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.

Guest Blogger: Alison Gaylin

A huge Murderati welcome to Alison Gaylin who’s sitting in for me today. Her new hardcover from NAL debuted in September and it sounds absolutely tantalizing:

From Publishers Weekly
Gaylin’s giddy hardcover debut follows young reporter Simone Glass on her short but shocking infiltration of Hollywood’s sleazy side. Simone, a recent Columbia journalism grad, heads for L.A. to work for a slick weekly that goes out of business almost immediately. She grabs a position at the L.A. bureau of the trashy tabloid Asteroid and plunges into the world of celebrity gossip. Reluctantly rummaging through TV superstar Emerald Deegan’s garbage, Simone discovers a shoe belonging to the recently murdered comeback kid Nia Lawson. Then Emerald becomes the next victim, and one of her bracelets is found in another future victim’s trash. When Simone carelessly wears the bracelet to a party, she catches the killer’s eye as a potential target. Gaylin (You Kill Me) has tremendous fun with stereotypical tabloid fodder, from a closeted gay superstar and a desperate, underage stripper to wild Hollywood parties and car chases. The hectic pace and huge cast of extras keep the reader guessing right to the end.

And now for Alison’s fun blog:

The best thing about promoting my new book, TRASHED, is that I get to talk about what inspired it: the wacky nine months I spent – after college and before graduate school – as a reporter for The Star. This was not the glossy Bonnie Fullerized Star you see today. It was a serious, down-and-dirty supermarket tabloid whose main competition was the National Enquirer, and encouraged its reporters to do anything and everything to get celebrity scoop.

So, these days, when I’m doing speaking engagements, I don’t really spend a lot of time discussing my writing schedule or how I come up with ideas or my relationship with my editor or what it took to get published… Instead, I get to go into the specifics of posing as an extra on the sets of bad TV movies. I can talk about chatting up bouncers and sneaking into celebrity weddings and funerals and the waiting rooms of plastic surgeons offices. At most of these engagements, I like to detail my first night on the job, driving through Beverly Hills, feeling terrified and amazed — and sort of nauseous – the backseat of my car filled with Roseanne Barr’s fresh, stinking garbage bags.

Here’s what I find most interesting about all this. At every single speaking engagement I’ve done where I’ve mentioned my trash-stealing exploits, no one has asked me, How could you do something like that? No one has said, Did you have trouble sleeping at night? But the one question I’ve gotten every single time is this: What was in Roseanne’s garbage?

During that whole strange and smelly ride back to The Star’s West Coast office, I was thinking, Why am I doing this? And now, all these years later, I finally have my answer. People want to know.

Well, most people. There are those who tell me they couldn’t care less about celebrities… but they usually follow that up with a caveat involving Britney or Lindsay (not that they care or anything, but what is up with those girls?)

I look at my own books – all that time I spend trying to invent interesting characters and surprising plot twists and scary, dramatic murders, all in the hopes winning over a few thousand new readers… and then I look at the 1.5 million people who buy the magazine I now work for every single week, just so they can find out why Angelina snapped at Brad in an elevator.

I wish I could get to exactly what it is that fascinates people about certain celebrities. If I could, I would bottle it and pour it all over my manuscripts and watch the money and fame roll in. And here’s the best part: Since I’d be a rich famous author, no one would care about what was in my garbage.

Are there certain celebrities you want to know everything about? I’d love to hear which ones, and why (and, since I’m still in entertainment journalism, I might be able to provide you with some information!)

— Alison

PS The most surprising thing we found in Roseanne’s garbage was several copies of the National Enquirer. It really pissed off my boss.

Alison Gaylin is the author of the Edgar-nominated HIDE YOUR EYES and its sequel YOU KILL ME. Her first hardcover, TRASHED, is out now on NAL/Obsidian. Her website: www.alisongaylin.com. She regularly blogs at First Offenders. www.firstoffenders.typepad.com.

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.

————————–

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.

Goooooollll!!!!!!!

by Pari Noskin Taichert

Andres Cantor probably isn’t known by name to whole segments of the mystery community, but every time I finish a rough draft, I think of him.

Years ago, his exhuberant yell finally made the jump from the Spanish-speaking soccer world to its English-speaking counterpart. Goals in the game became even more exciting with his gleeful, full-throated upping the ante. People who’d never watched the game began to tune in, to listen to the radio and watch television, just to hear him scream that gorgeous version of "Gol."

Well, I wish Cantor had been in my office last Wednesday morning when I finished the first draft of BEE GONE, my initial attempt at a new series.

I WANTED a celebration, a howling whoop-de-doo . . . but got a fizzle.

