Author Archives: Murderati

To Live and Die in Nashville

When you launch a book, something strange happens. A little bitty minuscule part of you dies.

What? JT, you’re out of your mind. You should be celebrating, not feeling like your cells are disappearing, one by one!

I can’t help it. Let me try and explain. I can’t promise this will make sense, but hopefully I’m not the only author that’s ever felt this way. Actually, I know I’m not, John Connolly has written about this on his blog, this . . . feeling . . . that even though the book is done, there’s more that could have been done to make it better. I didn’t understand his sentiments at the time. As I went through the publication process, I truly didn’t understand, because I was so caught up in the first-time-itis of revisions and copy edits, learning the system, that I wasn’t seeing the forest for the trees. A book is never truly finished. Even when it’s being sold, you always feel like you could have done . . . something . . . to make it better.

The first time I finished the book and submitted it, I made a joke that if I had a child, I’d liken this moment to sending them off to college. You’ve given your heart and soul to shape them, to help them grow into good people. At some point, you need to let them go, see if they can fly on their own. It’s the same with a book. I just didn’t understand that until now.

I’ve mentioned before that this whole process feels somewhat surreal. I still sometimes pinch myself, making sure I’m awake, trying to prove that this dream isn’t really just a dream. At the book launch last week, these doubts came to a head. We were about 15 minutes until the "official" start time. People were showing up, the band was setting up, Borders had just arrived and had three huge cartons of boxes, a big banner, all the things they’d need. They started setting out the books, the wine seller popped the corks on a few bottles, the food was set out, the band couldn’t find the right plug, Hubby came over to see if I knew where they could grab a microphone lead, the host of the party, Paul Nadeau, came to see if I wanted, something, I don’t even remember now, I received a brilliant phone call from a fan who blew me away with her incredible graciousness to call me at my launch party to tell me good luck (B.G., you made me tear up, with pure joy ; ) ), Tasha was standing there talking to my parents, my brother was looking at me with this hysterical look on his face that made me want to laugh, because I know he was mentally calling me by my childhood nickname which will NOT be repeated here on this blog, and I realized I wasn’t breathing. Actually, I was dizzy. Make that borderline about to faint. For God’s sake, here we go. I KNEW that was going to happen.

Thankfully Tasha recognized the signs of imminent distress and got me to the bathroom, away from the hubbub, and reminded me that breathing is highly underrated as a source of not passing out. Once I got my pulse under control, fluffed my hair, and received a heartening pep talk, I left the bathroom, prepared to launch my darling.

The room was crowded, and the Borders folks got me set up to sign immediately. I sat, uncapped my purple fountain pen, and . . . the next two hours were a total blur. I was shocked at how many people showed up. Friends I hadn’t talked to in years, neighbors, people who’d seen the announcements here and on MySpace, fans who’d written me and I’d thrown out an invite, plus most of the people we’d actually invited. And they were all clutching copies of All the Pretty Girls for me to sign. Pure insanity.

Then I had to give a speech. I needed to say thank you to everyone who’d helped plan this great event. I did just fine until I hit Randy. I’d gotten myself in tears practicing the speech earlier in the day and knew I wouldn’t be able to make it through publicly. I was right. I choked up, but it was still perfect. And what a relief to have that over! The highlight of the night was the raffle. We gave away a compilation CD of Taylor’s favorite music (coming soon to iTunes, hopefully) a Killer Year anthology ARC, and the grand prize, a pair of cowboy boots donated by the Nashville Boot Company, where Taylor buys all her boots. They turned into cowgirl boots when our friend Mandy had the winning ticket.

So why, in the middle of this joy and frivolity (and the band singing Corn Dog) was I so freaked out? This was more than the train leaving the station. This was pure, unadulterated terror. A lot of people have read this book. A lot of people love this book. A few hate it. That’s to be expected. I never thought to have universal support, that’s wholly unrealistic. But these people, theses are my peeps. These are the folks who’ve seen me drunk, who know my secrets, who have been cheering me on for years. They’ve been resources for characters, have been patient while I crawl under my rock and refuse invitations, who bring me food and wine when they sense I’m hitting a rough patch. I just don’t want to disappoint anyone.

So that’s brings me full circle to the corner of my heart that shriveled up and died when I signed that last book, late in the evening. This moment, one planned for months, years, really, was over. I got myself a glass of wine, listened to the band (who were singing some really raunchy tunes at that point — the darlings made me laugh!) accepted praise from the people I care for the most, and felt empty.

We write because we want to share our stories. We have something to say, couched deep in the constructs of fiction, about the human condition. Little bits of our souls find their way onto every page. That laying bare, opening ourselves to criticism and praise, is dangerous for an artist. Staying grounded in reality, knowing that your work is just that, words on a page that may or may not appeal, and doesn’t define you as a person, is vital. You have to trust the people around you to tell you the truth, to support you when you’re up and when you’re down, to share the load. And you have to know when to say goodbye to your child, when to let them soar away on their own wings, knowing that they may fall, and hope, pray you’ve given them the strength to get back up.

Thanks to everyone who came out to my signings this week to show support and buy the book. I can’t tell you how much it means.

