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Tag: paranormal

May the Best Ghost Win

Four Teams. Thirteen hours. One very haunted house. Team GargoyleAnton Berg doesn’t believe in ghosts, so why is he in a ghosthunting contest? Because Lammie, that’s why. Anton’s best friend since the first grade, Lammie has a knack for finding things, especially trouble. And even without ghosts, running around a two-hundred-year-old house in the dark holds plenty of real dangers. Anton can’t let Lammie go alone. Team Flower PowerQuonzhenay is a librarian. Penny has a big stick. They’re on a mission to win a bet. Team WitchRavyn Wyng Starcrossed didn’t want to come, but her Tarot cards told her to. The Four HorsemenIt started as a prank. Now four members of the Fulsom College football team’s starting lineup are spending Halloween in a haunted house, and Blake would prefer to be left behind, please. Unfortunately for all of them, ghosts do exist, the haunted house is much more than an abandoned Gilded Age mansion, and a dark power has Lammie in its sights. When the night of spooky fun turns terrifying, escape is cut off. The teams unite with one goal–survive until dawn. The ghosts may be the least of their problems.

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May the Best Ghost Win–Sneak Peek

May the Best Ghost Win will be available for purchase on October 31st–naturally. From the tiny town where signs proclaimed, “Last Gas No Kidding” and “Ice-Cold Pop” to the top of the mountain where a dark destination waited, a narrow road snaked through wilderness. On one side of the mountain, the last rays of evening turned the world pink with alpine glow. On the other side, in the only moving car in twenty-five miles, Anton Berg drove alone except for his best friend who Anton thought was only pretending to sleep in the passenger seat. It was October thirty-first. Outside the car, dim headlights picked out gnarled black-limbed trees huddled close to the narrow, twisting road. Inside, the dash lights cast a green tone over Anton’s hands on the wheel and limned the edges of Lammie’s shape where he had curled into a ball, face pressed into the passenger seat. Hell, maybe he was asleep now. It’d been hours since he’d moved. Anton pondered what besides sleep could keep Lammie quiet and decided he didn’t actually care. Quiet was good. Quiet was what he wanted. Just get the trip over and— Static spat from the radio, finally overwhelming the DJ entirely. Anton jabbed the button to turn it off. Now he didn’t even have bad music to keep him awake. Silence filled the car, only enhanced by the rattles of the canvas top in the wind, the creaking of the woods around the car, and the soft sounds of the…

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Haunted Inspiration

On the farm where I grew up, we had a haunted barn. It looked sort of like this one. My mom didn’t like to talk about it, and she never told the stories when she knew we kids were around, but I heard them. It wasn’t “and then I saw a pale figure dragging chains” or “Get out!” or anything. It was the night she was milking the cows, and a hand reached in through the gap of the door to lift the hook from the eye-bolt, but it couldn’t reach far enough. The arm was clad in plaid flannel like my dad always wore, so my mom said “Hold on, honey, I’ll get it,” but when she opened the door no one was there. Later she learned my dad hadn’t been in the barn at all. It was putting a horse in a straight stall with the tie clipped to his halter, and finding him the next morning reversed in the stall (butt to the manger) with the tie wrapped around his leg. It was hearing footsteps walking down the aisle between the hay mows upstairs, and knowing the wagon was parked there and no one could be walking across that floor. And then getting the dog for company because she was spooked but she had to finish the chores—and the dog wouldn’t go into the barn. It was trying to bring the horses in from pasture on a wet and windy fall night, and they wouldn’t come near…

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Achievement Unlocked

My first job in Arizona was at a day-care center. For years afterwards (and still sometimes, for reasons) I would tell people, “I can handle eight one-year-olds for eight hours alone. I can do anything.” Yes, it was a constant round of diaper checks (every child had to be checked every hour, and changed if needed which they usually did need) but I kept eight one-year-olds happy and healthy for eight hours a day and that is a confidence builder right there. When I worked at Taco Bell, my brag was that I could make a six-pack of tacos, from taking the first shell to closing the box, in twenty-six seconds. And it would be right. Some people over-packed the meat, or under-packed the cheese, but my tacos would be exactly the way the company wanted them made. And I’d do it in twenty-six seconds despite the fact that I couldn’t get all six shells in one hand like some of the “steamers” I worked with. Two was the best I could do, and still move fast. Outside of Taco Bell, that’s not really a very useful brag, though. I stuck with the “eight one-year-olds” bit in other places. Then my dear friend moved from Ohio to Arizona, and I drove her truck. “I drove a seventeen-foot truck from Ohio to Arizona by way of shudder Oklahoma,” I would say. “I can handle this!” For whatever value “this” was. By the way, that’s a seventeen-foot bed. The truck is twenty-three…

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Whiff of Death, Manuscript Style

Last week I had a Moment. It was more than a moment long. I fell into despair. I’ve been working on this book for a year. It has been, as most anyone would agree, one hell of a year, and I’ve been trying to write this book the whole time. And I, in that very long moment, hated it. I never wanted to look at it again. Everything was wrong, it was all wrong, it was trash and it would never be anything but trash. The characters were boring, the plot was stupid, and I can’t write anyway. I suck. But I’ve been there before. When writers advise other writers to “finish something, no matter what” this is part of why. I’ve finished a number of books at this point, and I know now that every book I write has that moment. Also, it’s not just me! Many authors know that awful moment. I’ve talked friends through it more than once. Neil Gaiman wrote about it. The last novel I wrote (it was ANANSI BOYS, in case you were wondering) when I got three-quarters of the way through I called my agent. I told her how stupid I felt writing something no-one would ever want to read, how thin the characters were, how pointless the plot. I strongly suggested that I was ready to abandon this book and write something else instead, or perhaps I could abandon the book and take up a new life as a landscape gardener, bank-robber,…

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