick the Landing: How to End a Horror Story by Peter Derk. Peter gives some great ways to make sure your story ends in such a way as to impact your readers. 

The “Uncanny” by Sigmund Freud. 

Bibiliography 

Horror Trope Thesaurus by Jennifer Hilt (ISBN: 9798352214596)  

On Writing Horror: A Handbook by the Horror Writers Association (ISBN: 9781582974200)  \

Save the Cat! Writes Horror: The Ultimate Guide to Creating Monster in the House Stories by Jamie Nash (ISBN: 9780984157655)  

When I took the post down, I didn’t realize how many ASL instructors used the post in their classes as reading material for their students. Rather than keep summarizing the post for them, I’m adding it to the blog where it will stay. —T. Frohock September 2025

This isn’t going to be a long review, because I wasn’t able to get far into the movie. Two things I want to get out of the way up front are: first, I love Tim Lebbon’s books, and second, in terms of plot and cinematography, The Silence might very well be an excellent movie. I don’t know, because I wasn’t able to get past the “deaf” character’s actions. In other words, this review is about how poor representation ruined what might have otherwise been a good movie for me.

Nor is this review an attack on Ms. Kiernan Shipka or her talents as an actor. Ms. Shipka seemed to do well with the material she was given; however, it appears she wasn’t given much. I understand that she learned ASL for the role, but as I’ve stated in other posts, there is much more to being deaf than knowing sign language.

As with all my other posts from the deaf perspective, I also want to point out that this review is written from my perspective as a deaf person, which can and will differ greatly from those of the Deaf community, or from people with a different type of hearing loss. In other words, your mileage may vary, which is fine.

Viewing the movie as someone who loves horror films, I can say that my gripe with The Silence began before Shipka’s character, Ally, ever hit the screen. I’ve spoken of this particular issue in novels, and it’s no less annoying in a movie: the need to leap too fast into the action without any attempt to cultivate tension. The opening scene could have been a claustrophobic buildup of horror. Instead, it was delivered like an awkward prologue that was over so quickly, it felt like an aside.

Then we meet Ally, who tells us how smart she is because she learned to lip-read so fast after her accident … and I flinched, because that is not how it works. Even so, I gave the film a few more minutes, because I wanted to see how the story would explain that particular skill.

Essentially, Ally’s backstory is this: she was in a car accident with her grandparents three years earlier. Due to the traumatic head injury inflicted during the accident, Ally was rendered completely deaf. In addition to recovering from whatever other brain trauma she might have endured during the accident, Ally is now perfectly healthy, except she is deaf. In three years, she has learned ASL and how to lip-read and moves through the hearing world without the annoying dizziness, vertigo, or tinnitus that burdens the rest of us.

At no point are we led to believe that Ally moves in anything other than a world of silence. She doesn’t wear either hearing aids or a cochlear implant. This tells me, as a deaf person, that her hearing is completely gone, and due to whatever injury she sustained, assistive listening devices do not help her.

Within the first five minutes with Ally, we see her taunted from behind by a group of her high school classmates, who are actually acting like they’re twelve. That was just weird.

Immediately after Ally is taunted by her classmates, she walks down the middle of a street. Let me pause here to say that deaf people, who can’t hear a vehicle’s approach NEVER walk down the middle of any street without constantly looking over their shoulders. Then her boyfriend approaches her from behind and puts his hands over her eyes.

And I almost shut the movie down then, because that is the most horrible thing you can do to a deaf person: sneak up on them from behind. Seriously, you scare the crap out of deaf people when you do that. It’s horrible. Don’t do it. Ever.

But this is Ally’s boyfriend, who will soon be getting his drivers’ license, and Ally informs him that her parents will probably never let her drive because she’s deaf …

Dear Ally’s parents and the producers of this movie,

Deaf people drive all the time and we’re probably safer drivers than hearing people, because we are paying attention with our eyes.

Thank you,
Me

Then Ally arrives home and my nitpicking reaches monumental levels. The usual systems designed to help deaf people pinpoint noise (for example: doorbells, phones, fire alarms, or loud noises) are large bulky boxes that indicate why a light is flashing. They could have been there in the background and I just missed them, but after going to all the other lengths to show Ally’s deafness, the director doesn’t bother to show us that her home is equipped for a deaf person.

Ally’s family uses pidgin sign language to communicate. As a family having to adjust to a late-deafened child, it’s possible they’re doing the best they can. They also make asides that Ally can’t hear, and although unkind, I found this plausible as well.

Still, it bothered me that Ally follows conversations with ease. Even with lip-reading and signing, most deaf people are moving on a delay and the faster the topics change, the more frustrating communication becomes for the individual. Also, to lip-read with Ally’s accuracy, one needs to have some residual hearing.

Later that evening, Dad comes into her room and at one point, they forget to sign, but Ally has no trouble following the sudden topic shift, and that was it for me. I’d watched about all of the movie I could watch, because I realized from that point forward I would be doing nothing but critiquing Ally.

Those critiques turned into my biggest issue with The Silence. Whereas A Quiet Place presented a moment of ableism in the lack of captioning during the spoken parts between hearing characters, The Silence is the ableist viewpoint on full display. At no point did I believe that Ally was actually deaf, and if you can’t make me believe in your characters, then I’ll never buy into your story, no matter how good the film.

At the Fantasy Cafe, April is Women in SFF Month, and if you missed it, no worries! Kristen has done a wonderful roundup of the many posts she hosted over the month. She approached me in February about writing a post for this year’s series, and I gave her a post on The Women of Miserere.

Kristen and her blog have a special place in my heart, because she was one of the first bloggers I approached about reading Miserere when it was first published in 2011. She said yes and I absolutely flipped out when she posted her review. If you love fantasy with a dark edge, then please check out the Fantasy Cafe and subscribe to her newsletter for updates.

I was also extremely excited when The No Sleep Podcast purchased my short story, “Dark Places,” for Season 22, Episode 11. Matthew Bradford and Jeff Clement (as Mike and Ray respectively) totally captured the characters. If you’re hearing impaired and just want to read the story, it’s available as an ebook on my Patreon.

The website got a minor makeover during the month. I’d long been envious of Squarespace’s new 7.1, but never switched over from 7.0, because I couldn’t take my blog with me. At the time Squarespace debuted 7.1, the switch also essentially meant redesigning the whole site, and I didn’t have time to do a redesign. So I simply changed themes so that might site had some of the look and feel of 7.1 without committing to the whole change.

