All Hallow's Eve Word-Play October 11, 2012 - October 29, 2012

Reading and Deliberating

Details

October is one of my favorite times of the year, not only because of the ritualistic Pagan qualities of Halloween but because the very air during the days of Fall has a singular taste of an utterly foreboding sense of dreadful dismay to it. October is the month traditionally known as the gate-way on the path of Old Man Winter by The Gods who keep secure and guard the far-reaching hands of Time. Fall simply means that Death is visiting soon, which is inevitable in this short mortal lives we all lead. In the soft, hazy late afternoon October sun-light, one can feel this crippling feeling of impending doom in that inviolate private place we all have, along with the dark night that falls gently but oh so quickly upon the land this time of year and this has always given me a shocking electric thrill through-out my body, causing my extremities to tickle.......
As I take advantage of a lazy, grey Central Valley Northern California afternoon while watching "Stephen King's Silver Bullet" on the AMC random Thursday Stephen King marathon, it got me to thinking that I should start a Halloween type contest on this wonderful writer's social network before the rare beauty of this time of year grows thin.
I've only been a member for a few months and the first month I did absolutely nothing with it but the sense of community has overwhelmed me so I have no doubt I will not be disappointed in the submissions I get. The contest will be ending on October 29th so that in case I am bombarded with many submissions, which I hope happens, I can have the judging done before or on Halloween. All ages and types of writing are welcome; I will be judging on creativity and descriptive content more than anything else in all forms of writing, whether it be a poem, story, essay, etc etc and I sincerely hope one of y'all great writers on this illustrious web-site will scare the hell out of me. That is the goal for this Halloween contest, which is why I am concerned with description.
I doubt any of you will succeed in frightening me, especially since my mother warped my now deviant and twisted mind at the tender age of four. Late one Saturday night, when ‘Shock Theater” --with that Billy Bob guy as host-- was still running on Ted Turner’s TBS, my mom had me crawl into her lap when the night was stormy and windy and when it was only the two of us since my father was working the grave-yard shift at some Bay Area hospital. She made me watch the Stanley Kubrick's version Stephen King's "The Shining”, the one where the wife was a shrill b***h and Jack Nicholson made the entire movie terrifying with his portrayal of writer Jack Torrance. The number two reason you will not scare me is that during the same year, my mom also gave me a paper-back version of "The Eyes of the Dragon", another Stephen King project, which of course led me to all his other books. (I guess this why I am such a Stephen King fan, though I consider him to be the ‘grand-son’ of modern horror, with H.P. Lovecraft the ‘grand-father’ and Richard Matheson as the ‘father’.) My wonderful mother also introduced to the sick and depraved dark comedy thriller of "American Werewolf in London" and other similar things. I write this lengthy abstract screed not only to help give you a better description of what I want to accomplish with this contest but also because it makes me remember lovely child-hood memories filled with hours of fictionalized horror. Good times indeed.......
Andrew Nicolas Farrens