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Many years ago, I went to a high school reunion and ran into a classmate and friend, Nilda Barrett, who at the time was working at one of the BIG New York Publishers, doing something important that I don’t even understand (she has a great brain) on the international side of the company. We chatted for a bit and when she told me where she worked my eyes probably lit up like a rabid bat’s and I pounced on her like said bat, being a pre-published writer at the time. She told me that she didn’t work on editorial concerns, but I did ask her for one favor and she said she would see what she could do. I asked her if she could find out who Christopher Pike’s literary agent was.

Do you all know Christopher Pike? He is the author of about a billion YA and juvenile books, supernatural in nature, and he was huge around the same time as R. L. Stine (who has also writen about a billion books). Between the two of them, an entire generation of kids was introduced to the sort of books I would have given up chocolate for back when I was a kid. Well, not really. And I'm not jealous of those kids who had so many supernatural books to choose from. Well, maybe just a little.

Christopher Pike was HUGE at the time I ran into my friend so of course I thought, well, might as well try for the top. Now, she hadn’t made a huge promise to find his agent’s name for me, and why would she? She had a life and an amazing job. But to my huge surprise and with boatloads of gratitude, I received a message from her a few days later with the agent’s name and phone number. Holy moly! I couldn’t believe my luck. I studied the number and thought, he’s probably in New York, so I’ll call when the office is closed and leave a message. Then he can call me back, or not. I was too nervous to even consider broaching him over the phone, me a no-name, would-be writer, and he a bright light in the agenting universe.

I made my plans and made the call. And son-of-a-gun, he fricking answered the phone himself. What??? How did that happen? Probably because the area code I thought was for New York was actually for California (doh!), and instead of getting him after hours, I got him when he was just getting started with his day. YIKES.

I managed to introduce myself, explained how I got his phone number (Nilda, if you’re reading this, he was just as excited as I was that you worked for that publishing company. He was only mildly disappointed to hear that you weren’t doing editorial work) and then I was off and running. We discussed paranormal stories and YA audiences and it ended with him agreeing to look at my manuscript. Oh, my God. I was in shock. I blessed Nilda about a hundred times or more. And then I submitted.

As you probably all know, the book didn’t go anywhere. But he was a true gentleman. Instead of simply shipping the manuscript back to me with a form rejection, he actually called me to tell my why he didn’t take it. He said, and I’ll never forget, “You write very well and I like your style. Do you have any edgier stories on hand?”

Here is the bottom line of that conversation. Being an agent, he was looking for what would sell. At that time, the huge paranormal stories concerned entities like Freddie Krueger, Michael Meyers, and Jason in the hockey mask. I had submitted a pure ghost story to him. And so he couldn’t take it. The trend in paranormal stories at the time were vengeful, murderous ghosts (or worse) who liked dispatching their victims with quite a bit of gore. I don’t write like that.

The trend stayed that way until M. Night Shyamalan released “The Sixth Sense,” a critically-acclaimed box office hit that was about ghosts. Just ghosts. And then things began to shift. The kinds of stories I wrote became more marketable. And a shift that favored just-ghost stories began. I needed another eight years or so, but in 2002, Saving Jake was accepted by a publisher and so my writing had its own shift.

Funny to think of it, but paranormal/supernatural stories do have trends. Vampire stories are like the tide: their waves rise and fall but they are always there. Sometimes they get so hot we’ll see both movies (Twilight) and TV series (True Blood) running concurrently. Even after those two ended, there were still offshoots like The Strain -  just ended- or The Passage and What We Do In The Shadows, currently on TV.

Werewolves are a little different. I have a buddy who LOVES werewolves, but you don’t see as many of them around as you see vampires (who apparently really never do die.)

Zombies hit hard and hot in the recent past and are still roaming around today.

And my beloved ghosts? Well, they’re faring better than they were back when I tried to get Christopher Pike’s agent to take me on. A remake of The Haunting of Hill House was a huge hit for Netflix, and my boys in Supernatural are still going strong, even though they’ve chosen to end next season. And then there are all those paranormal reality shows.

I’m grateful for the current trend that has room for every kind of ghost, ghoul, monster, and creature that can be imagined. That's how it should be. There’s room for everybody in a well-stocked library of horror.

Perceiving Ghosts - And How They Look

In my third Bridgeton Park Cemetery book Drawing Vengeance (no spoiler ahead), there is a scene where Michael Penfield is looking out the bookstore window and sees a handful of dead people out on the street. I based this scene on the experience of someone I know who sees dead people, as M. Night Shyamalan so famously put it. I will not include the names of any of the folks I will write about here out of respect for their privacy, but what I put down in this blog will be details of sightings as they were told to me. That aside, the first gentleman I write about who can see the dead told me about various places he has run into them: a party, a storefront window, a home a block or so away from his home, even in his own house (this one followed him there: YIKES!) We did a book signing together and I believe he mentioned being able to see "a dead someone" across the parking lot adjacent to the book store where we were situated. 

Since the book signing took place in the neighborhood where Steve's bookstore is, and where Cassie and Michael and Nick and Eloise frequent the Ice Cream Shack for burgers and sundaes, I guess it only seemed natural to let Michael start seeing dead people on these same streets. Like the gentleman who did the book signing with me. 

I know another person, also a man, who told me that he sometimes sees dead people around the hospital close to his house. He's seen them sitting on the bus stop bench, or wandering through the parking lot, or just walking around the front of the building. He did give me an interesting tidbit about his sightings: he told me that when he sees them it's a very quick glimpse. Even just a flash of a glimpse. But it's enough for him to see the entire person and register gender, clothing, even facial expressions. I thought that was interesting because between these two guys that see spirits, the actual perception is different: one sees them for a length of time, the other only gets a quick shot of the ghost. But both are able to give me explicit details about what they've seen.

I know a woman who not only sees them but can hear what they are saying, if they actually speak. She has described being passed by a dead woman who was mumbling to herself the whole time. You might say, but that could have been any crazy person out on the street. Yes, it could. Unfortunately, the woman I know was standing in her own house when this mumbling ghost went past her. Where she was coming from, where she was going, and why she was in the house is anybody's guess. Glad I missed out on that!

When I first started writing the Bridgeton Park Cemetery series, I was worried about depicting how my psychic characters perceived ghosts, but as I've gotten farther into the field, I'm beginning to realize that those who can see spirits don't necessarily all see them in the same way. The dead might appear with or without sound; they might show themselves for an extended period of time or just for a split second. I've been told that they can also project the way they choose to be seen: the gentleman in the first paragraph told me about a house that is haunted by a little girl, but he knows that the little girl is the spirit of a woman who was in her '90's when she died. In the Mary O'Reilly series, my friend Terri Reid has her ghosts appear the way they did at the time of their passing, which makes sense. In the show The Dead Files, psychic Amy Allen will sometimes mention that the spirit "is showing itself" to her in a particular way even though she knows that is not how they may have appeared when their lives ended.

What this all tells me is that I have quite a bit of freedom when it comes to writing the ghostly characters presented in my books. They can appear older or younger. They can be scary with dripping wounds and faces filled with terror, or show up as any average man or woman who just happens to be dead. And I'm so glad for that sense of freedom - because I think that Cassie and Michael are going to run into all sorts of things as the series progresses.