User blog:CharminglyShallow/WHO WAS CHARMINGLY SHALLOW? (sorry, couldn't resist ;) )

First blog, and mainly because default pages look a bit miserable really, like moving into a new house and not changing the wallpaper I suppose. It feels a bit…..temporary otherwise I guess.

Uh oh…too many dots in the first ellipsis…oh the shame! :)

Sorry, but I like to mess around with the number of dots. I didn’t even know of the word ‘ellipsis’ until a couple of months ago. I’ve since tried to reduce the number of times I use ‘…’, since people are right, too many and it does ruin the flow of the story, but I do argue the other way that breaking the ‘three dot rule’ gives a writer some control over the length of a pause, but only in a narrative.

Anyway, as on my front page I suppose you’d call it, I explained what brought me here. Basically I asked my eldest daughter what she was reading on her iPad in bed one night and she said ‘Creepypastas’.

My response?

“What the hell is a ‘creepypasta’?”

…and so began my descent into the hell that is short creepy/horror/what-if stories, mainly in an attempt to impress my daughters by scaring the crap out of them. Good parenting at its best. :)

After reading several I finally began to understand just who this ‘Slenderman’ and ‘Jeff the Killer’ was that my daughters had been dropping into conversations with their cousins. I guess I was thankful they were vicious monsters rather than rap artists or pop poseurs. Hell, at least they were reading!

I’d written a few short stories before, mainly just for fun or helping out my friend who ran murder mystery weekends and murder mystery steam train events, but this sounded like am ideal way to scratch a creative itch and have something to talk to my daughters about without having to watch Nickelodeon or some annoying MTV reality show.

I wrote a few, and submitted them to the creepypasta.com website. Only one got published there, Support Call ID: 100156-03. An updated, revised, and hopefully better copy of which now resides on this site. That’s what I really like about this place – I can go over my old stuff and edit out the odd line or word – pruning and improving as time passes. The story doesn’t sit frozen in time – it continues to refine itself.

Back to the Support Call ID story, it was the first story which included my daughter’s names, just to surprise them. I don’t know why, but evil daughters appear to be a theme in some of my work now. Does this say something about them, or me? ;)

More later…