Well, guess what? Squarespace made the switch easier and I got to keep my blog! So in a fit of madness one night, I made the switch. Of course, it had the same effect of moving a picture in Word, where everything shifts down two pages, sirens sound, and the world tilts on its axis.

(Not Squarespace’s fault, they have a wonderful help section that warned of all these things.)

Fortunately, the makeover wasn’t as traumatic as I just made it sound. Part of it was me getting a feel for the new site’s commands and readjusting some photos in my main pages. If you go back to an old post, you might find some weirdness, and I’m still cleaning a few things here and there, but for the most part, the site is presentable.

Ta-da.

I hope you’ll take a minute to browse around. I love the flexibility of 7.1 and the slightly more modern look to the site.

If you’re following along with the Miserere sequel on my Patreon and wonder where I’ve been, well, see paragraph one of this post. I’m hoping to be back to Perfect Thunder updates soon. Meanwhile, I’m working on other projects while taking care of the day job and all the other household issues.

Take care and watch for me. I’ll be around.

At a glance, this indoctrination seems to favor men, but a deeper inspection shows the insecurities and stress exacerbated by this line of thought. Men are required to be stoic at all times, and this unrealistic expectation damages men’s mental health, resulting in suicide and abusive behavior.

The ideology inflicted on us by fundamentalist religion does no one any favors.

Let me be clear, Christianity usually gets the blame for this behavior but only because its fundamentalist ideas reach the mainstream press on a regular basis. All religions suffer some offshoot of fundamentalism. Follow the delineation of gender roles and you’ll find parallels:

• women are taught to be submissive, especially to men, at all times

• men are taught to be stoic and maintain authority in their homes

• emotions are seen as feminine while strength is attributed as masculine

• emphasis is placed on gender roles and ties spirituality to those roles rather than emphasize an individual’s conscious contact with a higher power

These roles are ingrained in children from the moment they are old enough to comprehend the lessons being taught in their respective religions, and this indoctrination follows the child throughout their lives. I’ve found this to be one reason many women justify the status quo and demean others who break free of this strict ideology. They don’t know any other way of life and the discomfort of living differently is so overwhelming, they can’t comprehend it for themselves, much less for others.

Having grown up in a fundamentalist religion, I see now that I was trained from day one to be of service to men. Social norms such as always seeing to guests and their comfort were the woman’s responsibility, being the caretaker of others was seen as a virtue, a clean home, etc., etc., etc., and most especially being groomed as a sex object whose only worth resided in birthing babies.

None of this is new information. What is new to me is waking up to realize how indoctrinated I became over the course of my life. Looking back, I can see how many of my ideas and beliefs were chosen for me not by me. And the struggle to overcome certain thought patterns is harder than I like to admit.

Oddly enough, being online and listening to people I might not normally encounter in my day-to-day activities has had a lot to do with my change in attitude. It’s easy to fall into comfortable patterns when one’s thoughts are never challenged, but I’ve found that by listening to others who have different perspectives has reshaped many of my former opinions.

I’ve been required to unlearn damaging behavior and relearn healthy ways to cope. The idea of unlearning can be uncomfortable, and it is … at first. It requires a willingness to examine oneself and how certain attitudes harm others. In order to unlearn, I must be present in the moment, because moving through the day on autopilot is no longer an option, at least not initially.

A friend once used the analogy of driving to explain it to me. When I first learned to drive, I had to think about every single thing I did: start the car, put it in reverse, turn the wheel just so … and then, in no time at all, driving becomes a reflex. So does unlearning. It’s a process that requires trust and the ability to make mistakes.

It takes work from both the individual and the community. When people say things to me that I know are forms of indoctrination, I answer them with what I’ve learned (or more accurately, what I’ve unlearned). It stops their disinformation, because they don’t know how to respond to someone who listens to what they and then asks them pointed questions about those beliefs.

I’ve been far more successful looking someone in the eye and refuting their argument with clear reason. I might not immediately change someone’s mind, but usually, I can see the wheels clicking and they’re thinking.

What I have learned, post-unlearning, is that it’s okay for me to be a woman and be emotionally strong. If I’m caring for someone, I’m not doing it out of obligation or to get into heaven, but because I genuinely care for that person. I consider my spirituality to be the sum of my experiences and how I display that understanding to help others, or even myself.

I’ve come to realize that men who show their emotions aren’t weak but are actually braver than the men who don’t. To display vulnerability takes great courage. Men who shout and attempt to dominate others use their bluster to cover their insecurities. They aren’t honest with themselves, so they can never be honest with others.

I used Miserere to explore these themes of indoctrination and unlearning bad habits. Lucian has allowed his sister to manipulate him, using the gender role his parents indoctrinated into him. He must unlearn those habits before his heart of stone becomes a heart of flesh. Rachael believes she needs no one and becomes Lucian’s savior only to have to rely on him for her own salvation. In the end, they recognize one another’s strengths and weaknesses to work together and save themselves. And then there is Catarina, who gives away her emotions, certain she is becoming stronger without empathy, love, or compassion, only to be eaten alive by her own addiction to power.

Religion, like it or not, plays a huge role in people’s lives, and getting rid of religion only shifts the indoctrination to another venue, such as news organizations that manipulate facts to spur fear. Refusing to acknowledge the power of these doctrines doesn’t help anyone. But just as people can be taught to fear or be indoctrinated into living certain patterns, so can unlearning be taught.

Unlearning any form of indoctrination begins when the damage and its cause is clearly recognized. Only then can healing begin, and as each individual heals, so does society as a whole.

Miserere: An Autumn Tale, Fully Revised is now officially available for only $5.99! I’ll be plugging this one for a while, so please bear with me. [Also: Please keep in mind that there is currently no print or audiobook of the new edition.]

If you missed my livestream with Edward Myers (@gryftkin@bsky.social) on January 21, 2025, Edward recorded it and it’s available at: https://youtube.com/live/A6waRyOsU2Y?feature=share, so you can see me in my spooky looking house. Emerson also puts in a rare appearance at the end, so as Edward said: Come for the talk and stay for the cat.

Here at the blog, I give you a brief history lesson when I introduce you to Anna Pointner.

At the Patreon, paying members are getting sneak peeks at the rough draft of Miserere’s sequel, Perfect Thunder, as well as a new Los Nefilim vignette, starring Miquel and Rafael. On my drive to work, I was thinking about the first attempt to form a gay male parade in France in 1971. The younger men were determined to see it through, but the thought of their sexuality being made public terrified some of the older gay men, who recalled persecutions under the Nazis.