Wine of the Week — A selection from the wonderful wine sellers who sponsored the book launch — Best Brands —2004 Piping Shrike Shiraz

Here’s a link to some of the photos from the launch, plus other tour stops. I’m waiting on the professional snaps, and will post them to this account, so keep checking back if you’re interested in seeing more. And yes, due to the unfortunate fact of being one-handed for 10 weeks, I was forced to cut the hair. I’m finally getting used to it.

UPDATE: Here is the link to all the pictures from the launch. Enjoy!

UPDATE the Second: My First Sale Story has appeared at Dear Author. Come by and say hello!

I See The Future And It’s Quite Blurry

Bugger! I failed my eye-test. I can’t believe it. I studied so hard. I knew all the parts of the eye and I still failed. The eye-guy says that my close-up vision is still good, but, I can’t see distances for toffee. I told him he was dead wrong and he said, “Over here, Mr. Wood. That’s the coat rack.”

Okay, maybe he’s got a point.

I know why I flunked my eye-test. I get so nervous about it, because I don’t know if I’m answering correctly. The guy wheels up the giant Elton John glasses circa 1976 and squashes them into my face and asks me which blurry image do I like the best. Eventually, I can’t tell the difference between the blurry images and I can’t make up my mind which is best. The eye guy loses his temper and I feel like I’m Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man, but Lawrence Olivier isn’t asking, “Is it safe?” The words that strike fear into me are, “Number one or number two? I just need to know a number, Simon. One or two? One or two? I can’t let you leave until you tell me. One or two?”

So I need glasses. It’s not a problem. I can deal. I am a little worried that my writer buddies are going to pick on me now that I have glasses. I can see some of the hardboiled guys yelling out, “Four eyes,” then stealing my glasses and beating me up. They’re hardboiled for a reason, y’know. The cozy people, being more subtle, will just write something mean on my back. They’re sneakier.

But to my advantage, I can do the dramatic glasses removal during book negotiations. I look disappointedly at the advance offered and slowly pull my glasses off and rub my eyes and sigh and say, “This is one time I wish I was seeing double (the dollar figure).” So glasses have their ups and downs.

But I’m going with glasses. No contacts for me. I can’t stand anything in my eyes. The eye-guy had a hard enough time getting the drops in my eyes. He had to hold me down and pull my lids back to get the stuff in. Oddly, I kept my mouth clamped shut. I don’t know why. I’m definitely not going with the eye surgery. I’d go on a bad laser day and get zapped, but my mother-in-law dissuaded me. She just had the surgery and said, “I saw my cornea peel off,” like it was a good thing. I don’t need to hear that, especially when I’m eating.

So I’ve been wearing glasses for about a week. It’s okay. I can see better. Things used to have that soft focus thing going on, like on Star Trek whenever James T Kirk set eyes on his woman of the week. Julie says I look very distinguished, but then she laughs and runs away. I’ve stopped complaining that we need a high definition TV because the picture is for crap. I did see an intruder in the house, but it was a false alarm. It was just Julie. I didn’t see that coming. Maybe I should have gotten glasses sooner.

Yours in sharp focus,
Simon Wood
PS: I’m to San Francisco to do a lunchtime signing at Stacey’s with Tim Maleeny and Mark Coggins. Then tomorrow, I’m off to Seattle to do signings up there. Check my website for when and where.

Gateway Drugs

by J.D. Rhoades

All my life, I’ve been a reader. My family still talks about how I’d disappear at family gatherings, only to be found later in my parents’ car, stretched out on the bench seat with my feet up in the open window, reading. Whenever and wherever a book was lying around, I’d have to pick it up and read it. Some of the books I picked up during those formative years certainly served as gateways to my current addiction to writing and reading about bad people doing bad things. So return with me now, to those glorious days of me misspent youth, to the writers who hooked me on mysteries and thrillers and led me inexorably to the hard stuff….

Donald Sobol: The Encyclopedia Brown series featured a "boy detective" and the P.I. agency he ran out of the family garage. I snapped them up like popcorn in elementary school. Encyclopedia (given name: Leroy) was a brainy kid who somehow managed not to get the crap kicked out of him by bigger kids. This may have had something to do with his pal Sally, who even the bullies feared. (Come to think of it, this may explain my long standing affection for tough female characters). Encyclopedia always managed to foil the machinations of his personal Moriarty, an evil kid named Bugs Meany. He always caught some inconsistency or other that showed Bugs or some other junior miscreant was fibbing. Once caught, of course, the bad guy always confessed. The best part was where, just before the big revelation, the story would break and give the reader a chance to figure the mystery out for themselves. I managed it about half the time, which made me even more eager to try my hand at the next one.

Arthur Conan Doyle: It’s impossible to have grown up in the late twentieth century and not at least had a good idea of who Sherlock Holmes was. His image, in one form or another, was everywhere: commercials, movies, even on children’s television where a parody character named Sherlock Hemlock was a fixture on Sesame Street. So when I found a collection of Holmes stories in the school library, they seemed strangely familiar, yet still totally engrossing. (I can still remember the cover of that book by the way,with its iconic painting of Holmes in deerstalker cap and magnifying glass). The line, "They were the tracks of an enormous hound!" still sends a chill down my spine, thirty-odd years later.

