Hello!

I hope everyone is doing great this holiday season. We’re rapidly approaching the end of the year, and during my admittedly small amount of free time, I’ve been looking back on how things have gone in 2022. While I’ve mostly been happy with it, I’m going to being making some changes in hopes of making 2023 a smoother year for content.

One of my biggest headaches this year, and I’m sure that other content creators dealing in written content will understand this, was my content being taken and used without permission. This is especially true when it comes to YouTube content creators.

Over the past two months alone, I’ve had to file over fifty copyright claims through YouTube. The annual number is through the roof. I absolutely hate making these claims. It’s time-consuming, it requires constant searching through videos, and, frankly, I don’t like affecting other content creators negatively even if they’re using my content without permission. Unfortunately, it’s the only way to protect my copyrights and honor my agreements with content creators who have actually contacted me about using my stories.

The majority of these issues are coming from people taking content from CreepyPasta.com when I post stories there. Because of this, I will no longer be regularly posting on that site. Sure, I’ll probably put up a story here and there for the fun of it, but I will no longer be making regular postings on that site.

Instead, I’ll be putting all of my original content on my site (timothysprague.com). This was the first thing that I wanted to inform everyone about, because if you’re looking for new content from me, it’s going to all be centralized here instead of on other sites.

I’m also going to be changing the content that I produce. I enjoy writing horror short stories, and I will continue to do so, but I’m going to be focusing a lot of content specifically for audio narration. I’ve done a lot of research over the past year, listening to a lot of horror podcasts and YouTube narrations, and I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of the content is lacking.

This isn’t due to the narrators themselves. There are some truly fantastic ones out there, and I’ve had the pleasure of working with many of them. The lacking content is due to the material being narrated.

You can have the absolute best short story, one that is critically acclaimed and breaks all viewing records, but it can absolutely suck when it’s narrated for a YouTube video. This is because of the difference in types of media. A large number of written stories don’t translate well into spoken form. They loose a lot of what makes them special.

I’m going to be doing a lot of content creation that is specifically designed for audio narration. Scripts, stories that allow for creative choices by the audio narrator, things that take advantage of audio cues, etc. In my opinion the entirety of horror narration can be elevated by better synergy between the writer and the narrator, and that’s what I’m hoping to achieve. It’s certainly what I’m going to work towards.

I’ve always offered custom content to creators, and I’ll continue to offer that as well. The only change to that is I’m going to be more detailed in my questions to tailor the project even more towards the content creator’s wants.

Long story short: if you enjoy my content, or want to use it in the future, my website is the place to find it. Just shoot me over a message through the contact form if don’t already have my email address if there’s anything that you’d like to use.

Thank you, and have a great rest of the year!