In my fiction, Rafael and Miquel would both be pushing for the parade, but Miquel also understands why the thought of it frightens Diago. It’s a monologue from Miquel’s POV and it just flowed. What I love about that group is that they try so hard to understand one another, so whenever I get an idea for a scene, I’ll be posting the vignettes on the Patreon.

Creativity and ideas are something else I wanted to talk about. My creativity doesn’t usually just hit me like that unless my mind is calm. I know the times are currently tumultuous, but I refuse to let other people live in my head rent-free. I’m writing and researching for new works and working on my house and yard, and of course, I’m still working full-time.

When I get a burst of creativity, I jot it down. I’m carrying notebooks and my phone with me so I can expand on the ideas later. It’s taken me a long time, but I’m working harder than ever on my art.

Before I go, there are a couple of things I want to mention:

Mary Soon Lee has released both the print and ebook editions of her magnificent epic poem, The Sign of the Dragon. Soon Lee’s poetry is the perfect vehicle for this haunting tale of a prince chosen by a dragon to lead his people. Beautifully illustrated by Gary McCluskey, The Sign of the Dragon, is the pure escapism enhanced by Soon Lee’s captivating voice.

If you love fantasy and have been looking for a modern epic poem, this is one you must have. The Sign of the Dragon is now available in both print and ebook.

Rolling to the other end of the spectrum, Lilith Saintcrow is coming out with a hard-hitting anti-fascist tale on February 25, 2025. Horned Lark Press is publishing Coyote Run, a non-stop barrage of action that will have you flipping the pages.

It is a novella that rockets you through an adventure in an alternate future, or maybe that future is already here. Either way, Saintcrow’s characters carry the day and there is an escape scene that will have your blood racing. It’s not an easy task to write something that intense to carry the reader along, but Saintcrow does it with style.

Coyote Run … February 25 … watch for it.

Okay, that’s it for now.

I’m writing and working and I hope you’re doing the same. Please take care of one another and, as always, watch for me …

Before I introduce you to Anna, it’s important to know the backstory of the film collection known as the Boix Collection, and to do that, I have to take you back to the Spanish Civil War. When Franco’s Nationalists overthrew the elected government of Spain, the Republican army and the Spanish civilians who supported the Republican government fled to France. Approximately 500,000 refugees flooded into France.

This was known as La Retirada (the retreat), and the Spanish Republicans had every intention of regrouping in France to retake Spain. The reasons why that didn’t happen are complicated, but for the purposes of Anna Pointner’s story, it’s important to understand that thousands of active duty Spanish Republican soldiers were now in France. Many of these soldiers joined the French army when Hitler’s armies invaded. Others participated in the French Resistance.

Two Spaniards, Francesc Boix Campo, a Catalan communist and Antonio Garcia Alonso, a Spanish antifascist, were captured by the Germans, along with roughly 8,000 Spaniards during the war. Of the 8,000 Spaniards sent to the forced labor camp at Mauthausen, only about 1,600 of these prisoners survived the war.

At Mauthausen, Boix and Garcia were assigned to work in the "Identification Section." Both men were clerks, who processed the photographs taken by the camp’s SS photographer, Paul Ricken. Boix and Garcia were constantly at odds—Boix was something of a sadist according to Garcia, and the two men barely tolerated one another, but the Spanish prisoners at Mauthausen were a tight group and worked together nonetheless.

We’ll fast forward a bit now: When the Germans were defeated at Stalingrad in 1943, the writing was on the wall, and Berlin ordered the destruction of all camp photographic film. The Spaniards knew that if the evidence of the crimes was destroyed, many of the guards and kapos would walk free. So they devised a plan to hide over 2,000 small Leica negatives, which documented camp conditions, official visits, executions, and other atrocities.

Enter Anna Pointner.

Anna Pointner was an Austrian, who was disgusted by the Anschluss (when Austria was annexed into the German Reich) and anything to do with Nazism. When the Catholic Church allied itself with the Nazi Party, Anna wanted nothing more to do with the church.

The Nazis forbade the people in Mauthausen to watch the convoys of prisoners as they arrived. Anna's husband and four others who worked at the railroad were denounced by a Nazi coworker for observing the convoys. The men were arrested, imprisoned, and tortured by the Gestapo before finally being sent home. The whole village knew the story, and Anna herself knew firsthand what happened to those who disobeyed Nazi edicts.

Still, she felt such pity for the youths in the Poschacher Kommando—a group of Spanish youths sent into the village as slave laborers—she would toss apples out her window to them as they passed her house. As the war dragged on, Mauthausen suffered from a depletion of manpower as more men were sent to the front. With fewer guards and harsh threats, they sometimes sent the Poschacher Kommando into the village without an escort.

Always discreet, Anna took advantage of these moments and began to make manual signs to the boys, eventually exchanging a few words with them when she could. Meanwhile, back in Mauthausen, the Spaniards knew the war was nearing its end and they were working to secrete the packets of negatives outside the camp. The Poschacher Kommando was their best chance to safely sneak the packets of negatives to the village.

One of the youths approached Anna and asked her to hide the packets. She agreed to do so. A high stone wall ran behind her house and couldn't be seen from any other buildings. She worked a stone loose, hid the packets of negatives in the wall, and replaced the stone. She said nothing of these actions to her husband or daughters.

Anna Pointner didn't carry a gun, but she was an important resistance fighter in the war. She knew the risks and she knew she'd be murdered if the Nazis found out, but she hid the negatives nonetheless. Her [seemingly] small act of resistance resulted in the Boix Collection.

The Boix Collection covered the years 1941-1943. These photographs documented Himmler's visit to Mauthausen in April 27, 1941 and were one of the many exhibits used during the Nuremburg trials to convict Himmler as well as serving as visual proof of the Nazi’s atrocities.

The Boix Collection is the result of resistance, and it was the collective effort of many people. It’s important to remember that resistance is often quiet and patient. You never know if your work will produce results, but the work is done. And sometimes, like the Boix Collection, the work pays off.

So when people talk about acts of resistance, I rarely imagine partisans running through the woods, but instead I think of Anna Pointner, quietly placing negatives behind a stone.

References that might interest you:

Websites:

Joan Ramon Zaballos Rubio has a blog post with photographs of Anna and the wall where she hid the negatives. The post is in Catalan, but if you want to know what Anna looked like, there is a post-war photo of her, her daughters, and Republican deportees.

The United States Holocaust Museum has a few photographs from the Boix Collection online. [The photos are graphic.]

