Rewriting Richard Matheson, foolishly
I started reading Richard Matheson’s The Gun Fight the other night. I had read it before, but I didn’t remember much about it, other than the ending and the basic premise (basically, gossip gets out…
Author: Steve Ruthenbeck
Midnight Offerings
I seem to be on a made-for-TV horror movie kick. It started with The Intruder Within. I then decided to view another movie that has stuck with me for even more than 34 years —…
The Intruder Within
Sometimes movies stick in one’s brain. One such movie showed up on TV in 1983. I remember the day well. I had a birthday party, Pac-Man frosting was on my cake and that night a…
Vertically-Endowed Tales — Valentine’s Day
Vertically-Endowed Tales are my version of Tall Tales. They are basically just goofing around, writing exercises, if one will. I don’t try to make them perfect. They are like jamming in a band, not really…
Fun With Revision
I looked at some older things I wrote tonight. One story, And Then There Were None, was accepted for an anthology a few years ago. The anthology then got cancelled. The story went back into…
Shine on you crazy Shining
I watched Room 237 the other night. It’s a documentary about hidden meanings and subtext in The Shining. Some theories sound plausible. Others sound like a case of people reading too much into the movie….
Opening Paragraph Lesson Via Die Hard
I’ve read editors claim that if a story doesn’t grab them in the opening paragraph, they don’t bother reading the rest. Whether that’s true or not, let’s play around with opening paragraphs. I’ll pick a…
My Predator Movie
The original Predator is a classic. I saw it in the theater with my dad for my birthday. I didn’t think Predator was a classic at the time. It may seem tame to the modern…
Didja Ninja?
The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things, of sailing ships and sealing wax and whether pigs have wings…and ninjas! I started thinking about ninjas today. This is a dangerous practice,…
I Am Legend
Things were different before the Internet. We sat down to do computer work…and actually did computer work rather than follow Internet links into oblivion. We never crawled into a corner, hugged our knees and lamented,…