For this year's Halloween theme I was going to convert my entire garage into a disco inferno (picture Bee Gees with Satan masks), but decided it was best during a pandemic not to make little kids walk through an enclosed area (next year!). So I went back to...
My end-of-year newsletter is usually a reflection of gratitude for the year. Then along came 2020 and spit globs of infectious goo in all of our faces, making this year's annual rite a bit challenging. Still, there were things in 2020 that didn't suck. In no...
BIG NEWS: Halloween wasn't a horrible disappointment! After my rant last month about the challenges of Halloween during COVID, I'm pleased to announce that it ended up being quite the success at the Wilson household. Instead of creating a suffocating walk-through in...
Rejoice, as the Halloween highlight reel is here. As my long-term readers know, each year I comb though video footage to collect the choicest screams from my Halloween house-staging. This was the first year I moved the set from the porch to inside the garage, allowing...
One of the best parts of Halloween is I have guaranteed newsletter content for a quarter of the year. In August or September I write how I'm stressed out that I haven't yet decided on a theme. In October I reveal the theme. And in November I always provide a recap...
Mid-July is when the Halloween nightmares start. The recurring dream is that it's 6 P.M. on Halloween night, kids are walking toward my house, and I totally forgot to decorate. I haven't put out one goddamn thing. My body is frozen in place, so I can't even get a...
November 2018 My favorite post of the year, where I get share the highlight-reel video of my Halloween porch screams. As detailed in my last newsletter, this year's theme was a mishmash of previous ones, so my covered front porch was a chaotic mess of frights....
October 2018 You smell that? No, it's not the musk of fallen leaves, nor the stank of a Pumpkin Spice Latte. What you're smelling is fear. Specifically, little-kid fear. It's all around, because Halloween is just about here. I don't do Hobby Lobby Halloween at...
October 2017 Happy October—by far the best month of the year. Many of my stories have bits that occur in October, and, in the case of Mister Tender's Girl, the whole book takes places over two weeks of the month, from the middle of October through Halloween....
September 2017 Novel writing by Sharpie! This is the closest thing to outlining I've ever done. I was 40,000 words into something new and writing, as I usually do, from the seat of my pants. But then I got stuck, big time. So I bought some butcher paper and...