Books:

Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis by Jeffrey H. Jackson

Spaniards in the Holocaust: Mauthausen, the Horror on the Danube by David Wingate Pike

Women Heroes of World War II-the Pacific Theater: 15 Stories of Resistance, Rescue, Sabotage, and Survival by Kathryn J. Atwood

Miserere: An Autumn Tale, Fully Revised releases January 21, 2025 for only $5.99! I’m so very excited about this new edition. It’s a novel and characters that has long been close to my heart. [Please keep in mind that there is currently no print or audiobook of the new edition.]

If you want to hear more about it, you can join me and Edward Myers (@gryftkin@bsky.social) January 21, 2025 at 7:00 p.m. EST for a livestream talk about Miserere, demons, and religious mythology at https://youtube.com/live/A6waRyOsU2Y?feature=share.

If you want to read an excerpt of the new edition, Stefan at Civilian Reader graciously loaned me space on his blog for a guest post and excerpt.

If you haven’t decided whether to buy a copy, you can read reviews for it here:

T.O. Munro at The Fantasy Hive says: This latest telling of Miserere feels even better than the original, smoother and sharper with fine plot, character and world-building all glued together seamlessly by some exquisite prose.

Paul Weimer reviewed it at Nerds of a Feather and gave you an awesome comparison between the two editions in case you’re curious about how they differ.

Want to add it to your Goodreads shelf? It’s here.

Want to read a sneak peek of the sequel? It’s at my Patreon.

Whew. That’s feels like a lot, but it’s not really. I do hope you’ll tune into the livestream if you’re able.

I also want to take this opportunity to thank all my long-time readers and followers for sticking with me. Even when I doubted myself, you’ve all been around to give me encouragement when I needed it most.

Thank you, and know that I will watch for you in the hope that we will one day meet in person.

I read a huge number of books this year, both fiction and nonfiction. That was primarily due to a knee replacement over the summer. My right knee was failing over a long period of time, and this past summer was the perfect time to have it done. Everything went exceptionally well because of a great doctor and awesome PT therapists at EmergOrtho. I won’t be running any races, but I can walk and move without pain, and that is simply miraculous.

In terms of writing, I got my rights back to my debut novel, Miserere: An Autumn Tale with the assistance of my amazing agent, Lisa Rodgers, and the good people at JABberwocky. That was a learning experience that consumed the last part of 2023 through early 2024.

Once I regained rights, I set about getting the book ready for a rerelease. As I read through my early drafts, I realized I missed the boat in several places, so I essentially ended up rewriting large portions of the book. Part of this is because my writing style has changed, and part of it is because I’ve changed.

I keep learning about myself with every passing year, and those changes in my personality and my life change me, sometimes imperceptibly and sometimes more overtly. A lot of those changes are reflected in the new edition of Miserere.

Anyway, we’re rereleasing it as Miserere: An Autumn Tale, Fully Revised on January 21, 2025 as an ebook for $5.99 and it’s available for pre-order now.

If you’d like to read more about it, I have blog posts here and here on the changes. T.O. Munro gave the new edition an excellent review at The Fantasy Hive.

A few people have been confused between the old and new editions, so if you’re on Goodreads, the page for the newly revised version is here. The first edition and audiobook are still available, but neither reflect the changes in the fully revised ebook edition at JABberwocky Ebooks.

In terms of new works, I dug out a trunk novel that I’m rather fond of and reworked it. I’m sending that one to my agent in January and we’ll see how it goes. As many of you know, publishing is a gamble, but I’d like to see it published in some form. A lot of that will depend on time, so please be patient with me and the publishing process as I navigate new projects.

I’ve found that I enjoy writing stories much more than talking about writing, which is why you see so few writing posts from me. I did start a Patreon, the link is on my Subscriptions page. I’m using the Patreon to publish short stories that don’t sell and random thoughts about things that keep me up at night, as well as excerpts from ongoing projects.

On the personal front, I’ve learned more about setting boundaries around my ADHD and whatever other issues I might have—I’m sure I land somewhere on the Autism spectrum, but it’s sort of like getting diagnosed with ADHD at this late stage of my life … not particularly useful. At sixty, I’ve just decided I am the way I am, and I make no apologies for it.

With all that said, I’m so excited about being creative again. I’m working on new projects and jotting down ideas for short stories and novels. It’s not longer stop and go. Once I’ve found my way into the story, I’ve fallen into my imagination and the words are coming.

I’m horribly slow at beginning new projects, because I tend to write the ending before the beginning. It’s like working a story backwards, but once I have it outlined in my head and find the right tone for the characters, the story is off and running.

The one goal that I do have is to try writing more short stories. It’s a skill I lack, and the Patreon is a good place to post the ones I can’t sell.

Anyway, that’s what’s been going on in the background. I hope your holidays were safe and happy. For me, I’m looking forward to a new year with more stories.

If you want my brain-droppings, I’m on BlueSky consistently.

Be safe and know that I’ll watch for you, as I hope you will watch for me.

And because the entire subject has fascinated me throughout my long life, I’ve spent quite a few years studying demonology and the Christian rite of exorcism, as well as the philosophy behind it. I talk about some of that here.

In this post, I want share some of the things I’ve learned about demonology and exorcisms. I was exceptionally fortunate—long ago in the days when the Internet was the sanctuary of academics and not billionaire men-children—to be able to download the Catholic rite of exorcism. The sequence of prayers used in Miserere’s exorcism is based on this rite.

However, an exorcism is more than rite. At its heart, any exorcism also provides philosophical insight into both the exorcist and their chosen religion.

The Catholics have, and will forever have, The Exorcist as their mainstream exposure to the rite. What a lot of viewers don’t seem to realize is that the core theme of the movie is about Father Karras and how he doubts his faith and God. That doubt is what Pazuzu latches onto throughout the rite.

This theme falls directly in line with the philosophy behind Sylvester Prierio’s De strigimagarum daemonumque mirandis (Rome, 1521), which is a book that Armando Maggi calls a central, yet underestimated, book of Renaissance demonology. Prierio’s work begins with the phrase: “Devorant plebem meam sicut escam panis” (“they devour my people as if they were eating bread”); however, Prierio sees this devouring in terms of linguistic expressions, which, in Prierio’s view, regulates the illocutionary act of the exorcism itself.

It’s essential to understand that the Christian exorcism is about more than waving a Bible around and chanting. A pantomime wields no power. A Christian exorcism is about the power of words.

The general premise is that demons and devils attempt to bring about chaos through language, which is articulated by their followers. The devouring that takes place is in the form of the devil’s syllogism, which is based on lies and affects the victims’ hearts and minds.

