Category Archives: Hauntings

Here are the latest fruits of my labor

01 Monday Sep 2014

Posted by in e-books, Ghosts, Hauntings, Wisdom Court

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9781614176459                        9781614176473

Edge of the Shadow, Wisdom Court Book One http://amzn.to/1tCmzcj and A Signal Shown, Wisdom Court Book Two, http://amzn.to/VKSbAc are available in ebook form at Amazon.com.

B&N Nook  has paperback editions of both:  http://bit.ly/1ouI35u for Edge of the Shadow, and http://bit.ly/1lBUn9v for A Signal Shown. The Nook ebook editions of both are available, http://bit.ly/1tUB5Ns for Book One, http://bit.ly/1x2KoyA for Book Two.

The rollout will continue over the next few weeks, and will include Kobo, iBooks, and others.

I’ve been working on publicizing the books, promoting wherever I can think to do so. There’s always a lot of work generated when books are launched. And, I’m writing Wisdom Court Book Three, All in Bad Time, which will be launched in the spring of 2015.

I’m thrilled and happy that the characters of Wisdom Court, who have populated my brain for a long time, are now free to mingle with readers. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have and continue to do.

Happy Labor Day!

Wisdom Court and Halloween

09 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by in Ghosts, Hallowe'en, Haunted Denver, Hauntings

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from the El Paso County website

One of my inspirations in writing the Wisdom Court books is an ongoing fascination with hauntings. I’ve long loved spooky stories about strange sounds and cold mists, about encounters with spirits who do not rest. I’ve scared myself silly with ghost movies, and I’ve been forced to look under the bed before I can go to sleep.

I live in Denver, a city with many haunted sites, one of the most notorious being Cheesman Park, not far from my home. It’s a beautiful expanse of grass and trees, and at the  top of a rise there’s a pavilion overlooking Capitol Hill and the Rocky Mountains. By the appearance of the park, and the wide array of people who enjoy it, you’d never know it was once the site of Mount Prospect Cemetery. Moreover, you’d never dream there are bodies under the grass, and, according to some, their spirits walk.  On a cloudy evening it’s not hard to discern lower spots in the grass where bones may still lie. Several were discovered during repairs made to the sprinkler system a few years ago. Some of the homes near the park are reportedly haunted by the spirits whose graves were disturbed. Below is a link to the history of Cheesman Park and its sad history.

Happy Halloween.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheesman_Park,_Denver

Picture credit: cheesmanpark.net

Book Beginnings: Plot threads, part one

12 Thursday Sep 2013

Posted by in e-books, Ghosts, Hauntings, Uncategorized, Writing

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997995-097For me a book begins with a kernel of an idea I need to explore.  My soon-to-be published e-book, Edge of the Shadow, sparked into life when I read an article about the MacArthur Awards, the genius grants.  Six accomplished individuals had been chosen to receive a healthy chunk of money, though I don’t remember exactly how much.  A hundred thousand? Two hundred thousand?  Whatever.  Point was, these people had been writing, creating, researching things the MacArthur Foundation considered interesting and worthy of encouragement.  No strings attached, no required reports of how the money was used, the foundation just gave them money.  I loved that idea.

Because I tend to write books with female protagonists, I thought how cool it would be to award similar grants to six not yet well-known women.  And because I’ve always liked what I call Grand Hotel books, (get a bunch of people in a place and observe their interactions, named after the movie of the same name), I decided to create a women’s institute where these characters could interact to their hearts’ content.  It eventually came to be called Wisdom Court, a play on the founder’s name–Wyntham–and its architecture–three structures with a fountain in the middle of a courtyard.

Then the characters started arriving, and they brought with them their luggage and back stories, and the details of the endeavors that had captured the attention of the Wisdom Court selection committee.  Noreen had recently retired from her job as the headmistress of a private girls school and was compiling a book of quotations strictly by women.  Dolores was a sculptor putting together an exhibition.  And the main protagonist, Andrea, was a forensic artist who wanted to paint.  (The others will get their due in another post.)

I liked the women, and the institute, which I placed in my home town, Boulder, Colorado.  But in my life the past and present dance together, and the story I wanted to tell myself had to include that element.  I wanted to know what would happen when a likeable, deserving woman had her chance to get what she really wanted but was stymied by a strange confluence of events.  What would happen if this wonderful institute was affected by the lingering traces of those who’d lived there before?  What if Wisdom Court was haunted?

Why I love haunted houses, and, really, aren’t they all?

05 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by in Ghosts, Hauntings, Mysteries

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552050_340069802746868_1757767987_nMy dad was a bricklayer, and during my childhood our family lived in a total of three houses he built at the edge of Boulder. Early on I became aware of how houses were made, how the inner wooden skeleton was covered inside by plaster and the outside with brick, how the plywood floors had surfaces of tongue-in-groove oak or asphalt tile or linoleum. Windows were finished with frames and sills, the doors lintels. Wires and pipes and vents and  switches were set into the spaces left for them. Eventually a brand new structure was the result, and soon the smells of wood and concrete, of paint and newly-laid carpet melded into the scent of home.