Rex Stout: It was shortly after falling under the spell of Holmes that I discovered Nero Wolfe in the town library where my Mom took me every Saturday (or at least the ones when I didn’t ride my bike to the Sunrise Theater to watch Godzilla flicks and chop-socky movies). It’s a natural progression, when you think about it, since there’s actually a theory that the corpulent agoraphobic sleuth Wolfe is actually a descendant of Sherlock’s smarter and equally reclusive brother Mycroft. Whatever his origins, Rex Stout’s pairing of the intellectual, puzzle solving detective with the wisecracking hard-boiled type, as embodied in Wolfe’s assistant Archie Goodwin, bridged the gap between two supposedly incompatible sub-genres.

Erle Stanley Gardner (writing as A.A. Fair): Hammett, Chandler and Ross McDonald may have done it better, but "A.A. Fair’s" series about the team of Donald Lam and Bertha Cool were my first introduction to the wonderful world of P.I. fiction. You can thank one of those library book sales, where I found a dozen or more "Mystery Book Club" 3-in-1 volumes for a quarter each, several featuring the wonderfully named Lam and Cool. Bertha was the boss of the outfit, a plus-sized lady as "tough as a coil of barbed wire." Lam was, in Bertha’s words A "brainy little runt" who did better using his wits (and his wit) than he ever did with his fists. Great characters, snappy dialogue, and ingenious (occasionally too ingenious) twists. How can you go wrong?

Ian Fleming: "The two .38’s roared simultaneously." So begins Moonraker, the first James Bond novel I ever read. I picked it up when I was 12 or 13 from the bookshelf in my uncle’s old room at my grandparent’s house. I was hooked from the first scene, where Bond is engaging in gunfighting practice under the amused eye of "the Instructor" ("I’m in hospital, but you’re dead, sir"). From there, Bond heads upstairs to M’s office, and from thence to a confrontation with the evil Sir Hugo Drax. Like Sherlock Holmes, the image of Bond was unavoidable for anyone not living in a cave in the late 60’s-early 70’s, but these were the first books I found that were actually better than the movies.

John D. McDonald; I came across Travis McGee, John D. McDonald’s "tattered knight errant on a spavined steed" at just the right time in my life. Around my mid-teens, I was a lonely kid with a streak of romanticism and a tendency to wax philosophical. McGee was a loner with streak of romanticism and a tendency to wax philosophical, but he was as tough and cool as I wanted to be someday. Plus, he lived on a boat, and he got all the hot women, even though they were usually gone and often dead by the beginning of the next book. Re-reading those books now, I can’t help but still be impressed at McDonald’s storytelling abilities. Despite the digressions over relationships and the destruction of the beauty of South Florida, these books really move.

Trevanian: When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I read and reread Trevanian’s books five or six times each. Trevanian, the pen name of Rodney Whitaker, was probably best known for his novel The Eiger Sanction which was made into one of the more fun 70’s Clint Eastwood flicks.

The movie was certainly memorable, but there was no way to capture
on film that certain atmosphere that Trevanian brought to his spy
adventures, that sense of never being quite sure when he was putting
you on. I mean, how could you resist a character like art
collector/assassin Jonathan Hemlock, who worked for a shadowy
(literally) intelligence boss named Yurassis Dragon? (say that last
name fast if you don’t know why it makes me laugh out loud). My absolute favorite Trevanian character was Nicolai Hel, the half-Japanese assassin of Trevanian’s classic Shibumi.
Killer. Philosopher. Master of Oriental sex tricks. Wine connisseur. When it came to cool, Nicolai Hel gave Bond a run for his money. Trevanian’s books had style. They had wit. They had great and
often bizarre characters. They had hot sex. They were, above all, huge
fun to read.

So what were YOUR "gateway drugs"?

Of Books and Gyno’s

By Ken Bruen

Last year, I had an email from my New York editor, informing me that one of his friends was coming to Galway to study for a year and would I look out for her

Sure

I met her on arrival and we got her a place to stay and enrolled in the college

The Clifden Arts Festival was due and I Iwas invited to read at it

Clifden is a beautiful small village about 50 miles from the city centre and it perched on the Atlantic, it still has all the old flavor of Ireland as it used to be, horses on the street, tinkers selling their wares, one bookshop and fifty pubs ……….. oh and one church

I thought this would be the best first introduction to the country

I asked Pat Mullan, the thiller writer and great friend to come along

Megan, the girl, I was to look after brought along another American friend and they asked me

“What does ‘Jesus wept’ mean?”

I said

“You’ll see”

Before my reading, Pat stood us a round of Guinness and Megan asked

“You have a pint before?”

Pat laughed, said

“Before, during and after.”

I had warned Megan to bring rain wear and she said

“How do you know it will rain?”

I said

“It always does.”

It did

Constantly

I told her the shite we pedal to visitors

“It’s soft Irish rain, doesn’t mean anything.”

