Hello to you, brave creators. How are you doing? Here in London we’ve just had the hottest day ever recorded, and watching all the wildfires breaking out made me remember summers back home in Australia. There’s nothing quite like the smell of smoke on the horizon to yank you back to previous lives.

So I’ve been doing a lot of staying inside, sitting right in front of a fan (no aircon here!), and trying to make sure the bunny survives the heat. She did so well; as the weather broke last night, I sat with her watching my guilty pleasure TV (ahem, Supernatural) and pretended all was ok with the world.

A few days earlier, as the heat cranked up, I spent time on Zoom running some workshops on the art of the drabble. I find the teeny tiny stories are such a great way to hone my craft, to learn to make the hard edits, to spark creativity and curiosity. So, I brought that curiosity to my writing community at the London Writers’ Salon. I had more than 30 writers sit with me to examine some published drabbles (a few from this very publication, of course!), and to then work from visual prompts to create our own. Not everyone went dark – we even had some erotica! – but those that did have been encouraged to submit to Trembling With Fear. 

You see, we have a never-ending hunger for drabbles and short stories, and I’d personally love to see what you all have in you, deep down in that dark place you don’t like to show too often. Tap into it. Let it all spill out. Then let me see the proceeds… <insert evil laugh>

Let’s take a look at those who have come before: This week’s short story sees Eric Fomley take us to the trees and the revolution with a tale of friendship gone awry.

For the quick bites, we have three delicious offerings:

• Emma E Murray’s Postpartum is simply heartbreaking
• Cursed Heart by Don Money warns us to treat our elders well, and
• Luminous Darkness by Catherine Berry will have you checking the dark corners twice

Over to you, Stuart….

FIRST – A quick note from one of our TWF editors, Amanda Headlee: Who wants summer to last longer? We do at the Horror Tree! This year, we’ve extended our Summer Specials submission period by an extra month so that we can collect even more hellishly hot and campfire creepy stories. Send us your tales of horror about backpacking, road trips, glamping, beach adventures, summer camp… anything summer-related goes! You may even want to write a drabble as a summer vacation postcard as a “wish you were here” [insert evil grin].

The submission window is open until August 31st to submit drabbles of 100 words and short stories up to 2500 words. 

I am on a quick vacation this week! Visiting a friend who I used to visit yearly and *waves hand in the air* it’s been a couple of years. So this one will be short and sweet. Not much in the way of updates, more in the way of reminders.

Just a reminder: the new editions of ‘Trembling With Fear Year 5‘ And ‘More Tales From The Tree 4‘ are both fully available at this time. Also, last month we lost 3 Patreons recently. Thankfully, one new one has stepped up to really help out! We’re still behind, though, thankfully, are much closer to where we were at. I will say that, if you’ve been thinking about becoming a Patreon, now would be the perfect time!

As mentioned the last couple of weeks, we’re a bit low on drabbles at the moment so if you have 100 words of speculative fiction that you’d like to send our way, we’re very open to it! 🙂

We’re under ***5*** subscribers away from hitting our current goal for the Horror Tree’s YouTube channel at the time of writing this! Once we hit 500, I promise that I’ll stop plugging it for at least a month! 😉

For those looking to support the site, we’ve recently launched a Ko-Fi and always have our Patreon going.

As always, I hope you had a great weekend.