Preview of "Ghost Story"

Ever wondered how an author writes a story? Would you like to read a few paragraphs from one of the books in the initial launch? Here it is.
Enjoy.

I blame Ghost Story on National Novel Writing Month.

Stick with me, my story gets better.

I met a lot of good friends through NaNoWriMo. We would have our local write-ins during November, where little writing actually got done. We would actually sit outside the coffee shop long after the place had closed down and the staff was gone, still talking about anything and everything that came to mind.

I was driving home after one such write-in, and the hour was far too late to begin with. It had rained earlier, and even in November it gets warm in Louisiana so the weather was perfect for fog. The shapes in the mist were shifting and then I almost had a heart attack -- Driving through a residential area, I thought one of the shapes climbing out of the drain was a person.

By the next write-in, I had three pages of Ghost Story written and the rest of the story plotted out by the time the others showed up. I asked the others if they wanted to read it when I was done....

The rest is, well, a ghost story.
~Gracie Musica


Sometimes people see things in the fog, in the dark, shifting shadows momentarily taking on the appearance of a person, of an animal. There's that moment of fright, that heart-out-of-your-chest jolt of pure terror that you're not alone, that you're up against something unknown and foreign and genuinely creepy. It's the moment that the best horror movies live for, the one that the truly frightening ones are able to repeat.

Then the shadows move, or someone pulls out a flashlight and the serial killer with a knife is a tree with a broken branch, the human-eating wolf is just a shrub that has grown in an odd way. The things that can't be explained away are forgotten, hidden, never spoken of again except when someone gets really drunk and blabs.

But sometimes that figure of a bear really is a bear. And appropriate actions against must be taken to defend yourself against them.

So the figures in the fog that looked suspiciously like people I ignored. It was almost midnight, and if anyone was out walking in the middle of the interstate fifty miles to the next little hole in the ground, they were probably drunk and deserved to be taken out of the gene pool.

To be honest, nothing tells a ghost to screw off like a hood ornament through their midsection.

So there I was, plowing down figures in the mist, goose bumps occasionally rising up on my arms. It was far too late – or too early, depending on how you looked at it – to be dealing with this. There was a good chance this was all the fevered dream of a tired, overactive imagination. Next place there was to stop, no matter how run-down, I'd stop for the night.