In Love With the Ghosties by Jane Kindred

I have a thing for ghost stories. I love them. And I especially love them in October. I watch horror movies all month long, and the ghost stories are my favorites. I really miss the Ghosthunters series that used to be on the SyFy channel. (I understand it’s back on A&E, but I haven’t been able to catch it yet.) As silly as it was, I enjoyed virtually wandering those houses and buildings in the dark with the team to see what they might turn up. There are other paranormal reality shows, but I haven’t found any I like as much as Ghosthunters. The others all seem to rely on jump scares, creepy reenactments, and just plain shrieking. (Please. Stop the shrieking. If there was an actual ghost in the building, you idiots would be scaring it into permanent hiding.)

Last night’s ghostly selection was the movie Sinister, starring Ethan Hawke as a writer who moves his family into a “murder house” to write about the mysterious killing of its last inhabitants. And right away, you know that’s not going to go well. Did this author learn nothing from The Shining? It makes you wonder if writers are particularly vulnerable to the ghosties. I mean, maybe we’re downright haunted, as a group. From Edgar Allen Poe to Shirley Jackson to Stephen King, being haunted (especially while writing) is obviously something that’s on a lot of authors’ minds. I was thinking to myself as I watched it, though, that I would probably stay in a murder house if given the chance. (Because I clearly do not make good life choices and have no more sense than most classic horror movie characters.)

Personally, I have never been haunted—though I’ve felt a couple of unusual things that I couldn’t explain—but I’m fascinated by the concept of hauntings nonetheless. The protagonist of my current work in progress (an urban fantasy that is so far just flirting with being a paranormal romance) is a woman who can communicate with the dead—seeing visions of their deaths as she tries to solve a horrific crime. She also has a near-death experience that may have been “nearer” than she thinks and which may or may not have enhanced her natural ability to see through the veil between the living and the dead. This is about as close as I’ve come to writing a “ghost story.” I had one other character—Phoebe Carlisle in Waking the Serpent—who could hear the dead. But the paranormal abilities of both these characters is secondary to the relationships in the story and the crimes they’re trying to solve.

With as much time as I spend every autumn watching horror movies, though, I think I’m really going to have to write my own ghost story one of these days. I don’t know if it will actually be horror (because I love happy endings way too much to really fit the genre) or if I might write a character in a romance who somehow is a ghost—or maybe a ghost hunter? Hey, how about a ghost hunter who falls in love with a ghost? But since I tend to get a little carried away with research, like the time I lived in Russia for a month to get the flavor for my Anastasia-inspired Arhangel’sk books, I wouldn’t be surprised if I do end up staying in a murder house—or actually buying one (bad life choices, remember?)—at some point. Let’s hope it turns out better for me than it does for those hapless writers in the movies!

How about you? Would you ever buy a murder house or stay in one? Maybe if somebody offered you money? How much would it take?

The Business of Writing

It’s one o’clock in the morning and I’m taking a break from some writerly business to try to put this post together. A better person would simply write a post and schedule it in advance, but I am not that person. But as long as I’m still hip deep in it, I thought I’d talk about some of the nitty-gritty of being a writer that people don’t often see.

In my opinion, the synopsis is the worst part of writing. I loathe, loathe, loathe them. It’s not so bad coming up with a three-paragraph summary once the book is finished, but when you’re writing “on spec”—putting together a proposal for a publisher who’s interested in your next unwritten book—the synopsis must be highly detailed and several pages long and needs to cover every part of the plot, back story, and character development. Worse, you have to write this monstrous thing in advance. As a dedicated “pantser,” I don’t know what’s going to happen in a book until I write it, so writing a detailed synopsis about something I don’t know about—and don’t want to know about yet, because it tends to suck all the creativity out of the story and get me bogged down in a static idea—is extremely painful.

And it can also be physically painful. I’ve been at my standing desk for five hours tonight so far, after a full day at the office, working on a short synopsis and a couple of character descriptions, and the pinched nerve from a herniated disc in my neck is now at “excruciating” level. This particular synopsis, at least, is only five paragraphs long, but I had to distill it down from the ten-pager I’d originally written for the proposal. The short synopsis, character descriptions, and key scene descriptions are all part of a package for the publisher to put together an art briefing for cover design. This also involves scrolling through hundreds of story themes/tropes and settings to help build the metadata for the ebook version.

And then there are the titles. I start with a working title when I’m first drafting a book then come up with a better one for submission to the publisher. But the publisher will often have other books with similar titles or knows that certain words don’t really grab readers as well as others, so they’ll ask for a list of alternatives after rejecting a proposed title. That’s when I pop out my handy-dandy thesaurus and start a game of word association with all of the key themes in the book—then try to fit some of those words into an existing title format if I happen to be working on a series. (My current series uses what I call “Verbing the Noun”: Waking the Serpent, Bewitching the Dragon, and the new one whose proposed title was Redeeming the Wraith but which is now in the “alternatives” stage with the noun being Viking.

So that’s my “night in the life,” just a little glimpse into the behind-the-scenes of the business of writing.

Sounds glamorous, right? ;)

The Things That Get Us Through the Year by Jane Kindred

It’s that little souvenir, of a terrible year
Which makes my eyes feel sore
And who ever would've thought, the books that you brought
Were all I loved you for
 — The Sundays, “Here’s Where the Story Ends”

Normally, I’m all about the holiday spirit this time of year. I’m an atheist with pagan leanings, and I adore all things Yuletide. This year, however, putting up the tree was an act of faith—as it is every year—that after the darkness, the light will return. But this symbolism has never resonated with me quite so much as it does right now, at the end of this terrible year, in which “to 2016” has become an insidious verb.

The unexpected death of David Bowie on January 10 hit me hard, and then my personal year got off to a rocky start with the announcement that my publisher was closing its doors. In addition to uncertainty about the fate of my current titles, it meant the cancellation of a book whose characters I'd grown deeply attached to. That loss, coupled with some reviews that shook my faith in my writing, plunged me into a deep depression.

Then, in April, Prince’s tragic death hit me even harder than Bowie’s had. Both were major influences on me growing up, helping me to take pride in being different, accepting that who I was didn’t have to be who I’d been raised to be. But Prince had helped me define my individuality in countless ways, letting me take the first baby steps away from my fundamentalist Evangelical upbringing when I wasn’t quite ready to let go of my beliefs even though they no longer rang true. The loss of that icon—and that music that had been the soundtrack of my teenage years—made me feel like a little bit of my youth had been irrevocably lost as well.

And then 2016 continued to unrelentingly “2016” on a global scale.

But there has been a little light among all the darkness. In April, the first two books of my Sisters in Sin series sold to Harlequin Nocturne. And it’s those little glimmers of light that keep writers going when the world seems to be turning against them. Writing is what carries us out of the darkness.

The first book in the series, Waking the Serpent, was released yesterday, and the second, Bewitching the Dragon, comes out in May. I started writing Bewitching right after Prince’s death, and the first draft of that book included my main character reflecting on how his music had given her strength as a young woman. Like me, she had struggled to reconcile the beliefs of her youth with her changing views as she came of age. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Book 1 is about Phoebe, the sister who embraced her magic and never looked back, and Rafe, the living embodiment of Quetzalcoatl.

If you like magic—and hot dragon shifters—with a healthy dose of sin, perhaps the Sisters will do for you what they did for me and help you get through these dark times.

Waking the Serpent is available now in ebook and mass market paperback at the following retailers:

Amazon.com
ARe
Barnes & Noble
BookDepository.co
BAM
Booktopia
iBooks
Kobo