Save you get drenched

She’s a New Yorker and gave me the look, said

“I’m beginning to think you’re full of it.”

Rumbled already

The reading went ……….. mediocre

But as most of the audience had been having hot toddys they were happy enough, a woman asked me

“Did you ever think of writing a happy book?”

After, we dashed to a great old pub with a roaring fire and three musicians with

Bodhrans

Spoons

Uileann Pipes

Fiddles

And they did a haunting version of Raglan Road followed by The Sky Road

This road runs alongside Clifden and leads to the most spectacular view of the wild sea

We’d just sat down and a man approached, asked if I was K. Bruen

I agreed and he said

I went to Trinity with you

So I did what you do

Invited him to join us

He was, he said

“A gynecologist”

Then for the next 30 minutes lectured us on all items ………. am ……….. related to his work

When he went to buy a round

We legged it

Megan got a job in Charly Byrnes Bookshop, just about one of the finest independents in the country and reminiscent of Sylvia Beachs in those fabled legendary days

There was a book launch on the Friday and I took Megan, first person we meet is Roger, a friend of mine for over 20 years and I kept distracting him everytime Megan asked him what he did

Finally, he told her

“A gynecologist.”

She stared at me, asked

“Hello, what’s with you and gynos?”

I had to travel shortly after and Megan was busy with her studies and the bookshop

Must have been two months later, I was out for a quiet drink with a childhood friend and Megan appeared

She looked great, had an Irish boyfriend, a job as a columnist on a local paper, the bookstore and her studies

She hit it off with my friend and asked her what she did

My friend said

“I’m a doctor.”

Megan rolled her eyes, said

“Don’t tell me, a gyno?’

My friend gave her that Irish look, said

“Why on earth would you think that, I’m a psychologist.”

When we were leaving, it was lashing down and Megan looked at me, she was wearing a T-shirt, said

“Jesus Wept.”

Success: Determination + Luck

by Pari Noskin Taichert

Among the most influential books in my adolescence was BE HERE NOW, a groovy meditation on detachment, openness to the universe and love, by Baba Ram Dass. In it, another phrase, Go with the Flow, pushed its aimlessness onto my heart.

With my inexperience in life at age 15, I misunderstood the power of these concepts. I thought their point was to send out good energy into the world — by thinking positive thoughts — and to sit quietly contemplating my belly button lint.

Fast forward 30+ years to this past weekend. On Friday, I spent the day with aspiring writers (and wonderful readers) at the Tony Hillerman Mystery Writers Conference. It’s one of the premier mystery-writing events in the nation.

Then, on Saturday, I watched my youngest child earn a junior black belt in Tae Kwon Do. That afternoon, I also earned my black tip. This means I’ll be eligible to test for my black belt sometime late next year.

So, in two days, I had many examples of determination and its role in creating success.

Every week, I meet people somewhere on the continuum of the writer’s journey to publication. Some folks dream and don’t go any further than that. There are those who start project after project but never, ever finish. Others complete manuscripts and tell me, "Oh, I wouldn’t dare let anyone else look at my work." Still others send out queries, get rejections and give up right there — or, wrong-headedly refuse to take useful input — and stop growing as artists.

At the Hillerman conference, you could’ve summed up almost every session, every presentation — about craft, marketing or the writer’s life — with these words: perseverance, determination, hard work and luck. David Morrell spoke about them. Tony Hillerman and Steve Brewer did too. The agents and editors at the con went down that road as well.

I moderated a panel with Margaret Coel, Steven Havill and Joseph Badal. "Sinkholes on the road to publication," was my title. I told the SRO audience that I hoped our session would inoculate them as they pursued their own dreams. Yep. You guessed it. Behind every horror story, at the edge of every success, those same words — perseverance, determination, hard work and luck — popped up.

You’d think every member of the conference faculty had met beforehand and had decided to push the same agenda. But that didn’t happen. We’d all come to our conclusions through living our lives, through attaining the successes we’d attained so far and working toward more.

I used to think that the ideas of Being here now and Going with the flow were the polar opposites of taking action, setting goals and striving higher. Now I think they walk hand-in-hand.

Being here now means watching and paying attention to the present. If we practice that in our life, we’ll be able to identify opportunities right here that we may have missed if our sights are only set on the future. By working hard now, we’ll keep on track and create many of those opportunities (or attract them) AND those magnificent unforeseen boons that we call "luck."

To me, this picture of a ladder at Acoma pueblo in New Mexico from the cedarmesa website symbolizes this path of mindfulness in the present and aiming for that gorgeous blue-sky future.

Today, in our discussion, I hope you’ll share some of your examples of successes — or of luck — flowing from determination and perseverance.

Mondays are great days to be inspired.

Vicky, Zachary, and the ghost in the closet

by Alex

Appropriately for this week, I am at World Fantasy Con in Saratoga Springs, where the theme is “Ghosts and Revenants.” I did a ghost walk night before last. There have been a lot of sightings here. It doesn’t feel as resonant as, well, New Orleans! – but there’s definitely stuff around.

I’ve had three ghost encounters in my life.