The manner in which the priest must counteract the devil’s syllogism is not only through understanding the nature of the demon in question, but also in understanding themselves and their own nature so as not to be lured into corruption by the devil. Without a deep knowledge of one’s own faults and desires, the priest stands the risk of falling prey to the devil’s syllogism.

To use The Exorcist’s Father Karras as an example, he invites Pazuzu into his own body to free Regan from the demon and then commits suicide, thinking his death will end Pazuzu, but the demon doesn’t die with Karras. It cannot, because demons are, by their nature, spirit. Rather than defeat Pazuzu, Karras essentially succumbs to the devouring and his sacrifice is in vain, because Pazuzu merely takes on a new form.

Going back to Prierio, the devouring he speaks of takes place through chaotic reasoning. In order to combat the devil’s chaos, the priest must fight back with lucid and intelligible rhetoric. The words must invoke a purifying discourse, the sentences the priest uses cannot contain false statements, which could then be appropriated by the devil, and the priest must harbor no secret narcissism in discourse with the Word. The priest must concentrate on the understanding of the words s/he uses because this, in turn, allows them to purge the devil’s corruption (i.e. lies) with the truth found in the Word, which in Christianity is associated with the godhead.

However, the rite is not simply about speaking. An exorcism is an illocutionary act. The words used are commands designed to engage with the demon and draw out its presence through its name. In an exorcism, the priest doesn’t address the victim but the devil within.

Charles Stewart in Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture ties this relationship between words and action:

Divine language is absolute and powerful and forms an important model for exorcism. In Genesis, the word (o lógos) of God created the world. This divine word accomplishes what it says. In the Gospel of John the Word of God again stands at the beginning and becomes flesh. It is more than language; it is action. Exorcisms as well are not just weak imprecations; they too accomplish what they say. At instances of divine speech mediated through the person of the priest, exorcism may be considered exemplary performative utterances or “strong illocutionary acts” (Austin 1962; Tambiah 1968). At exorcism the Devil is addressed, but always in imperative forms: I banish you; I adjure you; Depart; Come out; Take fear … [emphasis mine]

With this information in the back of my mind, I formulated the exorcism in the new edition of Miserere so that the words take their power from the timbre and the spirit of the exorcist, Lucian. His chances of success are better than those of Father Karras, because Lucian has learned to clearly see his own faults, which leaves him less susceptible to the demon’s discourse. Likewise, Rachael’s power comes from her ability to resist the demon’s discourse, which she battles as best she can with the Latin and the meaning of the words, or, as the case may be, the Word, meaning the godhead in Christianity.

Stay tuned, because I will be speaking more of Christian mythology in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, watch for me …

_______________________________

References:

Maggi, Armando. Satan’s Rhetoric: A Study of Renaissance Demonology. Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Stewart, Charles. Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture. New Jersey : Princeton University Press, 1991.

And then one day COVID came, and something broke inside me. If corpses in freezer trucks taught me anything, it's to go out and touch the grass to be free. On that day, I let it all go, and decided that since my time on this earth might be short, no one deserved my time but me.

No one is coming to save us, my darklings. We’re on our own. The sooner we all accept that, the better off we’ll be. If you’re unfamiliar with Opus Dei and Project 2025, I suggest you familiarize yourself with those two ideologies as soon as possible, and take steps to protect yourselves and your loved ones immediately.

Stop fighting online. The fascists are emotionally insecure and need the constant attention. That’s why they’re always picking fights and saying outrageous things. They’re narcissists and crave the clicks. I’ve unsubscribed to the Washington Post and the New York Times. I might subscribe to a local paper, but I’ll no longer be clicking on any articles that carries the names of fascists. When the press finds the clicks are gone, they’ll turn their attention to other things.

I’ll keep myself apprised of necessary news, but the clown car will proceed without my attention.

I've already killed my Twitter account. I know some people are keeping their old accounts as placeholders, but I'm not on Truth Social, either, and since that is what Twitter has become, I've no use for it, nor do I want my name and brand associated with it.

I am on Blue Sky. You may follow me there, but I'll only be following back people who I know and have interacted with in the past. I'm maintaining the same block policy there that I maintained on Twitter and will now be utilizing on Facebook: one infraction and you're blocked, because Lord Jesus knows, you’re not worth my time. That is the bottom line.

I'm too old to suffer fools.

Please do not ask me to contribute money to organizations such as the United Way, which are really religious organizations in disguise. It sounds cruel, but my family will soon need every penny we have to survive. We already pay an enormous amount of taxes in NC on goods and services, as well as Federal taxes. If someone doesn't want to accept governmental help, or if the government the majority voted for no longer provides services they need, that's too bad. Sometimes tough love brings change.

That policy doesn’t apply to causes near and dear to my heart, just to the “VOTE RED!” tribe, you know you are. To you, I can only say, as we did back in the 1980s: Toyota … you asked for it, you got it.

I was raised in the south, so I know the fine art of smiling in someone’s face while undermining them behind their backs. It’s a skill I suggest you cultivate to use with fascists and ChINOs (Christians in Name Only). As far as ChINOs go, I suggest you shame them publicly whenever possible using Christ’s own words. If they can’t be shamed, then treat them as you would any cult member and avoid them both online and offline.

Red dawn is here, so I encourage my darklings to organize offline. Don’t use your phones or any META products. Remember typewriters can be traced so use printers. Form stitch groups or book clubs and don’t let anyone dirty get through, because you won’t change their minds. The trick is to make positive changes at the local level, and since most ChINOs are quite vocal on Facebook, you know who they are.

Protect your mental health at all costs, and remember, there are ways to resist without endangering yourself. Paper Bullets are quite effective. Resist creatively as creatives have always done in the past.

In this week’s post, I leave you with this quote from Albert Camus to carry in your heart:

In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love. In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile. In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm. I realized, through it all, that in the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger — something better, pushing right back. —Albert Camus, The Stranger

Be well, my darklings, push back, and watch for me …

What is it about?

At its heart, Miserere is a love story about two people who meet again after a terrible betrayal, and how they find their way back to one another. I hesitate to call it romantasy, because it is also very dark. Nor is it exactly horror, although it does contain many horror tropes. Dark fantasy fits it best. If you want to call it anything else, maybe dark romantasy fits just fine too.

Frankly, everyone who has read it has put it into a different category of fantasy, which is really fine by me. Some people pick up on the romance, others love the horror aspects, still others love the redemption theme. We all see ourselves in the stories we read, so we pick the parts that resonate with us and go from there. None of my works are easy to classify, because I have a very hard time writing to narrow genre definitions, which are more for marketing purposes than anything else.

