writing

The 31st Trick-or-Treater

/ Winona Morris / Leave a comment

You know what you need at the end of November and only 3 days away from Thanksgiving? You need me to tell you about a book that’s all about Halloween!

Ben Farthing, probably best known for his “I found horror” series, gave us a Halloween Advent Calendar this year in the form of The 31st Trick-or-Treater. It was set up so that if you started reading the book on October 1st, and read one chapter a day, you would finished it on Halloween night, which is also when the book concludes.

In it there is a small community who love and celebrate Halloween with great gusto. Then, 30 children disappear all at once on Halloween night.

A year passes, during which time our main character, Bob, never stops looking for his missing daughter. Then, just as suddenly as they disappeared, the children stat Reappearing, one child a night. The children, seeming to be 100% the same as they were the moment they disappeared a year ago, come back terrified and talking about a mysterious “31st Trick-or-treater” who will arrive on Halloween night.

While Bob waits nightly to see if his daughter will return, he still keeps looking for her around the town. Where he has not managed to find her for 365 days, but whatever floats your boat dude.

I hated Bob. HATED him. He looked own on all the other people in the community for “giving up” on the missing children, was absolutely self absorbed to the point of neglecting his wife and remaining children, and still had the audacity to complain that neighbors weren’t “neighborly” anymore.

Make it make sense my dude.

I did enjoy the book in the beginning enough that I accidentally read more than one chapter at a time and had to wait for the month to catch up with me. (When a story is good, chapter breaks cease to exist for me). There were some scenes that were definitely giving Stranger Things/Upside down vibes.

But the my interest fell off, and I had to catch up several chapters to reach the ending on Halloween.

The ending….

The ending couldn’t have fallen flatter for me if it had tried. I was left with a feeing of “That’s it?”

I ended up feeling generous with a 3 star rating.

I do recommend Ben Farthing, but not this book. The Twitching House and It Waits on the Top Floor were both good reads.

Week End Review – 11-9-25

/ Winona Morris / Leave a comment

Happy Sunday friends! This week seems to have gone by amazingly fast, and horribly slowly all at the same time. Its all a blur I don’t remember too much of. Not that I do much anyway. I work. I sleep. I get up and do it again.

Lets face it though….I’m in it just to make the faux newspapers every week. Look! This week there are cow jokes:

  1. I was interviewed by Nora B. Peevy.
  2. I wrote a story for an upcoming Christmas special for The Butchered Writers. Ya’ll have to wait ’til December to read it.
  3. I read 4 Thanksgiving themed short stories and wrote a little bit about them: 4 Short Reads Filled with Family, Fear, and Feast Gone Wrong
  4. I’m still plugging away at The Butchered Writers Pinterest board. Its dropping in impression since the 31 Days of Free Horror ended. But even the best of us can’t put out a story a day infinitely (at least not if we want them to be any good.)

I have no major plans for the upcoming week really.

I have a doctors appointment tomorrow. Hopefully it will end up with me being able to come off my diabetes medicines. Or at least one of them. My at home tests have all been in range for a while now.

I want to write a story for the Horror flash fiction contest since I skipped the last 2 months. And there is a Butchered Writers anthology that a story is due for I need to get knocked out. (As soon as I get an idea)

Due to working several 6 day stretches and not having 2 days off in a row my mental health isn’t where it out to be. That means with my AuDHD I have an onslaught of doom piles growing, an I plan to tackle those this week, so you might have some before/after blogs coming up.

I also need to start working on crafting projects. I’ve started a TikTok that I hope to dedicate to my “Feral Crafts” and want to have at least one day a week here where I share what I’ve made, which means I actually have to make something. I have SO much craft stash built up I need to use it all.

Merging my Split Personalities

/ Winona Morris / 4 Comments

Ko-Fi Makeover

Today I spent several hours editing graphics for my Ko-fi page.

In the past I have kept switching back and forth from it being for my crafts to it being for my writing. Back and forth, over and over. Decisions are hard, and we’ve concluded already that I lack the ability to niche down at all. So today I decided that there, like here, I’m just going to stop trying to squeeze my square peg into a round hole.

Ko-fi is a site where you can take “tips” or “donations,” but it is much more than that. You can set it up like a patreon with hidden content for paid members. You can also open a shop there, which is something I hope to utilize to my advantage. The shop lets you sell both physical and digital items. So if I do decide to go digital with my mail club when I get it figured out then I’ll probably do it through there.

I can also use it to sell ebooks in the future if I so wish.

For now I plan to use it as one of the places I’m going to try to sell the things I craft, to help generate money not only for more craft supplies, but for further publications.

WIP Wednesday

Speaking of crafts, I have a few I’m working on that I need to get a move on. Right here is a SMALL cross stitch of a mushroom that I should be almost done with by now…but I kind of keep just not working on it.

Other Works in Progress include:

  • Tracing/carving some images onto/into rubber blocks for block printing.
  • Removing the sleeves from a torn t-shirt and using it as my first print on fabric test.
  • Work on/finish the diamond art that I’ve been working on for literal YEARS so I can move on to the next one I want to work on.
  • Make the large coaster I told my son I would make just for him to hold his chicken nugget plates on.
  • Finish the frog I have a commission for.
  • Get Settled into my new journal.

Chaos Journal

I have finished Chaos Journal #4 (the one on the left) and will be moving into #5 (the one one the right) today.

A chaos journal is sort of a beast of my own invention. A lot of journals have journal ecosystems, where they have a different book for every kind of journal they keep. I was trying to do that as well, only to find that I just….stopped journaling altogether.

So a Chaos Journal to me is an amalgamation of all the other journals I would like to keep. Dream journaling, book reviews, Commonplace notebooks, junk journaling, daily journaling, art journaling, bullet journaling, they all go into this one book.

It is handy to have all my brainstorming ideas in one spot when I want to remember something, and it is also fun to watch how the journal changes as I use it over time.

To be loved is to be changed.

Lastly for today, this is the social media link image I made for my Ko-fi today. I think it’s cute. I’m thinking of making a smaller one as a signature to sign off my different types of blog entries I might write.