Borrowing from Reality

Shortly after Saving Jake was released, I started getting questions from readers -some of whom I knew, some I didn't- about whether or not I had the same ability as Philip Corts, my main character. Philip Corts has the extraordinary ability to obtain information about someone by touching or holding an object that belonged to the person in question. The name for that ability is psychometry. It's an ability that has fascinated me for a long time and though I don't know anyone who can do it, I just tried to put myself into the head of someone who could. I must have done a reasonably good job because so many people asked me if I could do the same things that my character did. I can't and am actually glad I can't. I think getting images and pictures off something I touched would drive me a little crazy. 

No the reality that shows up in Saving Jake is not psychometry but is all about shipwrecks and Door County, as pointed out in a previous blog post.

But some of the fears and experiences and scenes in the Brigdeton Park Cemetery books are indeed borrowed from reality. For example, in the first book, Haunted, there is a scene where Cassie pulls open her bedroom door only to be confronted by the ghost of a dead young man who then comes into her bedroom as she backs away from him. Now that scene is quite a bit more drastic than my everyday life, but for years after moving into our current house, I would hesitate every time I opened the bathroom door upon finishing my morning or night routine. I can't tell you why, except that I always had the strongest feeling that there was someone waiting for me right outside that door. Someone dead.

If there was, I never saw him or her. And I can't tell you why I felt that, but I could never shake the feeling. Even when ghosts were the furthest thing from my mind, as soon as I touched that knob and turned it to open the door, that dread would overtake me. Always.

And then there is a scene in book three, Drawing Vengeance, where Cassie dreams she meets up with the ghost from an earlier book in an empty banquet hall. The ghost is sitting at a table under the only light in an otherwise darkened room, waiting for her. This is an adaptation from a dream I once had. Some years ago, I was obsessed (and I mean obsessed) with a particular historical figure, and I must have read about twenty biographies about the man, all in a row. I don't know why, and I don't know where that initial fascination sprang from, but I binge-read everything I could find on him until I got to the point where I wasn't learning anything new from each successive book. And about that time, I dreamed about him. I walked into a darkened room with a stage at one end, where he stood under the only light that was turned on in the entire venue. I don't know where we were or why we were there, I just knew I wanted to walk up to him so I could finally meet him. He was looking down and I'll never forget how that light made his fair hair almost dazzling. He was dressed entirely in black, an amazing contrast to his hair, and he raised his head when I reached him. He looked me straight in the eye and said, simply, "Don't get too close." 

I came up out of that dream like I was breaking the surface of a dark pond, seeking light and gasping for breath. I didn't read anything more about him for close to twenty years, after being warned off like that. I still have no idea what that dream meant, and it still has the same effect on me if I think about it too much. Cassie's experience in that dark room might have been slightly more benevolent than mine!

Lastly, the use of memento mori pictures in book five, Touching Shadow, Stealing Light, was something I needed to get out of my system. I found a site that featured nothing but pictures that included at least one dead person in the shot, or maybe just that one dead person in a portrait, and I actually bookmarked this thing on my computer. After Jim had such a visceral reaction to looking at them ("That's enough of that," he said after the first five) I started getting weirded out by the pictures myself. In fact, my whole office started feeling like I had a crowd of dead people waiting for me every time I came back to my computer. I deleted the site and that was the end of that. But I put the concept of photos of the dead into book five. As well as a crowd of dead people.

There are times I wish I could ask writers I admire, and whose works I love, what was behind certain images or scenes or other attributes in their books. Were they writing about fears that they may have always had? Was that character someone he or she knew in real life, or maybe a composite of several people? Was that amazingly frightening or amazingly poignant scene based on something that really happeend?

Tell you what: if you read me and you EVER have a question about where someone or something in my book came from, write to me and I'll tell you. I can't get many of those answers from most writers that I read, but I would certainly give my answers to anyone who might ask me!