BLOG | author-blog

Mar 25, 2018
3 min

A healthy respect for spiders

It's a funny thing how life works sometimes. Not too long ago (keep in mind, I still think the 90s were "just a few years ago"), I wrote a blog about how I hated and feared spiders. I killed spiders left and right anywhere and anytime I saw them around. I especially enjoyed spraying them with things so that I could see them crawling around before dying. Yeah, I was a spider serial killer. Then I started working for, of all things, a pest control company. Yeah, my day job invo

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Bryan W. Alaspa

Feb 27, 2018
4 min

The journey to S.P.I.D.A.R.

One of the questions I as an author get asked a lot is - where do you get your story ideas? I have talked about my latest horror book S.P.I.D.A.R. and how it came to be, but there are some deeper things that happened along the way. I mean, spiders are scary all on their own, but why create a bunch of fictional half-robot/half-spider creatures that do the horrifying things they do to people like in this story? I have personally been afraid of spider for a long time. However, i

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Bryan W. Alaspa

Feb 26, 2018
3 min

Audiobooks: Listening to the horror

The first time I listened to an audiobook it was way back in the late 80s when my family and I were about to hit the road for a long roadtrip. It was a huge box of cassette tapes to listen to on my Walkman of Stephen King reading The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger. As a fan of King, I had heard of this novel, but knew it had only been released in a limited release and this was the first time I had seen it made available in any format to the public. Riding in the car across the mo

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Bryan W. Alaspa

Feb 22, 2018
3 min

The Real Life Whittier Alaska

For my new novel, S.P.I.D.A.R., I decided it would be fun to set it in a place cut off from the rest of the world. A place where it would almost be feasible that the actions taking place within the novel could happen. That meant creating a place totally cut off - perhaps one where pretty much the entire population lived in one very large building. Well, for inspiration, I turned to the real-life town of Whittier, Alaska, then named my own fictional version after it and filled

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Bryan W. Alaspa

Feb 21, 2018
3 min

Spider Facts: the Black Widow

There are few spiders in the world with a more fearsome, and undeserved, reputation than the black widow spider. They are just the epitome of "evil" to a lot of people. They are a shiny black with the bright red hourglass markings. They are notorious for being deadly poisonous and for eating their mates - giving rise to the idea of wives who kill their husbands being labeled "black widows." There was even a movie out in the 80s with that as a title about a vicious woman who d

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Scary Insects: The emerald cockroach wasp

Bryan W. Alaspa

Feb 19, 2018
3 min

Scary Insects: The emerald cockroach wasp

The world of insects... so much to truly be afraid of. Of course, most of it is at a very small level and most of the time you, as a full-fledged human being, do not need to worry about little wasps like the one above: the Emerald Cockroach Wasp or jewel wasp. Look at it. It's beautiful, and it's relatively small, and it poses virtually no threat to people unless a person were to grab it and hold it. If you're a cockroach, though, you would find the emerald cockroach wasp the

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Bryan W. Alaspa

Feb 16, 2018
3 min

Spider Facts: the Brown Recluse Spider

For the most part, we are pretty lucky here in North America when it comes to spiders. If you live in Central or South America or some of the warmer or more tropical climates (or Australia - so many deadly things live there it's almost unfair) you may have poisonous spiders, ants, centipedes or giant spiders or other insects. However, in the U.S. and North America there are few spiders to fear - but there are a couple. One of the most infamous is the Brown Recluse Spider The

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Bryan W. Alaspa

Feb 14, 2018
3 min

Insect Facts: the Tarantula Hawk Wasp

As I have mentioned, the world of insects is far, far more terrifying than anything I could write. It is a brutal world where almost all of the tropes of the horror genre are visible. There are parasites and parasitic wasps that can take control of a host and cause them to do what they want - turning them into zombies. There are insects that implant eggs into a host only for the young to hatch and eat their way out- bursting out of the hose like something from a movie. Then t

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Bryan W. Alaspa

Feb 13, 2018
3 min

Zombie insects

The world of insects is a generally terrifying place. As the Jeff Goldblum character in The Fly says - it is a basic and brutal place. This is true. There may be debate these days as to whether or not insects or other animals have any kind of emotion, but the fact is most insect species have set orders and duties for each member of the colony or nest to do. They attack other insects for food, raid nests, kill opposing nests and defend nests with a sort of insane brutality. So

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Spider facts: the deadliest spider in the world

Bryan W. Alaspa

Feb 12, 2018
3 min

Spider facts: the deadliest spider in the world

People have been afraid of spiders for a long time. The term of fear of spiders is known as arachnophobia. Of course, a phobia itself is known as an "irrational fear of something." I myself have suffered from arachnophobia and also suffer from astraphobia (fear of thunderstorms). For the most part, the terrifying attributes of spiders is very overblown. If you think about it, it makes sense. The vast majority of spiders are small and all they want to do is be left alone to se

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How my day job helped me write S.P.I.D.A.R.

Bryan W. Alaspa

Jan 31, 2018
3 min

How my day job helped me write S.P.I.D.A.R.

One of the things I have written about before is that I am a 'working' writer. This doesn't mean I make a living just writing my books. It means I write for a living and, in my case, this means writing blogs, website content and marketing materials. You may have thought I spent my days coming up with the demented stories I put out, but instead I spend my days writing blog articles to generate leads and writing high-SEO content for websites for a large international corporatio

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Bryan W. Alaspa

Jan 17, 2018
11 min

Read an Excerpt from: S.P.I.D.A.R.

My upcoming horror novel S.P.I.D.A.R. is one that will scare you. I tried hard to scare you. It is my first true, straight-up horror novel in a while and it deals with something that a vast majority of the world finds scarier than death. Spiders. The town of Whittier is isolated in Alaska and the people all live within towers once used by the military. The tourist season is over. Winter is coming. Then a body washes up on shore. A body that says it's from the government facil

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Bryan W. Alaspa

Jan 15, 2018
3 min

Eight Legs of Terror Comes Feb. 23!

Hello there! So, I finally got word back from the publisher about when my terrifying new novel, S.P.I.D.A.R., will be coming out. Originally, I had been told the novel would be coming out in all formats on January 8, but that didn't happen. I am guessing it had to do with the audiobook. Having produced a few audiobooks, I can tell you, it's always the audiobook. I have been told that the new target date is Friday, February 23, 2018. That is the day a new definition of terror

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Book Trailer for S.P.I.D.A.R. - coming January 2018!

Thriller Author Bryan Alaspa Signs Publishing Deal with Beacon Publishing Group

Bryan W. Alaspa

Jul 24, 2017
2 min

Thriller Author Bryan Alaspa Signs Publishing Deal with Beacon Publishing Group

New Horror Novel S.P.I.D.A.R. to be released in 2017! Chicago, IL - Horror and thriller author Bryan W. Alaspa has announced that he has signed a publishing deal with Beacon Publishing Group to publish a terrifying new novel: S.P.I.D.A.R. This is the first time Mr. Alaspa has signed with Beacon and the plan is for the novel to be released in print, ebook and audiobook formats in 2017. “I am honored to be published by a company that has also done releases for horror legend Cli

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BRYAN W. ALASPA