Just because I’d seen those corners created didn’t mean I was okay with what I feared might live in them. My acute peripheral vision and sharp hearing had me starting at the least motion and softest noise. And while I knew about the wood and brick and wires, I wasn’t as clear about the sounds those materials made when the lights went out. Boards creaked and windows vibrated.  Even new pipes could whine. The sound of tiny feet clicking across the floor was, I later realized, the ticking of the furnace vents as they heated. But, huddling under my blankets, I imagined small, vicious creatures beneath my bed and knew if I let even a finger extend past the edge of the mattress, they would grab me and haul me far away.

I smile now at some of the kid books I read back then, but a few of them had real power when it was dark and the images they’d evoked in my mind came out to play.  Television became an influence, and some of the fears of childhood were enriched by depictions of the evil people commit against each other, fictional and real.  It didn’t help that my parents let me watch the Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Or that my mom dropped my cousin and me off at the movies when we were twelve.  The feature was Psycho. Yes, I am twisted.

I live in a house built in 1909. It has three stories and plenty of odd corners and strange sounds. Over the years we’ve lived here, I’ve grown accustomed to the nooks and crannies–cleaning once in a while will eventually calm the jitters. When I dream, it is of the house my father built for us the year I turned eleven. A modest brick ranch house on an acre of land beside a stream, it was the place he and my mother loved best. It is where they lived until their end, and if it haunts me it’s more because of their deaths than their lives.  Old age and illness are far more frightening than those little creatures under my bed.

I continue to connect with the frightened child when I see a haunted house movie. (Next time I’ll write about the latest, The Conjuring.) The house, the home, the enclosed spaces where we spend our lives are haunted with our memories, our fears and triumphs, our most primitive beginnings. I’ve never made friends with the shadows, those vital shadows that feed my writing.

(Image from Spooky Places.)

All of my excuses are gone…

11 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by in Ghosts, Hauntings, Random Thoughts, Wisdom Court, Writing

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We had the visit from our son.  Ditto from the old college friend.

I gathered all the relevant info and we completed taxes over the weekend.

I’m not sick anymore.  I’m not on extra taxi duty for the grandchildren anymore.

We survived the incredibly over-hyped blizzard of 2013, April Edition.

I dumped all my cookies and got my Mac to work faster.

It’s too early to plant stuff, unless I cut up the sprouting potato in my kitchen and put pieces into the ground, sans a full moon, and of course with a tip of my hat to St. Patrick, upon whose day potatoes are supposed to be planted.

The laundry falling over the edges of the hamper is just too lame to consider a real excuse.  It is entirely possible to type while nude, and I have clean blankets to wrap around myself when my teeth start chattering.

It’s time to get back to the book.

Kicking, screaming, eyes rolling back into my head, I must go back into A Signal Shown, the second book of the Wisdom Court Trilogy.  My characters are standing in the wings of my mind, arms folded over their chests, toes tapping impatiently.  Even the spirits haunting Wisdom Court have threatened to move to a different old house if I don’t give them some attention.

It’s not that I hate the book.  On the contrary, I love it. I’m crazy about my characters and I know they have tons to tell me about how the plot has thickened while I’ve been Taking Care of Important Things.  And writing will make me feel better because it helps control my inner virago, the one who monotonously shrieks, “Tell me a story, tell me a story.  Tell Me Now!”  Her I’m not so crazy about.

No, I’ve been riding the U.S.S. Avoidance for a while and it hasn’t pulled into port.  Much as it pains me, I’ll have to jump over the side and swim to shore.  If I can steer clear of subsequent grooming rituals, as well as word games to “get my ducks in a row,” I’ll actually get to the computer and Start Again.

First I have to copy edit this blog post.

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Boomer Gothic and a Year of Her Own

14 Thursday Feb 2013

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Back in the day, my favorite fiction genre was gothic, and I read as many such novels as I could find.  My favorite authors were Mary Stuart, Charlotte and Jane Bronte, Phyllis A. Whitney, Barbara Michaels, Elsie Lee, Dorothy Eden, Victoria Holt, Joan Aiken..the list is long. As an English major in college I read Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, and discovered Anne Radcliffe, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, more Poe, some of Dickens, Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Stevenson’s Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde.  You get the drift.

By the time I got serious about writing, the market for gothics had pretty much dried up, and I was reading mysteries.  I decided to write one set in Denver, and after hundreds of years and thousands of revisions, I published two of them, the previously mentioned Finny Aletter mysteries, Scavengers and Obstacle Course (both soon to appear as e-books.)

But, in my heart of hearts, I still yearned for gothics.  I wanted to tell myself a story set in an old house where odd things happened, and I wanted to create characters who began to regard each other with suspicion.  Dark psychological overtones would match the shadowy corners and somewhere along the line, a scream would split the night.  Good times would ensue.  Thus was born Wisdom Court.