I wrote THE HARROWING about a haunted college, with a ghost apparently from the 1920’s, and it never occurred to me the whole time that I was writing it that I was writing it because I went to a haunted high school, with a ghost from the 1920’s. I was a theater kid and the greatest thing about my high school was this beautiful, decrepit old auditorium from the turn of the century. It was a real, fully equipped theater and all of us drama kids LIVED in that place – not just for classes and rehearsals, but we were always cutting other classes and hanging out there. It was just live. There were places that you simply would not go alone – under the stage, up in the conference and storage rooms at the top of the building – because there were cold spots and breezes from nowhere and a feeling that you were just not alone. The lights would go off at odd times and props disappeared from the prop table and ended up in unlikely places. Of course those last two kinds of occurrences were undoubtedly sometimes or always the work of pranksters, but that kind of thing only added juice to our feelings of being haunted.

The story was that back in the 1920’s a student named Vicky died in a car accident on the way to her senior prom. The next day was Baccalaureate, and when the class was photographed in their gowns, standing lined up on risers, Vicky appeared in the back row in the photo.

I never saw a shred of evidence to support this story, and of course you may recognize this as a classic urban legend, but we teenagers didn’t know it was an urban legend, and we all believed in Vicky.

THE HARROWING is also based on another spooky incident I experienced in high school. I had another crowd I ran with that was into those classic teenage rites of passage – séances with a Ouija board and breaking into graveyards at night. One of my girlfriends had a single mother with a boyfriend and was often not home for days, and so of course her house was the gathering spot. For a time we were really into playing with the board. And that escalated, as these things do, and we decided to try a séance at a local cemetery. Of course sneaking into a cemetery at night is going to get you jacked up, and we had all those teenage hormones going on to begin with (there were six of us, three boys and three girls.), so we were pretty well flying on our own expectations as we settled down on a likely grave to try making contact. It was always me and my friend, D., who sat with the planchette, and I was quite sure that D. was moving it, but the messages were often perceptive so I always went along with it.

That night the planchette had just begun circling when one of the boys suddenly bolted up in terror and screamed, “OH MY GOD. RUN!!!”

Which we did, screaming all the way to the car, and there, freaked and panting, demanded to know what he saw. He turned and pointed back to the cemetery and we saw that the automatic sprinkler system had gone on. We all could have killed him right there, but instead we went back to D.’s house and jumped right back in to another séance. We always had candles lit in these glass candleholders on the wall, and we were so completely wired from the cemetery that things started getting weird right away. We “contacted” a spirit named Zachary who claimed to be the son of Hitler and was saying some really profoundly nasty things. There was a weird tension in the room – I’m sure all of us thinking at the bottom of it that my friend was actually saying these things and being uneasy about that, but not quite willing to put a stop to it.

And then in the middle of the board spelling out a sentence, one of the candleholders shattered on the wall.

(Mass hysteria, screaming, running from the house, hours to calm down again…)

We never played with the board again after that. I never believed that we actually contacted a spirit, but I was very affected by that demonstration of collective psychic energy: I thought that the combination of all our intense focus on the board had actually effected a physical manifestation. It’s a classic poltergeist situation, and pretty much hooked me on the supernatural for life.

My third experience was much more recent. When I moved into my house in LA, there was a front bedroom that just didn’t feel right. It was fine in the day, but as soon as it started getting dark, I had an enormous reluctance to go into the room. The middle of the room was also weirdly cold. It was the best bedroom but I wouldn’t sleep in it, until someone moved in with me and we started sleeping in it. But on several nights I had the same dream or not quite dream – of a small, very angry woman rushing out of the closet, just a ball of fury. My partner had the same dream.

And then I got my cats, and the ghost completely disappeared. The sense of the room totally changed, no more cold spot, no more dreams. And yes, the cats have been controlling the rest of my life ever since as well.

But that haunting felt the most real of the three of them, because I was so sure of an imprinted presence.

The best thing about having written a ghost story as my first novel is that now everyone I meet always tells me their ghost stories. And I’ve heard way too many not to believe – something.

New Orleans After Dark

by J.T. Ellison

We had my launch party last night, and since I want to report on it and post pictures (and there’s no way I’m going to have the time or energy to write it up afterward) I’ll wait until next week to share the details. Instead, in honor of Halloween week and the posts we’ve had here, I thought I’d share my ghost story.

I love New Orleans. When I was in grad school, my husband and I decided to start a political consulting firm. We signed a candidate in Mobile, and went down over a weekend to meet him. We quickly realized he wasn’t the candidate for us — he kept suggesting ways to get around the FEC filing laws, talked about how he was going to split apart his political donations for home improvements — you get the idea. So we cut the trip short and drove over to New Orleans. Hubby made a reservation at the Maison Dupuy, an utterly charming and highly romantic hotel in the Quarter, and I fell in love. With the city, the people, the vibe, and a little bit deeper with hubby. It’s one of those shining memories, a day and night of pure bliss.

We went into a million clubs, danced and drank too much, wandered through the Quarter all night . . . it was a wonderful twenty-four hours. The only things we didn’t get to do was go to a club known as the Dungeon. Hubby had been there on another trip and wanted to show it to me, but we just ran out of time.

