Despite never having been to New England, I was determined to submit a piece to the Northern Haunts anthology. Shroud Publishing is considered the cr\u00e8me de la cr\u00e8me of horror fiction, and I knew that snagging a spot in Tim Deal\u2019s stellar anthology would be a great way to get my publishing career started.<\/p>\n
Other than a few poetry submissions to (and subsequent rejections from) Prism International, this was the first time I had sent my work out into the publishing world.<\/p>\n
I came up with this idea after reading about an old superstition about eating spiders in pats of butter to ward off illness. Being arachnophobic, this both grossed me out and intrigued me. And knowing how many other people out there hate or fear spiders, I knew that this piece would definitely cause a reaction. What else can you ask for?!<\/p>\n
This piece actually turned out to be a bit more of a challenge than I had previously thought.<\/p>\n
700 words. That was all the room I had to tell this tale. 700 words to work in plot, character, and the right creep-to-gross-out ratio.<\/p>\n
My first draft was double that. It started with a scene that was inspired by a middle school end-of-year party at Lori Hawthorne\u2019s house where someone killed a spider with a hammer in Lori\u2019s backyard. Ah, the memories.<\/p>\n
That part had to be cut, unfortunately, as I realized I had to start the story much later. The good thing is I already had a vision (or should I say \u201cheard\u201d) of exactly how the story would end. I could literally hear my own voice in my head reading the story aloud and the final line\u2026\u201dAnd when Mrs. Crawley\u2026\u201d well \u2013 you get the point. I can\u2019t very well post the final line here, no matter how many of you are immediately-turn-to-the-last-page-of-the-book readers. You\u2019ll just have to read it for yourself. Then let me know what you thought of it!<\/p>\n
I found out that my story was accepted after a camping trip where our tent was bombarded with countless (seriously! I\u2019m talking nests here people!) Daddy Long-legs. At the time, I was overwhelmingly terrorized by the disgusting little creatures \u2013 but in hindsight, I look at it as a sort of skin-crawling tiding of what would soon be great joy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My Motivation: Despite never having been to New England, I was determined to submit a piece to the Northern Haunts anthology. Shroud Publishing is considered the cr\u00e8me de la cr\u00e8me of horror fiction, and I knew that snagging a spot in Tim Deal\u2019s stellar anthology would be a great way to get my publishing career…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[452],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-inklings"],"yoast_head":"\n