Welcome to the cKotch.Com blog. I’m Christopher Kotcher, and these are my attempts at Halloween specials over the years.
The Scariest Time of the Year
I have been all over the place this Halloween season. Posts have covered creepy cartoons, personal hang-ups with horror, and family and community ghost stories.
All of it has led to this. Now comes the time to detail my history writing Halloween stories.
For whatever reason, Halloween is the most common holiday in my writing. I guess there is just something about this season.
For one, Halloween has a wide variety of creatures and characters to its name.
Christmas may give you Santa and elves. Valentine’s day and Easter pretty much limit you to Cupid and rabbits.
Halloween though? Vampires, werewolves, witches, zombies, ghosts. Just to name some of the more common ones.
Then you add all the different aspects of celebrating Halloween. Haunted houses, trick-or-treating, parties, creepy dares, monster attacks. There really is a lot to this holiday.
Now, many of my Halloween stories have simply been fun side projects, never really meant for my main canon of works.
Even the formerly canon Halloween stories have been dropped. Many of them no longer fit the current feel of their series.
In fact, one story is quite the ghost itself. It appears to exist now only in memory.
Starting with the Best Villain
Let us start with Halloween in my lifelong literary project Story Chronicles.
This book stars a young writer named Ulysses Nlucky. His experiences inspire and shape the stories featured in the book. One of these experiences is Halloween.
All four story series in Story Chronicles have had Halloween tales. Since I have revealed only one series here, I will only share Cubey and Liney’s old Halloween adventure.
The tale begins with the young cube Cubey and Line Spirit Liney grabbing pumpkins for a Halloween party at Cubey’s school.
The two friends run into one of their recurring enemies at the pumpkin patch. He tries using a specialized vile energy to destroy Liney’s ghostly form.
The fight finishes rather quickly. Cubey and Liney have become quite the team by this point in their adventures.
Cubey and Liney then head to the party. Cubey dresses as a ghost to mess with his friend while Liney dresses as a masked swordsman even though only Cubey can see him.
The two friends have some fun until the lights suddenly go out. Strange vines and thorns begin to block the exits while eerie flames race through the air.
Liney uses his costume’s sword to cut some vines, and Cubey follows him out of the school gym to investigate the situation.
A few more scares happen with the vines and thorns until the two finally discover their newest foe. The evil pumpkin monster, Pumpkor.
You see, in the day’s earlier fight, loose vile energy had contaminated the pumpkin patch. Now the crops have come to life as a living Jack-O-Lantern monster.
A pretty cool fight soon starts. Cubey and Liney leap around to dodge Pumpkor’s whip-like roots and fiery breath. The two heroes find victory by pushing over Pumpkor’s top-heavy body.
Pumpkin seeds and guts scatter all over the place, and the day is won.
I really did like this story. Pumpkor’s also always been one of my favorite characters to draw and write.
Still, in my latest edits to Story Chronicles, I have found myself having to cut this tale. It just no longer fits with the series’ pace. At the only point where the story would fit, I had to place another key moment in the plot.
I suppose that is just one of the tougher things for writers to do. Cut some of the stuff we have the most fun writing so that readers can have the best possible reading experience.
Maybe one day I could find a way to fit Pumpkor back into things. For now, I find it hard to tell where that chance would come.
The Crusader’s Two Halloweens
Let us continue with another one of my major literary projects.
Charlie the Crusader started at the fun little comics I drew alongside my writing. The series has gradually shifted from pure comedy into a more genuine fantasy adventure. Light-hearted moments still exist, but they are no longer the main focus.
The series’ Halloween specials were written for the old comedy comic format.
The first was a bit simple.
I made a whole collection of Charlie the Crusader Holiday comics. For Halloween, he simply went through a haunted house at the local shop. The Shopkeeper apparently had one every year.
The story was mainly an excuse to draw Charlie in some panels filled with Halloween imagery. I had him face a few ghosts and deal with floating furniture.
My second Charlie the Crusader Halloween special was something wild.
I actually wrote this one for a free write assignment in a high school creative writing class.
The story here started with a Halloween costume contest hosted by the Crusader Council. A strange guest in a ghost costume would win.
When time came for the winner’s face reveal, everyone saw he was a hopelessly ugly beast. Some parts of his body were massive while others were puny. He was made to be a mess.
Anyway, the broken-hearted brute would then cast a magic spell that turned the world of the comic into a written short story. That way, no one would be able to see him ever again.
After adventuring through a text-based world, Charlie would save the day by beating the beast and restoring his world’s pictures.
Looking back, this was actually one of the most fun stories to make during Charlie’s nonsensical days. It was also the first time I told a Charlie the Crusader story in writing rather than a comic. At least partially.
A Lost Story?
Now, here is something rare. Here we have a story which I lost. The tale has apparently existed only in memory for the past few years.
I remember writing an original Halloween story for school one year. I remember typing it in either fifth or sixth grade and turning it in.
The story should have been in one of my older computer folders called “School Stories.” But no. Nothing at all.
So, what was the story?
I called it “Globlins.”
I wanted to make some new kind of creepy creature. They would be a small goblin-like horde made of slime.
I imagined the globlins swarming people or merging into larger balls of slime and waves of sludge.
The story itself involved a guardian figure strengthening a seal containing the globlins. Most details about the actual creatures and their crimes came through flashbacks.
Looking back, this really could have been a good idea. A different take on talking about monsters. I honestly think I just lacked the skill back then to make the story work.
In fact, I think I may try taking on this story again. That would be the perfect grand finale for this month of Halloween.
Kotcher’s Call to Action
Halloween’s grand finale is here! I have reworked my old story “Globlins” and posted it in the cKotch.Com portfolio. Check it out here, if you dare.
Also, if you like my content and wish to see more, then you have a few options.
You could check out my book Good Stuff: 50 Poems from Youth on Amazon. Good Stuff is enrolled in the Kindle Matchbook program, so anyone who buys the paperback can also get the eBook for free.
You can also check my Essential Posts page for links to some of my greatest posts to the cKotch.Com blog.
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