Head in a bucket

I'm working on a short story right now. It's a ghost story, coming out of an assignment about peace from my writing workshop this week. I'm not sure how that happened,but it did. I've written several stories this week, and I was inordinately proud of my ghost story, but then Alberta told me it was only eerie, not scary. Damn it.

I told her I had been going for spine-chilling, and she attempted to make me feel better by saying it was "faintly ominous." Whatever.

So while Alberta's been painting the Planter's Peanut Moon, I've been trying make my ghost story scarier, what Alberta and I call more "head in a bucket." Any time we can't find a serial killer show on tv that's grisly enough, we say it needs "more head in a bucket." It may have come from Cold Case Files; some girl called the police because on their date, her boyfriend kept reaching into the back seat and fiddling with something in a bucket, which turned out to be...well, you can figure it out.

So in my story I made the grandfather hang himself and the little girl find him dangling above the sideboard. Is that head in a bucket enough, Alberta? You remind me of Christopher Walken on Saturday Night Live, yelling, "More cowbell!"

When I finish it, I'll put it on the itmustbemice blog. But I have to run. My goal is to mail off two other stories to literary contests this week, and it appears to be Friday already. Keep your heads up and out of buckets. Ciao!
Ava