Set in Boulder, Colorado, Wisdom Court is an institute for accomplished women who have not yet achieved their professional goals.  Each is invited to spend a year there (short trips home allowable, but most time is spent in Boulder), all expenses paid.  Artist, scientist, writer, whomever the Board chooses, receives a year of her own.

Andrea Bellamy, the protagonist in book I, Edge of the Shadow, is a forensic artist who yearns to paint, and her invitation to Wisdom Court allows her to imagine a new career as a fine artist. Widowed some years earlier, she has seen her daughter through college and now has the opportunity to truly change her life. She takes a leave of absence from her job, rents out her house, and heads for Boulder.  She is welcomed at Wisdom Court by the staff and other associates staying there.  As she settles into bed that first night, her heart is filled with gratitude and her mind races with excitement.  At last she will be able to focus on her artistic dreams.  For at least this one year she can put herself first.  And then she awakes screaming…

You’ll have to read Edge of the Shadow to find out what happens to Andrea and the other women at Wisdom Court.  The book will be published online in the next few months.  I’m writing about it now out of curiosity.  Having written EOS as well as being two-thirds into the second Wisdom Court book, A Signal Shown, I’m wondering how many fellow gothic fans are out there.  I don’t yet have throngs of blog followers, but I’m impatient enough to issue the question anyway: how many readers out there are interested in gothics?  The Wisdom Court story arcs through three books, so I’m committed to at least the trilogy.  Will I find readers to share in the pleasures?  Let me know.  I’ll keep writing.

Posted by | Filed under 19th century novels, e-books, Gothic, Hauntings, Wisdom Court

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I’ve been thinking about words…

24 Tuesday Jul 2012

Posted by in Aurora, Grief, Hauntings, Life, Writing

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and how they sometimes back up in the brain, preventing the flow of ideas.  There’s  a fricking Hoover Dam inside my head, and not just in the usual word-block way.  This summer has been rough for a lot of people in my life, including me, and the continuing bad news has helped construct a large part of the stoppage.  Health issues, relationships problems, unexpected expenses (you ever have those pop up like weeds in what you thought was a neat little garden patch of a personal economy?  Yeah.)

And it’s been so damned hot for days on end, and the destroyed crops and dried up lakes and streams have given a sepia tone to what is usually the lushest time of the year.  Wildfires have consumed homes–not just of people but of forest creatures as well–and smoke has made the air hard to breathe.

I’ve been stumbling along, trying to achieve steady-as-she-goes again.  I’d like to report that my unwavering cheer has brightened the days of all around me, but though I try, I’m an Amy, not a Beth (I’ve might have squirreled away some of those breakfast goodies before I got to the Hummels’ hovel.)  One foot in front of the other, things will get better, we all go through rough patches–these have been my mumbled mantras.

And then July 20th, my late mother’s birthday, actually:  People who had looked forward to the new Batman movie went to a theater in Aurora to see it and some of them were killed and others were wounded for making that choice.  Because of sheer bad luck they crossed paths with a maniac who’d been collecting guns and ammo and decided to crawl out of his hole to make his presence known.  God only knows why.  Reams of news reports will try to nail down every detail so we can know why, and books will be written and the ongoing arguments about gun control will go on.  We’re already haunted here in Colorado, and we know how this will play out.

I’m left with a river of words backed up in my head, a river of sorrow and rage and frustration and soul-deep fatigue.  I’m so sorry for the blameless people who just wanted to enjoy a movie. I grieve for their friends and families who are going through hell.  I grieve for all of us who struggle to understand another of these obscene events.

I want this summer to be over and for rain to fall on parched land and for the air to be clean of smoke.  I want there to be peace in the land.  I want the dammed up words to flow again.

Screw the confetti, anybody got a drink?

02 Wednesday May 2012

Posted by in Ghosts, Hauntings, Random Thoughts, Writing

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I just finished the last dot-the-Ts, cross-the-Is revision.  320 pages of deathless prose.  EDGE OF THE SHADOW is a lovely pile of pages.  And the ongoing tradition I’ve always had was played out again today: every single time I’ve completed a book, something’s gone wrong with the printer during the last gasp.  This time it was the toner that ran out two chapters short of a complete print-out.  I have no idea why this should be so but I’m almost awed that something similar has occurred every damned time.  Continuity is a humbling force.

Now I will foist my literary child upon those kind souls who’ve agreed to read it and give me honest feedback, bless them.  I’ll have time to figure out my step-by-step plan to publication.  That means getting my two mysteries formatted for e-book phase, and determining how to go about getting the previously mentioned EOS into print, be it electrons or ink or both.  Research!

For right now, I’m quietly happy to have it done.  It’s taken a long time but I still love it, now more than ever.  I’ve had a lot of fun researching ghosts and their haunting ways.  Sitting in my third-story study, I’ve more than once heard strange sounds and found myself frightened by the words I’ve just typed.  Heh-heh.  Good times.