I just want you to enjoy a good book. So to that end, for those who read and enjoyed the 2011 edition and for those who are new to Woerld …

What has changed?

The biggest thing that changed is my writing style. Overall, it’s the same, but as I reread Miserere, I realized the sentences and paragraphs needed to be tightened. I put those changes in the tweaking category. I got rid of the tautology and some of the more purple prose.

In the first edition, the reader saw very little of the Citadel and the bastions. I expanded some of those scenes to make Woerld a little more vibrant. To give you an example of some of those minor changes, I asked a Wiccan friend what we should name the Goddess’s bastion, and he suggested the Shield, so the Shield is now a part of the story.

Those are the small changes most readers won’t notice. The major changes are the chapters with Rachael, which have been completely overhauled.

In the 2011 edition, she came across as more of a shadow than a person. When I reread her chapters, I realized her strength didn’t shine as clearly as it could. She is a victim who has become a survivor, and she is self-reliant to the point that what should be an asset has become a disability.

To give you an idea of how these scenes have changed, here is the first time we see Rachael in the 2011 edition:

A flame swelled and receded behind the dirty hurricane glass surrounding a thick candle. Its light flickered over a dusty dresser. On a rickety nightstand, another candle cast shadows around the dying boy and the scarred, one-eyed woman occupying the austere room.

Rachael pulled her rocking chair closer to the bed and peeled back the blood-soaked quilt. She narrowed her left eye as she frowned at the youth.

The new introduction to Rachael is less passive and much more active:

Lamplight flickered and cast shadows around the dying boy and the scarred, one-eyed woman known as Rachael Boucher. The austere bedroom they occupied wasn’t meant to be a surgery, but now it resembled one. The stained towel spread over a tabletop was littered with scissors of various sizes, needles, thread, linen torn for bandages, and a scalpel. A pan of bloody water rested by her boot. Twelve times she’d emptied it and came back to keep working. In between suturing the boy’s wounds, she slipped drops of laudanum into his mouth to muffle his screams.

The biggest changes revolve around Rachael’s possession and how it affects her. In 2011, this was the description of her possession:

Rachael burned with cold as the Wyrm seized her distraction and surged from the abyss of her soul. The demon uncoiled, seeking a vein, an artery, a canal to its birth.

In the revised edition, Lucian opens the hell gate, causing the demon to rise within Rachael. This time I intermixed the old with the new by keeping the paragraphs from the first edition that worked while blending in new details to reshape Rachael’s character as less a victim and more like a survivor:

As she opened the armoire to retrieve a clean sheet, a sudden spate of dizziness almost toppled her. The hair on her arms rose in response to an electric charge in the air.

This wasn’t the demon. She turned from the armoire to look out the room’s only window. Heat lightning flashed, briefly illuminating the yard.

Rachael immediately recognized the feeling—the static in the air. Somewhere, a Katharos opened a gate between Woerld and hell, and she knew the signature of this Katharos’s magic as well as she knew her own. Lucian.

What the stronger Katharoi might feel as a mild discomfort, Rachael felt like a punch to the face because of her possession. She shouted in surprise and anger.

Shadows, dry as October spiders, skittered from the corners of the room and blackened the edges of her vision. Fire snarled her synapses, driving her thoughts like quicksilver as the demon surged forward a second time, feeding on the chaos unleashed by the open hell gate.

She spoke faster now. “In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum. Et lux in tenebris lucet, et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt.” In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

The demon howled through her mind and filled her head with a buzz of roaring wind and fury. This is how hurricanes scream.

“Et Verbum caro factum est …” And the Word was made flesh …

Her mouth suddenly burned, but she didn’t stop, couldn’t stop. To stop meant giving up, and Rachael Boucher had no intention of giving up or giving in.

That last line describes the core of her character. Picking a favorite character is like picking a favorite child, but Rachael has always been my favorite. She is a fighter in the truest sense of the word.

Someone asked me if this is an extended version of Miserere, and I think that is a good way to describe it. I know those who enjoyed the 2011 edition loved the story, and I don’t want to disappoint them. So I worked very hard to keep the elements that worked while making the writing tighter and the characters more vibrant, especially the women.

Some people didn’t like the Bible verses, but I used an actual exorcism ritual for the rite, and since this is the Christian bastion of the Citadel, that is what they will use. It is the Catholic rite, because it’s the most dramatic and translates well to the page. I make no apologies for that.

So with all that said, I hope you’ve got a better idea of what the story is about.

What’s going to be there? Short stories I can’t sell elsewhere (there are a couple of free stories there now) and more labor intensive blog posts on demonology, angelology, and vampires, and such. Lighter blog posts of random thoughts will be free. You’ll also be able to purchase a single short story or blog post without having to subscribe monthly. I tried to pick as many options as possible for all of you.

There are two rather expensive tiers but those require a large time commitment on my part, and my time is rather squeezed at the moment. Hopefully, that will eventually loosen up, but for now … time.

I’ll hope you’ll join up, either as a free member or as a patreon. I look forward to seeing you there!

I am fortunate in that I have an excellent surgeon with a marvelous support staff. My physical therapists were the best!

There were a few ups and downs with the whole experience but somehow we made it through. From this point forward, I’m still healing and will be doing so for the next year, but I am looking forward to each day becoming easier.

I’ve been on and off social media over the summer, but I do remember I promised I’d share my favorite reads and movies with you in a post, so here it is!

The post-operative event kicked off with a couple of series that I initially tuned into because I thought they’d be mindless. Instead, one in particular turned so intense, I wound up buying the book.

Under the Banner of Heaven

This was a total surprise to me, and it really shouldn’t have been. Krakauer is one of my favorite nonfiction writers. I’ve read all of his books, not just because of the subject matter, but the approach he takes to his subjects.

Under the Banner of Heaven is a study of Mormonism, fundamentalism, and a murder committed in the name of God. I saw the series first and read the book second, which made me appreciate the series even more. It’s masterful storytelling in both the book and the film adaption.

In the book, Krakauer follows the history of Mormonism with the murder as backstory. In the film, the murder is the premise by which the history is told. If you are ever looking for a good example of how to tell a story in print versus film. I highly recommend Under the Banner of Heaven.

Ghost WAll by Sarah Moss

Ghost Wall was my next read over the summer. I was captivated by Moss’s voice from the first page. It’s the story of how a powerful young woman leads an abused youth to safety, but it is told in beautifully dark and delicious prose.