Fast forward a few years. Hubby and I were now married, and decided a three day excursion down to New Orleans might be a fun way to blow off some steam. I had a good sense of the town now, and I wanted to do a ghost tour. I loved our vampiric guide — with his pearly smooth skin, his long fingernails, velvet frock coat, he embodied the New Orleans I’d read about in Anne Rice novels. He told us a lot of great, gruesome tales, but I didn’t "feel" anything.

Now, let me back up and admit that I’ve always been a bit attracted to the paranormal. I’ve had some bizarre, unexplainable situations. Lest you think I’m a bit off, I have this weird six sense about bad things. Especially when I was younger, I would tell my mom something bad was going to happen, and it always did. Supposedly, most of the women in my family have this heightened radar, so it wasn’t a huge deal. The big one was when I woke up and told my mom something horrible was going to happen to President Reagan that day. He was shot six hours later. Ever since, I’ve done my best to tamp down those "hunches." I feel better that way. I’d rather not know.

Okay, so my bonafides are in place. I’m a little sensitive to weirdness. And I loved reading Anne Rice. I’d always been entranced by her New Orleans, and wanted to see it through her eyes. The ghost and vampire tour went a long way toward satisfying that need, but I still felt . . . I don’t know . . . unfulfilled.

After the tour, the group split off. I was tempted to follow our guide and see what he did next, but he disappeared (probably had a gig to play, or blood to drink, or something.) Hubby really wanted to make sure I got to see the Dungeon this trip, but the doors don’t open until midnight. We decided to kill some time at Pat O’Brien’s. We had a great dinner, and I sampled the infamous hurricane. Just one. Hubby had two. We weren’t drunk. We weren’t even buzzed. Just having a good time in Crescent City.

It was now about a quarter to one, and time to head down to the Tombs. Our waiter had been a ball all night. We were tickled because he looked exactly, and I mean exactly, like Louis Farrakhan. In between giggles, we asked him the shortest path to the Dungeon. He gave us directions, we paid our check and left the restaurant.

If you’ve ever been to New Orleans, you know that it’s just like New York. It never sleeps. There’s always (or at least there were before Katrina) crowds about in the Quarter. We walked up Bourbon Street to Toulouse, turned left and started down until we hit the entrance for the Dungeon.

There’s a wide plank wooden door, with antique hinges, the whole nine yards. Hubby reached for the handle of the door, and it was locked. We pulled on it a few times and were completely puzzled. It was 1 AM. The place was supposed to be open.

That’s when we realized there was no one around. No one. On Toulouse Street, just a block off Bourbon, at 1 in the morning — it was completely empty and silent. We looked at each other and started to feel a little strange. We’re standing there, discussing what to do, whispering to each other because we’re really creeped out. The hair on the back of my neck suddenly rose. We turned to our right, and the waiter from Pat O’Brien’s was standing there. No footsteps, no clatter of shoes on the cobblestones, nothing. He literally appeared.

We looked at him, and said a shaky hello. All of my warning signals were screaming at me. But I couldn’t move. I was frozen to the spot. He shook his head gravely and looked me right in the eye.

"They will eat you alive," he said. "Get back up onto Bourbon Street."

And then he disappeared.

There was no sound, no moment, not even a whisper of a breeze. Silence, and emptiness. He was just gone.

We practically ran up to Bourbon Street. We didn’t look back. We went straight to the hotel and to our room. We locked the door, and stashed a chair under the antique knob for good measure.

Two years ago we went back to New Orleans. Another three day trip. Had a great time, ran around, went to a couple of "private" clubs, got a drink spilled on my shirt and scored a free t-shirt that said "No Beads Necessary." After a long night roaming the streets, we decided to try the Dungeon one more time.

The door was unlocked this time. We crossed through the dingy front, across the moat, into the bar. We walked through, staring at the skulls, debating whether to get something to drink. There are a lot of mirrors on the walls, it’s very dark and freaky — just the kind of place people who like to be scared would hang out. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched. The hair on my neck, the shiver down my spine, everything in me screamed Get Out Of Here Now. I told hubby we needed to leave. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. And as I left, I heard the odd strains of deep laughter, ringing in my ears alone.

I’m going back to New Orleans in December for a signing at the Borders in Metarie. I’m staying in the Quarter. But I won’t be going back to the Dungeon. Something, someone, evil resides there.

Wine of the Week — Vampire Merlot It’s quite good.

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My very first televised interview was this past Sunday. I was honored to appear on John Seigenthaler’s A Word on Words, a fantastic weekly exposé into the lives and books of authors. Here’s a link to the podcast of our interview — just a warning, it’s thirty minutes. Felt like five. There’s something very, very cool about being interviewed by a legend.

My Other Sister

I know I’ve missed Halloween but I thought I would share this true life story from my youth. It’s one of those events that helped shaped me. So sit back and enjoy…

I was seven when I met my other sister.

