Do You Believe in Ghosts?

By Erin Kellison

To prepare for this blog post I took a very informal and non-scientific poll on Facebook with

Erin

that very question. I had about seventy responses, the overwhelming answer being yes. Many people posted that they’d had a personal experience witnessing a ghost. A handful said that they didn’t know if they believed. And a few gave me an outright, “No.”

My husband is an emphatic non-believer, but then he doesn’t like to encourage my overactive imagination. Our conversation goes like this:

“Do you bel—?”

“No.”

“But—?”

“No.”

One of my friends (via text) said yes, and another said no, then rephrased, not the Scooby-do kind. I texted a couple of my sisters and they both referenced a haunted house my family lived in when I was a baby. Apparently one of my sisters got so scared while babysitting that she left the house. (I hope she took me with her.) That haunted house is part of our family lore, which makes me all kinds of happy. I love lore.

On numerous occasions I’ve been scared breathless by a shadow in my peripheral vision, but whether a ghost was present or not, I have no idea. I’ve been scared in the dark, of the dark, of things in the dark. And I write dark stories because my imagination is obsessed with the more frightening aspects of the What if? question.

But I can’t say, “Yes, ghosts exist.” I can say, “I believe everything.”

I don’t even know if I want to know the answer. The What if? is pretty compelling as it is, and it gives me all sorts of license to do what I want with the possibility. I particularly don’t like the “THIS is the way it is” kind of answers; I’ll do the opposite on purpose because I’m cranky that way.

It’s the possibility that is so intriguing to me as a writer. When I look into a night-darkened corner of a bedroom, I’m thrilled—in both good and bad ways—by what may be lurking within. And since I have a decidedly romantic bent to my nature, the entity hidden in darkness may be frightening or seductive…or both at the same time. Thrilling, I tell you.

In the smallest hours of the night, when the house is sighing in its sleep and I’m at my vigil, covers up to my chin as I contemplate the blackest shifts of shadow…yes, I most definitely believe in ghosts. And if I get a little too scared (happens all the time), my husband will throw an arm over me, as heavy as his “No (there are no ghosts),” and I can go to sleep. That’s romance.

Do you believe in ghosts?

Bio: Erin Kellison is the award-winning author of the Shadow series, the Shadow Touch novella series, and the Shadow Kissed series, all of which share the same world, where dark fantasy meets modern fairy tale. RT calls her latest, Soul Kissed, “a dark fairy tale with a twist, perfect for readers who love passion with their fantasy.”

You can find Erin at:

Website: www.ErinKellison.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/erinkellisonauthor

Twitter: www.twitter.com/ekellison

Goodreads: www.Goodreads.com/ErinKellison

 

 

 

 

Cross-genre all the way

I’m in the middle of a blog tour right now for my September release, Shadowman, and one of the questions I’ve been asked more than once is what subgenre my Shadow series belongs in. Where should bookstores shelve me? So far I have found my books in romance, fantasy/sci-fi, and horror. One blogger named me paranormal romantic suspense, others refer to me as urban fantasy, and still others paranormal romance. All good, particularly if it helps me to reach new readers. I call myself dark fantasy romance and I want to be shelved where readers will find me.


And there’s the rub. The flip side of defying categorization is that people might not be able to find you. Case in point: Last night I went to my local B&N and discovered that the first in my series, Shadow Bound, was still shelved in Fantasy/Sci-fi, while Shadowman, book three, the same series, was happily face-out in Romance (and had diminished in number since my last visit--yay!). I’m with a new publisher now and I support my new placement in Romance--I think more readers will be apt to pick me up--but I had to squeeze my eyes shut for a moment at the insanity. I know I’m not the first author to experience this, and I also know that readers are super savvy people, who know what they like and can figure out just fine where to get it (if they have time and patience at the given moment to do so). Nevertheless, I’d sure love to make that process a little easier.

Online is a whole different world. With a click, an entire author’s list can come up. With tagging you can help identify your book. And bloggers embrace cross-genre authors; no need to walk across the store. It seems each day that more applications or features are being created to make information more accessible (My husband is a programmer). Problem is, there are so many books in cyberspace that it’s hard to stand out. Sometime it feels impersonal, and for me, books are very personal. Which takes me back to the bookstore and the kind of browsing I grew up on.

So I guess you can see how cross-genre, for me, has also become a bit of a cross-delivery kind of idea. I love my kindle (I’m on my second one), but I still have a fantasy of owning a bookstore (and reading my stock all day). I’ve mentioned a few conflicts in my cross-genre publishing experience, but let me just say that I view them as opportunities. I’m in two places at my B&N bookstore, doubling my chances for discovery. And online, there might be a lot of books out there, but I’ve got my husband in my corner making me cool stuff to help me stand out. (Check out my Segue site for his latest handiwork: www.SegueInstitute.com). We’ll see what the future holds. I’m excited.

