Matthew Jon Smith

11/23/24 9:56 PM CST Dear Reader, Coming soon from Dark Moon Rising Publications , featuring "Traditions Tangled in Tinsel," by Matthew Jon Smith, as well other terrifying horror shorts from other great authors, Last Christmas: A Holiday Horror Anthology. Links to purchase the paperback and e-book additions coming soon.

11/23/2024 6:54 PM CST Dear Reader, I started off the last blog wanting to talk about writing, especially trying to get published, but then I had to start with the concept of reading, as I think reading and writing are obviously linked. I went on a tangent about how I got started with reading and my love of horror fiction. The point is, for about the last two years, I have become a man obsessed with the stories that come to me. In the last blog, I explained that the first thing I attempted to write ended up being a 180k-word behemoth. I started just wanting to write a short story or two. I knew I could come up with a couple and maybe have enough for a short collection. But what it ended up being was a collection of 30 interconnected stories about a cursed town and the people in it. Think Twin Peaks meets Needful Things with a touch of unexpected extreme horror lite. There was so much that I just knew had to be in the book, and it wasn’t finished until all of the crazy puzzle ...

  11/11/2024 11:22 AM CST Dear Reader, Let's talk about writing for a second, shall we? But to talk about writing, I think first we have to talk about reading. I have been a reader ever since I was a little kid. I was part of some scholastic book program at school where if you took a book home, read it aloud in front of your parent, and your parent signed a sheet saying that you did it, you got a sticker on your card. For every four stickers that you got on your card, you were given a coupon for a free personal pan pizza from a famous fast food chain pizza restaurant. This was around first through early second grade, and I ran that free pizza game hard. I tried to take a book home every night because I wanted to rack up those stickers. Plus, I liked spending time reading to my mom or one of the members of the extended family, and those simple times where my mom would take me to the pizza place and we would sit down and share our free little pizza were some of my favorite times, so ...