So, as you probably know, every year I enter the "Masters of the Macabre" contest over at the Horror Addicts website. It's a short story contest wherein there’s an overall topic, and specific details given to each participant.
This is the third one I've done, and its theme was Hauntings, a subject fraught with Horror possibilities. They gave me the location of The White House, and an instruction to put An Unopened Letter From 1842 in there. It could only be ten minutes long, so I figured the tale had to be pretty simplistic. I thought I’d write about a paranormal investigator, or a ghost expert, who goes to the White House to see if there’s any truth to the haunting stories there.I stayed up one night researching the haunting of the White House, and it turns out people way back in the 1800’s claimed to see or hear ghosts there, and various Presidents and civilians have been sighted there ever since.
But because the story had to be so short, I ignored the tale I was going to write, and simply summed up the character's backstory. As a boy of ten, he went on a White House tour, and heard about the ghostly sightings. Even that was hard to sum up in ten minutes.
I recorded the story, which I creatively called "White House Tour," and once again had my niece voice the part of a kid (I honestly don't know if that makes the listening experience better or worse, but I like it when kids are used instead of adults). Even that version ended up a couple of minutes too long, but I managed to get it (right around) the correct length.
Here's the link to the aired episode: http://horroraddicts.wordpress.com/2013/08/23/horroraddicts-net-093-masters-of-macabre-contest/
In a recent That Gets My Goat, I spoke to Big about missing the deadline for submitting this tale, and how it was the sort of stupid mistake I've made all my life, but it turns out there weren't a lot of participants in this year's contest, and they extended the deadline for a few days, so everyone could get theirs in.
Everyone, in the end, turned out to be three.
They've also included the text of the story at this link: http://horroraddicts.wordpress.com/2013/08/24/mmm-contestant-1-rish-outfield/. If you prefer to read it, there it is, all for free. All for you, Damien.
Rish Outfield, Addict
P.S. I did a lengthy write-up about this year's contest a month or two back, which you can check out on my personal blog (if you like). There I talk about the process and tell you what I really think of the story I wrote (on second thought, maybe you shouldn't check it out). In there, I said I wouldn't ask our fans to vote for me, and I'm doing the same here. But I am asking them to go over there, listen to the three stories, and have a good time. All the stories are short, and feel free to vote for your favorite. It's your right as an Earthman or woman.
P.S. I did a lengthy write-up about this year's contest a month or two back, which you can check out on my personal blog (if you like). There I talk about the process and tell you what I really think of the story I wrote (on second thought, maybe you shouldn't check it out). In there, I said I wouldn't ask our fans to vote for me, and I'm doing the same here. But I am asking them to go over there, listen to the three stories, and have a good time. All the stories are short, and feel free to vote for your favorite. It's your right as an Earthman or woman.
Well, I voted for you. Yours was the superior story of the three. The main thing was the character development. It's a difficult thing to fit that in such a constrained amount of space, but it was done well.
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