charles barrow's writing

"Trashy Tales of Terror : cheesy horror fiction featuring creepy kids, killer animals, mutants and monsters, etc." The above caught my eye when I was perusing the submission guidelines for an anthology called Trash Tales, to be published next summer, but with a submission deadline of midnight on December 31st. Happy New Year. There is also a 5,000  word limit for entries. There were any number of other suggested categories to submit stories in, from Sci-Fi to romance to cosy crime, in fact, as the guidelines state on the website (see link at the end), "Your story can be in any category or genre you like, as long as it's what we might all consider of a trashy nature!" I learned of this opportunity whilst watching a #booktube channel, on Youtube. Alex Unabridged was the channel - you can link to their site here  youtube.com/@alex_unabridged  Alex will be producing/editing the anthology along with Olly from CriminOlly - you can find his #booktube channel here  yout...

Gah, I missed my Halloween deadline. Is it too late to post photos of pumpkins? Of course not. These aren't carved into ghoulish and gruesome faces but presented straight off the vine as beautiful as nature intended. Nothing says Halloween like a pumpkin unless you count Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, and flesh eating zombies. I don't actually clebrate Halloween. Perhaps 'observe' is a better word than celebrate. It seems to have bumped Guy Fawkes Night right off the calender and I'd much rather watch fireworks lighting the sky than the neighbourhood youth causing havoc door to door. Also I'm not good with horror. Blowing up Parliament? Fine. Who hasn't thought of doing that? But evisceration, murder, black magic, hauntings? No thanks. The last horror film I sat through was probably Friday 13th, the original one, it scarred me for life and I've avoided any scary film since. I read ghost stories occassionally, Victorian ones, I can handle 19th century h...