Moss nails the subtle signs of abuse with a deft touch and outlines the lies we tell ourselves when the truth is too terrible to comprehend. She wastes not a word, yet evokes such raw emotion, the story will leave you breathless.

Ghost Wall isn’t a supernatural story, even though the supernatural hovers ever in the background. The tale has a very gothic feel to both the prose and the plot.

We used to live here by Marcus Kliewer

I discovered this one through a review on the excellent review site, Run Along the Shelves. Matt reviews a lot of horror and fantasy, so if you find yourself looking for something new, head over and check out the reviews.

We Used to Live Here is a twisty-turny surreal novel that never once manages to lose the reader. I compare it to House of Leaves but with a much more satisfying conclusion. Here is a story with alternative realities, a terrifying antagonist, and some of the most claustrophobic scenes that I’ve read in a while.

If you’re into haunted houses and fractured realities, you’ve got a lot to love in We Used to Live Here.

My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna Van Veen

If you’re a fan of gothic Sapphic novels, I found one for you! My Darling Dreadful Thing is textbook gothic, full of twisted romance, all set in a gloomy manse. It’s the perfect read for a stormy summer afternoon.

The white road by sarah lotz

A friend recommended The White Road and I wasn’t disappointed!

Lotz takes the reader from Wales to Everest and back again with some of the tensest caving scenes that I’ve read. For those who love stories of dread phantoms, here there be ghosts and adventure.

I rank it with Ghost Wall as being one of my favorite summer reads.

A good house for Children by Kate Collins

This is one of those rare haunted house stories that isn’t about ghosts haunting a house, but about the evil house itself. It’s full of creepy moments, but I also loved how Collins approached the idea of women who allow themselves to be led from one situation to another. Parallel stories make for some interesting contrasts between women with active and passive agency.

The Militia House by John Milas

Another haunted building in the mix (I’m sensing a pattern here), but this story delves deep into the psyche of the story’s protagonist, an active duty Marine in Afghanistan. Milas manages to render even the most mundane activities with tension as he turns an external horror into an internal examination of war and the damage it does to the people it touches. It’s positively brilliant how he brings his themes and story together. Definitely a must-read.

And that’s how I spent my summer! What have you been reading?

It was on Facebook, because of course it was, and by a woman who claims to be a Christian. I’m not linking to the OP or to the original post. I don’t suggest you go there unless you like SHOUTY POSTS with a lot of spelling errors, but hey, you do you.

What I am telling you to do, and giving you the weapons you need to combat this form of disinformation, is to stop rolling your eyes and letting it slide, especially if you call yourself a Christian. Call it down for the lie it is and say why it’s a lie.

Cherry-picking Bible verses is a favorite evangelical tactic, because this is how evangelical churches are conducted. The pastor picks a verse and then constructs a sermon around it that usually involves a lot of demonology and at least forty references to hell. When you see Bible verses on an evangelical’s page, immediately go to the Bible and read that verse in context.

Here is what zipped across my feed one day. There is a picture of a man, who has just been shot, and his ear is bleeding. The OP posts the following:

In the Bible, the concept of blood on the right ear (Leviticus 8:22-24 and 14:28) serves as a visible mark of consecration, signifying that the person is dedicated to God's service and has been set apart for a specific purpose. This act represents a physical and spiritual transformation, preparing the individual for their sacred role. Here's a breakdown of the significance:

* Right ear: The right ear represents hearing and obedience. In ancient times, the right ear was considered the most important ear, as it was the ear that heard the words of God. [Note: No sources are cited, so I think the OP is just making stuff up here.]

* Blood: Blood represents life, sacrifice, and atonement. In this context, the blood is a symbol of purification and consecration. * Consecration: Consecration means to set something or someone apart for a specific purpose, making it holy and dedicated to God. In this case, the blood on the right ear signifies that the person is being set apart for a sacred task or role. [Note: No sources are cited, so I think the OP is just making stuff up here, too.]

* Priestly consecration: In Leviticus 8, the blood is applied to the right ear of Aaron and his sons, consecrating them as priests. This act sets them apart as mediators between God and the people. [Note: Leviticus 8 outlines an eight-day ritual—see below]

* Purification: In Leviticus 14, the blood is applied to the right ear of the person being cleansed, symbolizing their purification and restoration to the community. [Note: Leviticus 14 is about curing leprous persons—see below]

My response in a comment was as follows:

This is a gross misinterpretation of both of the passages in Leviticus. The ceremony being referenced is an eight-day ritual and the blood that anoints the ear is from a sacrificial ram (not a nick on the ear). Here it is in context:

"Then he [Moses] brought forward the second ram, the ram of ordination. Aaron and his sons laid their hands on the head of the ram, [23] and it was slaughtered. Moses took some of its blood and put it on the lobe of Aaron's right ear and on the thumb of his right hand, and on the big toe of his right foot.” Leviticus 8:22-23

Leviticus 14 is about the cleansing of leprosy.

So in Leviticus 8, the OP has left out is the sacrificial bull, two rams, and the anointing of the fingers and toes, the vestments, and I'm still not sure why the individual used the chapter on curing leprous persons, but it's really tacky and shows a lack of Biblical knowledge.

Priestly consecration is not a wound. It is a sacred rite, which requires a penitent heart, a love of God [You shall love the Eternal your God with all your mind, with all your strength, with all your being. Set these words, which I command you this day, upon your heart. Teach them faithfully to your children; speak of them in your home and on your way, when you lie down and when you rise up. Deuteronomy 6:5-9], and a genuine and abiding love for the people the priest will serve.

The OP’s post makes a mockery of that rite.

While my comment might not change anything, at least it gives people facts. If people refuse to face the truth, then that is on them, but I’ll not leave a lie to stand without challenging it. Not anymore.

The other thing I want to point out here is that the people posting these things aren’t real Christians. They’re simply performing, pretending to be Christian in order to promote false prophets, cults, and lies. In all probability, they’re being compensated for their performance, either monetarily or with the attention they so desperately crave.

True Christians will speak to you of love and charity and hope, but most of all, they will promote love of their fellow citizens through their actions, not words. More than anyone else, it’s not only incumbent on true Christians to lovingly call out their brethren on their lies, it’s long overdue.

The Old Testament class was the first time I actually read the Tanakh in its entirety and understood the context in which it was written. The beauty of the prose and the imagery of veils separating shadow worlds hiding gods and demons struck my imagination and wouldn’t let go. I read the Old Testament pseudepigrapha and the Gnostic Gospels and found a wealth of mythology describing angels, demons, and the worlds they inhabit.