As a child, it wasn’t uncommon for me to wake up during the night craving something to drink. I usually slept with a glass of water or juice on the nightstand next to my bed. On this particular night, I’d drained my glass and found I still hadn’t quenched my thirst. I hopped out of bed and, glass in hand, left the bedroom I shared with my sister, three years my younger. I switched on the landing light so I wouldn’t disturb anyone and trotted downstairs to the kitchen. I made myself a drink and took it back up the stairs.

As I reached the top of the stairs and turned to face my bedroom, a full-length mirror next to my sister’s bed reflected my image. I wasn’t alone in my reflection and I froze. Behind me was my sister wearing her black polka dotted nightdress. She was lying on the top stair, her face stricken in pain, reaching out to grab my bare ankle. She fixed me with her totally black eyes. There were no whites in her eyes at all, just solid black. Her mouth opened and closed as if trying to say something, but no words made it out.

My mind whirled. How had my sister followed me down the stairs and sneaked behind me without me noticing? What had caused her eyes to turn black? My mind snagged on the falseness in the reflected image, preventing me from answering the questions. For to the left of the mirror, my sister slept soundly in her bed, her face turned away from me. The fact she was wearing a flowered nightdress and not the polka dotted one only confirmed the impossibility of the distressed girl in the reflection being my sister.

My other sister’s hand continued to reach out for me and was within inches of grasping me. I couldn’t tell if she existed only in the reflection or whether she was right behind me. I didn’t dare turn my head to find out. In the reflection, my view of her was at least twenty feet away, but if I turned to face her, then those black eyes would be right on top of me.

Whether my other sister really meant me harm or just needed my help, I didn’t have the courage to find out. I bolted for my room, throwing my drink into the air and screaming all the way. This meant running directly at the mirror and if my other sister existed there, then I was running straight towards the creature and not away from it. In the mirror’s reflection, my other sister made a desperate lunge, missed me and collapsed on the landing, but she lacked the strength to give chase. I hurled myself on the bed and buried my face in the pillow and bedclothes.

My screams woke my sister and my parents. My mother had to pry me from the mattress that I clung to in the fear that it wasn’t my mother who had me, but a false mother like the false sister I’d seen in the mirror. Even when she managed to unpeel my fingers from the mattress, I refused to open my eyes in fear that I was in the arms of a phantom. But when my mother shushed me and rocked me, I knew no false mother would treat me with such tenderness and I opened my eyes.

“What’s wrong?” my mother asked. “Why all the screaming?”

Through my sobs, I choked out the event I’d witnessed. My mother showed me that my sister, although crying herself from being rudely awakened, was okay, and more importantly, that her eyes were okay.

"You were dreaming,” my mother insisted.

How could it be a dream? I’d made myself a drink. I told my mother this.

“Well, whatever you saw, it isn’t there now,” she said.

“How do you know?” I demanded.

“Because we would have seen it when we came into the room. Come on, come look.”

My mother tried to show me, but I clung to my bed. She wrenched me free and I went with her, even though I dug my toes into the carpet. She showed me that nothing lurked on the landing, other than my father cleaning up my spilled drink.

At some point when I’d calmed down, my parents put me to bed, but I failed to fall asleep straight away, fearing my other sister would return to get me. Finally, exhaustion claimed me and I slept through until morning.

After that night, I developed a fear of mirrors after dark. Once the sun had set, I averted my gaze or closed my eyes when passing a mirror. I wanted to hang something over the mirrors, but I didn’t want to expose my fear. If I woke during the night needing a drink, I let my thirst go unquenched. Nothing would get me out of bed after dark. I never wanted to meet my other sister again. I feared my escape might not be guaranteed.

Two weeks after the incident my sister was struck down by a nasty bout of flu, which kept her, confined to her bed for several days. The nightdress she wore when the flu hit was her black polka dotted one.

I don’t know if the phantom sister I saw was a premonition of some kind, but I never saw my sister in that stricken pose on the stairs during her influenza bout or at any other time and she never possessed those black eyes. I wonder if the phantom was some form of guardian spirit trying to warn my family of a threat to my sister’s welfare? Regardless, I didn’t look into a mirror at night for another seven years fearing a repeat encounter with my other sister or some other phantom that lurked in mirrors.

Eventually, when I summoned up the courage in my teens to stare into a mirror at night, I saw nothing, although I broke out in gooseflesh fearing that I would. Now, I’m in my thirties, and if I’m honest, I still fear what I’ll see in a mirror. If I have to get up at night, I don’t turn on the lights and I keep my eyes averted. My other sister has never shown herself again, but I can never be sure it will stay that way.

Yours reflected,
Simon Wood
PS: I’m off to LA for a signing at the Mystery Bookstore with Tim Maleeny and Mark Coggins, then we’re off to Men of Mystery.
PPS: Artist, Deena Warner commissioned a story to go with her 2007 Halloween Card and I came up with something called, Thursday.

Haunted

by Robert Gregory Browne

I don’t have any ghost stories.

Not the traditional kind, at least. There are no spirits lurking in the dark corners of my house, no monsters in the closet or under the bed. I lead what can generously be called a pretty humdrum life, a slave to the routines and rituals I’ve practiced for many years.

