Read Project Threshold

WHEW! It’s been a crazy week. We’ve put up the new website for Horror Tree, and so far the response has been generally positive! Even so, I’ve been working out bugs on it all week and still have a pile to work through. (If you see anything seeming to act funny, please reach out! It is absolutely still a work in progress, and I am happy to make corrections!)

For Trembling With Fear, we’re still working on getting together the last anthology and hope to have some news for you on that front sooner than later.

And now, I will return you to your regularly scheduled newsletter!

Read Shadowed Realms today!

This anthology stitches together a tapestry of tales, each shadowed by the dark, each whispering tales of addiction, celestial mysteries, and worlds crumbling into apocalypse.

This week, I’m sharing articles that centre on cohesion and consistency in a story. On Helping Writers Become Authors, K. M. Weiland discusses the importance of keeping a consistent tone. This article is a quick read, but it’s full of good advice. The second article is from Mythcreants. Chris Winkle takes a deep dive into the importance of cohesion in a story. This article is one I am bookmarking to revisit in the future, as it is full of examples and different strategies for streamlining a story by consolidating elements. For the final article, I decided to pull from Writer Unboxed. Heather Webb focuses on finding the heart of your story. I included this one because knowing the heart of what you are writing will help you understand what you need to make it more cohesive and what tone to focus on.

Craft:

Helping Writers Become Authors: https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/story-tone-in-fiction/ 

Mythcreants: https://mythcreants.com/blog/how-why-you-should-consolidate-your-story/ 

Writer Unboxed: https://writerunboxed.com/2026/03/20/finding-the-heart-of-the-story/

From Horror Tree:

🎬 Horror & The Oscars

📚 Ramsey Campbell Interview

📚 More Weight Book Review

📚 Godzilla Art Collection Review

📚 Nematodes Book Review

For this week’s free fiction, I have collected two flash fiction pieces and two longer stories. The first two share the themes of manipulation through storytelling. In Thomas Ha’s “Middle Song”, two men meet at a roadhouse in the middle of the desert and attempt to control each other and those around them by telling stories. What results is a tense battle of wills and a sense of ever-growing dread. In the flash piece “Heritage, or This Body of Folklore” the protagonist tells lies to steal from someone else. This story also has growing darkness, but a bit of a surprising end. The other two stories I picked because I enjoyed the ideas. From Clarkesworld, I pulled the story, “First Human Ghost on Mars,” which is a combination of space travel and ghost story. I love a good ghost story. This one is a creative exploration of what an afterlife on Mars might look like. The other story, “Nothing Bright by the Shine of Your Coat” is a retelling of the fairy tale, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, a story that resembles Beauty and the Beast and Cupid and Psyche. I have always enjoyed retellings, and this one offers a fresh perspective on an old tale that I love.

“Middle Song” by Thomas Ha from Bourbon Penn

“Heritage, or This Body of Folklore” by Ayida Shonibar from Apex Magazine

“First Human Ghost on Mars” by R. L. Meza from Clarkesworld Magazine

“Nothing Bright but the Shine of Your Coat” by Cressida Roe from Small Wonders Magazine

Writing Exercise: Spring is Coming

Your protagonist lives on a planet with brutal winters that can only be survived in underground facilities. Finally, the spring thaw has come, and the community can return to the surface. Everyone emerges, ready for sunshine and fresh air, except when they exit, an unexpected surprise awaits them that completely changes their plans…

What that surprise is, is up to you! Is it something fun or something sinister? 

Let your imagination run wild!

Read Trembling With Fear Volume 7 Today!