My partner in crime

I am very fortunate to have a fantastic support system in my husband. Writing is such a solitary (and in my case, slightly neurotic) enterprise, that having someone who understands is by far the greatest resource a writer can have. My husband is my hero. The day before I had my second kid, he surprised me with a laptop because he wanted me to know that he knew how important my writing was to me. He’s my first reader—getting all the rough stuff. And he’s my last reader—helping me going over the page proofs to spot any last mistakes.

He is a good sport about listening to all of my plot ideas and character arcs, which occasionally dominate my conversation. Most other people go glassy-eyed, but he manages to keep his eyes focused. I laugh when he starts to sway on his feet.

But that’s not all. He’s a programmer by day, and so web stuff is a cinch for him. And so yeah, he does a lot of that stuff too—my Erin Kellison website and a spinoff site for my series, the Segue website.

And so for this month’s topic on the writer’s life, I’d like to say thank you to him one more time. Love you, honey. I couldn’t do this without you.

Shutting up your internal editor

I've wanted to write books since I was in grade school. I asked for a typewriter for Christmas when I was in the fourth grade and attempted my first novel in the sixth. I've started many books over the years and for a very long time never finished one. I've got files on saved disks going back four computers full of unfinished manuscripts, stories I butchered during excessive revision. I remember once deleting everything except one sentence, what I now know to call a darling, when that should have gone and the rest stayed. I started novels and then discarded them in favor of other ideas that I thought I had a better chance at completing. Of course, I never did. When I think of those stories and the underlying concepts, I still get excited. They were fun ideas. Why couldn't I finish?

Because I didn’t know how to let go and move on. I didn’t know how to assimilate the critiques of my peers while protecting my voice, then make changes and… move on to the next chapter.

Moving on with a story is a difficult thing to learn. And I've discovered it's something I have to learn over and over again. There is one section in my last book that is infamous in my critique group. I know other writers who get mired in doubts, from relatively isolated issues (maybe I should start this chapter in another point of view) to major issues (structural, character changes, or the very worst—abandoning the book altogether).

This is not a new topic in the writing community; it's written about often. Many refer to it as Shutting Up Your Internal Editor.

Well, that's easier said than done. And for many writers, it feels impossible. This blog is for those writers. I am here to tell them how I figured it out (which may or may not work for everyone, but I hope will help someone). For me, it’s a little like riding a bike. Once you get the hang of it, you might occasionally lose your balance, but you never forget what it feels like, so you can get started again.

Flash challenges.

Roughly five years ago, I joined an online speculative fiction writing community called Liberty Hall. I don't know if they are still up and running since I haven’t gotten a return message from them. I hope they are. LH was awesome. They had a weekly timed flash challenge. Writers logged in, were given a prompt, and then had one hour to complete a story and submit it. I committed myself to this weekly challenge. The psychology worked for me—if I turned in something awful, so what? I could give myself the excuse that I only had an hour to write it. And let me tell you, my first flash challenges were stinkers. Each flash story was put into a group and was critiqued by the other writers over the course of a week. I sighed over the awesome ones, took my lumps on my submission, and then… started all over again the next week. LH, and me with it, moved on to a new flash prompt, a new story.

I didn’t rework and mangle the thing I had written until I abandoned the idea in favor of a “better” one. I let it go and learned what it felt like to do so. Eventually I had some decent stories. And I even started getting a little recognition (people could vote for things like best characterization). Soon I couldn’t wait to do the flash challenges. I had allowed myself to suck (and I did suck), and then I wasn’t so bad, and once in a while, I did something cool.

I now apply that same psychology to my daily word count. I make it as good as I can, take (and am grateful for) my critiques, and then I move on to the next chapter. Only occasionally do I stop to completely rework until the page bleeds (I see my critique partners nodding)—but I aim to move on. And when I have more of the story to work with, suddenly those localized issues become much clearer. Five years ago I couldn’t get past chapter three. Flash forward and Shadowman, the third book in my Shadow series, releases this September from Kensington Zebra.

What if?

I really like that question. That one, and its cousin, Why Not? But I’ll save the latter for another post.

I ask What If? all the time—mostly for fun and occasionally to scare myself. (Okay my husband would shake his head here and say that I scare the crap out of myself way too often with my What Ifs?)

What if, at any moment, a weapon or a natural catastrophe thrusts us all into a post-apocalyptic world? What if creatures from our nightmares can follow us into the waking world? What if dark, intelligent beings exist on just the other side of the shadows? (And what if they were hot? Yeah!)

Erin Kellison here

I’ve wanted to be a writer all my life. I asked for a typewriter for Christmas in the fourth grade and I started my first novel in the sixth—never completed, but I still get a kick out of those pages. I got an English Lit degree and went on for a masters focusing on oral story-telling. But what I really wanted to do was tell my own. With the support of my family, I was able to realize that dream, and frankly, I’m hooked.

My Shadow series has a very dark, modern take on fairy tales and mythology. I’m working on the fourth book right now.