Horror Stories, Star Wars and Inspiration

I’ve been working on re-editing a short story that I made a while ago called Shattered Glass. Now that I’m entering Short Story Competitions again, I’ve been focusing on re-editing short stories that I created previously. It’s been a good process, but sometimes I will get stuck too long on wanting to touch up a sentence and kill a lot of time doing so. Re-reading Shattered Glass is interesting because it’s one of a few horror stories that I’ve written, but I tend to lean more towards a Gothic horror than traditional horror.

I’m finishing up Shattered Glass, and I think that the story has improved quite a bit after the re-edit. I’m looking forward to re-editing more of these short stories and hoping that I’ll place in some of these competitions as well.

I also watched Solo: A Star Wars Story, and it was fun. It wasn’t particularly epic in scope like one would expect from Star Wars movies (no one’s trying to save the galaxy in this one), as it really did focus on the singular story of Han Solo. Ironically, my friends and I then watched some Akira Kurosawa films, Yojimbo and The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail, just a couple hours after watching Solo. If anyone knows Akira Kurosawa’s relationship with Star Wars, they’d know that a good amount of Star Wars is strongly inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress. 

As cliched as this sounds, but I really do feel that at this point, everything and everyone is inspiration for my stories. I’ll take a little from anime, Shakespeare, Dickens, movies, fairy tales, The Bible, Star Wars, Kurosawa, etc. Everyone has a different idea of how to go about things, or how to create a character or narrative.