Wednesday update and podcast spotlight

Hello ladies and gentlemen!  Welcome to the Casa!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Labor Day weekend (or weekend if you are outside of the U.S.).  I spent the weekend celebrating my youngest brother’s 21st birthday with almost all of my brothers.  We don’t get much time to do that, so it was fun and relaxing.  There was swimming, a Nerf gun war, and all the kids and adults had a blast.  Now that my baby brother is 21 and my third born son is in kindergarten, I’m reminded just how old I am and how little time it is until my oldest son is celebrating the same birthday (I already have some ideas for his… Mwahahaha!) and my youngest starts school.  Now that Labor Day has passed and the kids are back in school, we can move on to the first of my favorite two holidays… Halloween.

I’ve always held an affinity for All Hallow’s Eve.  Whether it’s because you get to dress up in costumes, using makeup to become something comical or scary, the candy, or the close proximity to my birthday, I love the day.  It’s not surprising that I listen to Halloween music and have Halloween decorations hanging all year round.

My love of the holiday is also evident in my writing.  I love creating stories that involve monsters, ghosts, and scary people.  The right character can be truly scary as long as you emphasize the right traits and emotions.  When you write a character whose job is to terrify the reader as well as the story’s protagonist, ask your character, “What makes you scary?”  If the answer is solely because of their teeth, claws, machete skills, or anything else more superficial and clichéd, you may need to look at the character in a different way.  See if there is a deeper reason why they do what they do and you may help the character bring more to the table than just their weapon of choice.  This isn’t always a guarantee to work, but is worth looking at if it might just help.

Halloween isn’t the only reason I love this time of year.  This is also when the Masters of Macabre and Wicked Women Writers contests release their stories for voting.  The Masters’ stories debuted on 08/24/2013 and voting for them runs until 09/24/2013.  The women are set to release their disaster ridden stories this weekend.  Check the stories out,, vote for your favorite, and you may win a prize package from the authors and HorrorAddicts.net.  This year you can listen to the stories via podcast or on the HorrorAddicts.net site.  And, for the first time, the stories are available in text form for the hearing impaired and those who prefer to read a story rather than hear it.  Check them out on the Masters of Macabre website and the Wicked Women Writers website.

As always, if you want to leave a comment, please do so below.  Let me know your opinion  and feel free to share mine with your friends, family, and yes, even your enemies.  I’m on Facebook, Twitter, Google +, and via e-mail at dpitsiladis@gmail.com.  And check out my stories in the “Darwin Murders” and “Bump Off Your Enemies” anthologies available through Amazon.com.

And remember… Why so serious?

Donald P.