Don't miss my new series! Five Masters of Terror and Their Deeply Useful Ways to Disturb People Here's the line-up Tuesday: Stephen King: Make the ordinary unsafe. Wednesday: Shirley Jackson: Let perfectly polite people become deeply unsettling. Thursday: Edgar Allan Poe: Trap us inside a mind we shouldn’t trust. Friday: Daphne du Maurier: Make a place feel as though it knows something. Saturday: Alfred Hitchcock: Let the audience see the danger coming.

While I'm writing a short article series on five masters of horror, I have to give a shout-out to a contemporary mistress of dark psychological thrillers, Nicky Shearsby Her novels take a "whydunnit" route into this territory: understanding the person you’d rather keep a safe distance from. That suggests a useful question for writers struggling with maintaining suspense: once readers know who your dark soul is, can you keep them reading to discover how that person justifies being one? A locked door is troubling. Someone on the other side who thinks they’re being perfectly reasonable is much more interesting.

Writing is often what pulls me out of a mental slump. It’s the rest of the writing life that wears me down: querying, criticism, travel, too much screen time, and isolation. The writing itself brings me joy. Apparently, imaginary people are good for me. It’s the real ones who complicate things.

Even the parts of your life you thought were keeping you from writing may be what gives your writing its depth. The detours count. So do the years you thought you wasted.

The pause also gives you time to notice whose urgency you’re responding to—and whether it deserves to become your own.

A writer will ask anybody for backstory if chapter three starts acting up. Even in a Kaua'i horror maze. #HalloweenVibes #HalloweenCountdown #writingcommunity

She took that personally. Grew couture. #Caturday

Learning to keep going without an audience is a useful skill. So is learning whose voice you no longer need in your head. There’s work to do, and the cat’s already in my chair.

“Back to HOLLOW GROUND. Someone in there knows what happened, and I’m beginning to take the silence personally.” #writingcommunity #writersofx #writerslift

Having these people in our lives (hopefully former lives) is useful knowledge for a novelist. An exhausting way to live. Some people are best kept on the page, where you decide how long they stay. When my urge to write suffers, the first place I look is at who I've been spending time with recently.

I know that rehearsal well. It took me years to realize how much responsibility I’d taken for someone else’s reactions. Longer still to stop doing it—and accept that some relationships wouldn’t survive my speaking freely.

The hard part is learning that feeling guilty doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve done something wrong. Sometimes it means you’ve stopped doing what everyone has come to expect.

Professor Mo'o has requested better billing. Pau denies knowing him.

Eight days until Halloween. Pau is making alterations. Professor Moʻo went unnoticed in the last cartoon. This time, he’s making sure there are witnesses. #WritingCommunity #HalloweenCostume #thrillerwritercartoon