Steven E. Wedel's Blog

I’ve been playing around with a couple of artificial intelligence tools lately. I know they’re not popular with writers, but they’re not going away, so I’m going to follow the lead of Joanna Penn and find an ethical way to use them. Mostly I’ve been using them for marketing when it comes to books. I’ve also used them — Primarily ChatGPT — for creative business plans for a bookstore I want to open and creating a plan that would allow me to hit a certain income goal with my writing/publishing/mark...

People ask me sometimes—why horror?

They ask it like I’ve made a strange, almost impolite choice. Like I could have written something nice. A romance. A cozy mystery. Something where the dog doesn’t die and everyone learns a heartwarming lesson by the end.

I’ve written books like that. But horror is where I began and horror is where I’m most comfortable.

Not because I like blood or shock or jump scares. Not because I want to disturb anyone...

Sometimes, a story grows out of a nightmare.

Other times, it starts with something quiet.

This one started on a dairy farm in Ripley, Oklahoma.

I loved my grandfathers. Mom’s dad encouraged my love of Westerns, teaching me to make a lasso and giving me a stack of ancient Old West magazines. Dad’s dad ran a farm and that was some kind of paradise for a young boy growing up in a small city.

Years after they were both gone, truths came out about both of these men. Devastating truths...

What happens to a man’s soul when his mind is gone?

It’s a question that haunted me long before I ever wrote The Dead of the Day. I’ve seen people I cared about fade slowly into the fog of dementia—forgetting names, faces, entire chapters of their lives. The body stays, the eyes still open, but the person behind them? It’s like watching someone drift away in pieces.

We’ve all read stories about monsters.

The ones that crawl out of the woods with too many teeth. The ones that live under the bed. The ones with claws, wings, fangs, or fire. They make for great entertainment. They’re scary, sure. But they’re also easy to spot.

You know what really scares me?

An old man in a hospital gown who whispers your name even though you never told it to him.

A man with a foggy memory, but perfect clarity about your sins.

A man who doesn’t have to chase yo...

There’s a certain pressure in fiction to make your protagonist likable. Relatable. Sympathetic. You’re supposed to give readers someone they want to root for—someone they’d grab a beer with or follow into battle.

But sometimes, the story demands someone worse.

Someone angry. Someone broken. Someone who’s said and done things you can’t defend.

Someone like Enoch Hoffmann.

When I started writing The Dead of the Day, I knew I wasn’t creating a hero. Enoch is a racist, bitter old man wit...

Some ghosts don’t come from outside the house.
They come from your last name.

One of the oldest horror tropes—maybe even older than the vampire or the haunted house—is the cursed bloodline. From Greek tragedies to Southern Gothic, horror keeps coming back to the same chilling idea: You can’t escape your family.

You can try. You can move across the country, change your name, leave the church, bury the past. But in stories like Hereditary, The Witch, The Shining, or Pet Sematary, the evil isn...

When most people think of Gothic horror, they imagine crumbling castles, fog-drenched moors, or Spanish moss hanging off antebellum mansions. But Gothic doesn’t belong exclusively to Europe or the American South.

There’s a different kind of Gothic hiding in the plains and hills of Oklahoma.

Maybe we don’t have vampires in stone towers or ghosts in plantation ballrooms. What we do have are empty fields, flooded riverbanks, and forgotten towns, a...

Nursing homes have always creeped me out. My first experience in one was in maybe the 4th grade as a Cub Scout. Our den mother took us to a nearby nursing home to sell raffle tickets or something. I remember old women sitting in a lobby like they were waiting for us. Waiting to take us to the other side with them.

As an adult, I know that’s irrational, but the places still make me uneasy. Maybe it’s the long, quiet hallways that smell like antiseptic and old skin. Or the way time seems suspen...

I have just come home from my last-ever visit to Bar K Dog Bar, a park that, for almost three years, had become the second home for me, Bear, Sweet Pea, and countless other canines and their humans. Sadly, it wasn’t for one last run through the splash pad, one more Diet Coke in the bar, or even one final game of Singo, which I hosted on Friday evenings. It was to pick up that Singo equipment and take one final look at the closed doors of a place that had come to mean so much to so many.

When ...