But I do have ghosts. Not the supernatural kind, mind you, but those all too real ghosts that haunt most of us from time to time. I’m often plagued by memories of people and incidents in my past, those sometimes tragic, sometimes embarrassing moments that I just can’t seem to let go of.

One of the memories that haunts me is my own insensitivity as a fifth grader, when I callously ripped up another student’s artwork after deeming it not good enough to be used in the school play. I’m not sure who that little bastard was, but it’s hard to believe he was me — and he certainly haunts me all these years later.

Another is the fumbling teenager who, in an equally insensitive moment, called up an ex-girlfriend (whose heart I had just broken) to ask her if her best friend had ever expressed any interest in me. The term asshole applies quite nicely to that particular memory.

These are the kinds of human failures that, while seemingly insignificant in the scheme of things, grab hold of us and never let go. That remind us of what we’re capable of.

Then there are the tragedies. Seeing my father lying naked in the ICU at his local hospital, machinery beeping around him as he struggled to stay alive. Running down to the parking lot to move the car, only to return and find him dead, looking like a wax doll, unmoving, unseeing, his body nothing more than an empty shell. Kissing him on the forehead and saying goodbye.

Or the young man who, at nineteen years old, had a promising life ahead of him, only to succumb to jaw cancer less than two years later. Seeing him on the last night of his life, looking very much like an old, old man, barely able to get comfortable in the Lazy Boy his parents had set up for him in front of the TV in their den. And later, watching his body carried away on a stretcher by two very somber paramedics.

These are just some of the ghosts that haunt me. Define me. The ones that, no matter how hard I try, I just can’t seem to shake.

And maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe I need these reminders from time to time to keep me grounded, to help me to remember to be kind to my fellow inhabitants of this planet, to cherish family and friends, to appreciate what I have while I still have it.

Yes, I know this is a pretty depressing post on what should be a fun day, but these damn ghosts just don’t want to leave me alone.

So I have to ask: what memories haunt you?

Lake Street Halloween

By Louise Ure

The longer the war goes on, the more baby George Washingtons I see and the fewer Power Rangers. More infant Ben Franklins. More tiny Paul Reveres. I think that’s a good thing, searching our own history for superheroes.

Halloween has always been a big deal here on Lake Street. In a landscape of calf-aching hills, the street is flat. In a neighborhood shrouded by fog, it’s well lit. In a city where one-car garages rent for $1000 a month, these people own whole houses.

Now, don’t go thinking I’m landed gentry. I bought my place long before housing prices in San Francisco got as high as the cost of a good size island in the rest of the world.

We had over a thousand trick-or-treaters last year. They bus ‘em in.

Some, like the young Russian couples in the neighborhood, are still new to the custom. “Our first Halloween!” the parents say, voices still thick with the muddied sound of Leningrad. The parents do most of the trick-or-treating; the kids sit bug-eyed in their strollers, victims of fatigue, sugar and the weight of Washington’s powdered wig.

Others know the drill all too well. The parents laze in their idling Lexus at the curb and release the children at each lit doorway, all of them too lazy to even walk from door to door. These are the little girls in the hooker costumes. The boys with all too real machetes stained with food coloring.

We learned long ago to set up a candy station on the front porch. No way I’m going up and down two flights of stairs four hundred times a night.

It’s become a neighborhood affair now, with a dozen houses on our short block hosting garage parties and handing out wine or hot cider to the adults. The children march three abreast down the sidewalk, as far as the eye can see.

We light lavender and sage smudge sticks to drive away demons, then offer sweets to draw them in.

David, from next door, is in charge of jack o’lanterns, and purposely seeks out the most misshapen gourds he can find. He wears a Freddy mask that looks like his face has melted. Kids approach him with caution.

Around the corner, the pickings are better than our Cost Co mini candy bars. Robin Williams lives a couple of blocks away and used to come to the door and do a short skit when kids rang the bell. Now his bodyguards answer the door and hand out the treats. His signature gift is a glowstick necklace, and watching the kids leave his house is like seeing a swarm of fireflies come into sight.

One year he got PC on us, and handed out toothbrushes as treats. You could hear the banshee wails from a block away. I thought they’d string him up with his own dental floss.

Sharon Stone used to live down the street, too. She gave away Godiva chocolates. The one Halloween she couldn’t be home, she left a wheelbarrow of them in front of the gate. They didn’t last long.

I’m never au courant with the costumes. Years ago, when a young Harry Potter wanted me to guess his disguise, I asked if he was an MBA. Every super hero I greet meets me with a disdainful, “No! I’m a Something-You’ve-Never-Heard-Of Man’!”

The six-foot phallus was last year’s biggest surprise. The bloody dentist, with pliers in his hand and a pile of red-stained teeth on a tray, was the scariest. Thank God there are still plenty of Bumble Bees and Fairy Princesses.

I understand this year there’s going to be a run on Ricky Bobby costumes from Talladega Nights. Oh my.

Tell me fellow revelers, how do you spend your Halloweens? Do you have a favorite costume in your past, or a favorite treat? I know you have a favorite trick someplace back there.