An Overabundance of Ghosts

I am currently trying to finish my manuscript for Dead Voices, the follow-up to last year's Haunted. In that first book, one of my characters, a regular at the Thursday Night Ghost Story sessions, remarked that thinking or talking or even writing about ghosts would make them all come to you. May Parrish is that character's name and she's a sweet, older, grandmotherly-type lady who tends to come out with observations that unsettle the rest of the people sitting with her. I'm theoretically the person who invented her, and I had no idea how unsettling, not to mention spot-on, she could be.

Dead Voices, like its predecessor, is a ghost story. Maybe I should say "ghosts" story. There are a bunch of them in there, and I really wasn't trying for that. It started out with a haunted house, like so many stories do, and somehow, the specters started mass producing themselves. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, but they're all clamoring for attention, and their own time in the spotlight, and so on and so forth. Bad enough to deal with that among living characters, but now the dead? Talk about unruly. Everyone wants an individual story line. I wonder if Charlaine Harris had that problem when she started working with the fanged undead.

Just to get away from the chaos they are presenting to me, I took time out to work on this blog entry, which I know should have appeared this morning. Apologies for that. The ghosts got the better of me, yesterday, so I'm writing it today instead. And playing Free Cell.

I guess I shouldn't really complain that so many spirits have shown up to be included. It's kind of flattering, actually. The hard part is weaving together all of their stories so that they make sense as they are revealed, little by little, to the heroes of the entire adventure. Not to mention weaving together all the stories of the heroes. It can get a little rough, but bottom line is, writing books about ghosts and getting to share those books with anyone cares to come along for the ride is probably one of the sweetest things a writer ever gets to do. So somehow, I need to find it in me to complete the Free Cell game, finish this blog entry, and then go whip the manuscript into some kind of coherence.

As I have mentioned in earlier blog posts, every time I start working on this stuff, I get treated to inexplicable bangs and other noises from various parts of the house, even when, or especially when, I am home alone. I guess it comes with the territory of writing about these things. (Thank you again, May Parrish.)  I will need to work around that, as well. But it's the season for hauntings so I guess i'd better get to it.

Hope my inner writer has a ghost of a chance.