It's that time of year again - my favorite time. Halloween Time!!!
Every since I was just a little writer, I loved Halloween. The entire fall thing, with the leaves all bright colors, the scent of them burning on the air, excitement over costumes and dreams of the veil between worlds growing thin.
Oddly, enough I'm not one to write many ghost stories, even though I love them - both watching them in movie form and reading them in novels. There is just something so poignant and lovely about spirits who can't move on due to some horrible tragedy that befalls them. Which makes it odd that I've taken on the task of writing a modern Gothic complete with several tortured souls. I'm close to finishing this opus of ethereal proportions, but wouldn't you know it...one of my soul sisters on Romance Divas mentioned one of my secondary characters in the book as being too yummy for words. "Will he get his own book?" - Oh, jeez! Did she have to ask that question? As soon as it was out in the atmosphere storylines and plot points starting flying around my office like ectoplasmic thought balloons, wafting skyward.
So, now I have the rough beginning of a second ghost story. They're cropping up like skeletons in a graveyard. However, I needed this one to be different. One ghost story if written in a series shouldn't be in the same vein as the first - right? I'm only saying that because I try to make books in series different no matter the genre. Why should ghosts be any different.
Which brings me to another point - types of haunting. There are so many different classifications and areas of hauntings that the way in which an author can present the spectral visitations is as vast as the afterlife itself. This really left the field wide open when considering the second book in my ghost duo. I really want to go in the opposite direction. The trick is to make an unconventional haunting real and believable to a reader who may not know how many different kinds there are. To accomplish this, I've decided to tie the haunting to an item rather than a place. I'm just hoping that in my quest to make something original or different, I don't stumble across a plot that tired or been used to death - no pun intended.
Happy Hauntings!
-Kat
3 comments:
There's something in the air this year that almost demands we defy our own writerly expectations. But that's a good thing. :D
There's a school of folklore scholarship which suggests almost all our various preternatural beings--from saints to fairies to vampires--were originally either the spirits of the departed or ways to explain their seemingly insconsistent behavior. (We're such a simple-minded species. If we call something a dog, we insist it bark all the time. Yodeling is not allowed, for example.)
A haunted object sounds like a fun way to go. Haunted people too.
Heck, that's a lot of "almosts"! Guess I really do need a bigger writing space to check myself. LOL
Hugs and grins,
Both sound very ionteresting
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