For the record, I was raised in an evangelical church, where biblical verses were doled out in bits and pieces through the King James Version of the Bible. The pastors focused, not so much on Jesus and kindness and empathy, but on demons, hell, and the wages of sin. Enter a child with a fertile imagination and raised in the mid-seventies—hello, George Romero—and the resurrection of the dead would never be the same in my mind again.

The church fostered in me a lifelong fascination with angels and demons and how these supernatural creatures intersect with our lives, or not, depending on the belief system or religion. Demons, especially, were an enigma to me, because I couldn't understand how, or even why, supernatural creatures would care about humans, much less want to invade our bodies and drive us to sacrilegious acts.

In the beginning, I read every occult book I could get my hands on, hoping to find the clues there. Turns out I was looking in the wrong place. You see, if I wanted to learn about demons, I didn't need to study the occult. I had to study Christianity, and I had to go back to the beginning.

That is where I found the demonic activity that so fascinated me. Demons in antiquity, merging from one religion to another, shape-shifting in name as they became part of the human psyche throughout the ages. Renaissance demons and angels filled grimoires with spells and modern authors have evaluated these texts and written volumes of their own on the manuscripts.

Meanwhile, in the creative writing class, I wanted to come up with a story that combined my love of fantasy and horror. They say write what you know, and learning to let go of destructive behavior to become a better person was a subject with which I had intimate experience, so I settled on a redemption theme. Trust me, if you think I’m bad now, you should have known me then.

I also wanted the story to reflect all the new things I'd learned about demons and Christianity. I thought it wouldn't be that big of a deal, because authors have been working with these mythologies since Milton and Dante tackled their respective visions of hell. A great deal of modern urban and historical fantasy also reimagines the war in heaven and how it comes to Earth in various guises.

Anyway, I wrote the book and against all odds, Miserere was published in 2011. The novel had some very kind people champion it, but overall, it went over like a sack of bricks.

Fantasy readers hated it because Christians. They wanted a story told from the perspective of any religion other than Christianity, but anything I wrote from another religion’s spiritual perspective would be inauthentic. Research, no matter how well done, doesn’t equate lived experience.

And to be fair, Christians haven't done themselves any favors lately. They come across as belligerent, hostile, and unforgiving. Trust me when I say the people who hate woke Jesus have been around a lot longer than the phrase woke Jesus.

However, the one thing my more tolerant readers missed in the original publication is that Miserere isn't about Christianity but is about a version of Christianity. Like Paul's teachings were a version of the young religion's oral teachings, or how Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestants have each taken the same ideas and its words to create a belief system designed to complement their worldview.

It didn't help that the original version of Miserere was marketed it as Christian Fiction. For those who aren't familiar with the genre, Christian Fiction is like the romance genre: there are specific rules and reader expectations and these are not to be subverted. Also, from what I’ve seen, the people who enjoy Christian Fiction aren’t into demons and hell and swords and sorcery.

Multiply all those things with my own marketing inexperience … well, let’s just say poor Miserere was doomed from the beginning.

Fast forward thirteen years, and I’ve had the benefit of working with the combined expertise of David Pomerico, Lisa Rodgers, Glinda Harrison, and countless dedicated copy editors leading me through the three novellas and three novels of the Los Nefilim series. Their knowledge and guidance taught me to sharpen my vision and how to read my own work for its flaws.

I’ve recently regained my rights to Miserere, and in the process of preparing it for a rerelease, I realized the story missed its cues in a few places and in others was downright cringe-worthy. I had an opportunity to make things better, and since the whole theme of the book is about opportunities to rectify past wrongs, that is exactly what I did—I fixed the weaker prose, sharpened the story, deleted a lot of tautology, got rid of one superfluous chapter, and eliminated the cringe.

I doubt the average reader will see the difference, but I want to assure fans of the original, and I think there were about five of you, the overall story has not changed.

For those who never saw the original, don’t worry, you haven’t missed a thing.

Catarina is less hysterical in this version and much deadlier for it. Her calm manipulation is far more sinister and truer to real-life manipulators.

Rachael is much stronger in this version and finally hits the page the way I envisioned her. There are decidedly more women in this edition, especially women in roles of leadership. I also wasn’t sure how Rachael would react to Catarina in the original drafts, so they didn’t say much to one another. Rachael has a few things to say this go-round, and she comes across throughout as less a victim and more as a survivor.

As for Lucian … well, Lucian is still Lucian. Some readers of the original felt he was too whiny. Frankly I’m glad those readers have never suffered from depression, but I do. It’s like my brain developed an immune disorder, except instead of white blood cells attacking the body, my mind attacks me with one destructive thought after another. It’s like being eaten alive by my own mind.

For me, healing came first in the form of behavioral management, and then with the later addition of medication. In Miserere, Lucian is going through the first step of the process. He truly shines in the exorcism scene, which has been significantly beefed up in the revised edition.

I’m hoping to have everything ready by the end of summer.

Meanwhile, if you’re a newsletter subscriber, I’ll be giving some occasional behind the scenes looks at the editing process and contrasting an old scene with a new one while letting you know the thought process behind my edits.

So stay tuned, there’s more to come.

As ever, watch for me …

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For those of you who choose to stay:

After much experimentation, I’ve decided to use the newsletter for short stories or vignettes from either the Katharoi or Los Nefilim worlds and/or major news. The blog is for the mundane letters to the masses and those look a lot like this one.

In terms of frequency, the newsletter stories will go out once a month, once every two months, or when the urge hits me. The newsletters will not be going out daily, weekly, or each time a new thought burps through my brain. If you want brain droppings, you can follow me on BlueSky, because that is where I plop the majority of my random thoughts and interact with folks.

Facebook is mostly for work and Threads is just too messy and Facebooky, so I’m rarely at either of those places.

Several of you have asked if I have a Patreon. I’ve tried Patreon and found it wanting. It’s another site to keep up, and I am, quite frankly, time poor, which means I have to invest the bulk of my free time where I believe it will best serve my needs. Besides, my newsletters/stories are sent out far too erratically to secure a patronage.

I’d much rather focus on writing novels.

My health hasn’t been good lately. I have the most unglamorous of diseases (diverticulitis, for those keeping track), which is making me crankier than usual. I spent last night hugging the old porcelain throne, and let me tell you, children, that hasn’t happened since I quit drinking thirty-six years ago and does nothing to enhance my already sparkling personality. Two hours of excruciating agony and very little sleep has left me feeling nasty, so I’m going to pop off for now and see if my doctor is in.

Meanwhile, I certainly hope you’re all well. Stay safe and watch for me … and be sure to check that spam folder.