Welcome. This is me.

So. Here I am. I'm starting this blog to help me in starting my career as an authentic author, among other things. I've been writing since 5th grade. Mostly short stories, but a few under my belt are novella length and I'm currently working on what should turn out to be a short novel. As of this point, I don't have anything published. But I do have a few pieces out looking for homes and I have one short story that is actually due to be published next month.

I've written everything you can think of. From humor, to fantasy, love stories to erotica. My preferred genre though is horror. There's just something about scaring and unnerving people that just makes me smile a little bit inside. As well, there's something about writing horror that is just more uplifting then any other kind of story. People read as an escape, to get away from the horrors they see every day on the street and on the news. Horror stories just make better escapes because they point out that things could always be worse. After all, no matter how bad your day is going or what emotional, mental or physical weights you find yourself carrying, at least you don't have a psychopath or supernatural monster snapping at your heels. My preference for the Horror story leads me to a lot of the writers you would expect. Poe, Lovecraft, King and Koontz. Bradbury and Matheson appear a little further down the list as well. (I find it interesting that while Lovecraft and Koontz are accepted as words on here, Matheson in underlined as being misspelled. Huh.) Micheal Crichton is on the list as well, with Jurassic Park being one of my favorite books of all time. His last work though, Micro, was unfortunately disappointing to me. It was unfinished when he passed, but the story itself just doesn't feel very original. The science in it might be new, but the story itself is fairly old and has been repeated many, many times in other books and movies. To be perfectly honest, I made it through the first third of the book and just put it down. My mind just kept picking up correlations to other similar movies I'd seen.

As I mentioned, I am currently working on a novel. No, I'm not doing it as part of Nanowrimo, though I did sign up for that a while back and neglected to get started on it when the first came around. I started this novel back in January and after a good burst of energy, I slowed down over the summer due to some heavy emotional trauma I took on. While I'm still working on getting over that, I've picked up my work again and it currently stands at just over 41,000 words. The most I've ever written on one story so far. I have a few more hoops for the characters to jump through before the grand finale, but it shouldn't be too much further. The real work is going to be when I get to work on the second draft. I am already aware of several major plot issues I need to fix and it's already hard to ignore them enough to finish the story as it.

Anyway, that should be good enough for my first Post I think. I'm actually on the hunt for my page of notes on my novel to double-check a few things before I get back to work on it for the night and I still need to keep looking. (Yes, I stopped looking just to start a blog. Get a sense of a bit of ADD?) Anyway, thanks for stopping by. Come on back again.

~ Shaun Horton