I patted myself on the back.
I called my husband (whose company is about to announce large layoffs) and his response would’ve put a gnu to sleep.
I reached out to friends, but mainly ended up with general congrats that didn’t satisfy — misfires and blahs. Wahhhhh!

I even resorted to posting a single line on a smaller listserv, something most people totally ignored. Mary Saums, lovely Mary, didn’t. She sent me a card; she got it. But man, oh man, I wanted more.

Wednesday night, after the kids and hubby went to sleep, I poured myself a nice shot of O’ban and toasted myself. Frankly, even that was a little anticlimatic.

It’s what, Monday? And I’m still looking for that darn celebration, for the world to stop for a second to applaud ME! Yeah, I know . . . it’s pathethic. Silly and sentimental and childish. But there it is.

And, what the heck?

What’s wrong with marking successes big and small? It sure makes life a lot more fun.

In the next few weeks, my Advanced Readers Copies (ARCS) for SOCORRO will arrive at UNM Press. I’ll be dancing again, toasting again, bursting with happiness.

When the book appears in stores and gets reviews, I’ll be bubbling. Even though this is #3 for me, it’ll feel just as wonderful, just as giddy, as what J.T. is going through right now.

Perhaps I’m manufacturing all this joy. So what? It’s nicer than being nonchalant about it.

I wonder if other writers — my more experienced friends with 15-30 books under their belts — feel the same glee and sense of accomplishment each time?

I sure hope so.

What about you?

Writers: Do you celebrate the birth of your rough drafts? Do you mark other moments in the lives of your works? How?

Readers: What personal accomplishments do you celebrate? How do you mark those wonderful occasions?

Please tell me I’m not alone in finding hundreds of reasons to feel happy in my writing life . . .

ghost stories

I never believed in ghosts. Until I was in a room with one.

When we were young marrieds and had our first son, we moved into a house that was in terrible shape. (Young, assuming we could fix it up. I think easy was tossed around a few times. Idiots got tossed around a few times as well, usually by older family members.) The house had been in one family since the early 1930s, and had been the first house built in a field in south Baton Rouge–a field which would later become the Garden District, an inviting place of live-oak trees and Craftsman and Colonial homes, where families crowded the sidewalks and neighbors talked to one another. Our house had not kept up with the majority of the neighborhood, which had made fixing it up a smart deal. The trick was, the homeowner was the daughter of the original owners, and she only wanted to sell to a family, not to someone who was just going to renovate and turn it over. Her mom, she’d explained, had loved kids and had wanted to have many more and was unable to. She, the daughter, had been unable to have any children at all, and while her mom was alive, the neighborhood had deteriorated. It was only after she’d died (in the house) that the area had started to revitalize. But because the house was so rundown, no one but developers had made offers and the daughter was losing hope.

So we bought. I was pregnant, and the daughter was thrilled. We had a house, which was such an improvement over the apartment where there was a basketball court in front of our door (literally, five feet in front) and if I never heard the thoing sound of a basketball hitting concrete or the kathunk shwish of it hitting the backboard and then the net, I would be the happiest camper on the freaking planet. I really wasn’t squicked out that the old woman had died in the house, which seemed to bother a lot of people. It hadn’t been a violent death. Everyone’s gotta die somewhere–might as well be in bed in a home she loved.

Odd things happened in that house. Missing items showed up in strange places. Often, the very thing we needed was suddenly on the table behind us, or on the counter. We hadn’t remembered putting it there, but in my pregnancy haze and my husband’s hectic schedule, we chalked it up to forgetfulness. You know, how you’re standing in front of the refrigerator, looking at your glasses on the top shelf, wondering how in the hell did they get there when you just had them on in the living room. Stuff like that. Common. What wasn’t quite as common was walking into a room and seeing someone walking out of the other door, only to follow and find no one was there in the hallway or the porch. Tricks of the light, though. Highly active imagination. Pregnancy hormones. Stir craziness.

When Luke was born, he had colic. Bad colic, constant, and the doctor claimed he’d ‘grow out of it’ and there was nothing anyone could do to help. Luke was miserable, and rarely slept. My peace of mine and sanity slowly disintegrated with my exhaustion. One night, I heard Luke crying from his room and then suddenly stop. I’d already been on my way toward him when I heard him giggle.

Giggling was so rare, particularly in the middle of the colic pain, that all of the hairs on the back of my neck pricked, and as I entered the room, I saw an old woman bent over his baby bed. He was looking up at her, laughing, though I couldn’t hear her saying a word, and since it was three something in the morning, I shouted–because who in the hell was this woman and how did she get in my house and why in the hell was she standing over my child? I ran toward the bed.

And she was gone.

That was it. I thought I was unraveling. My husband came running in to see what I was shouting over, and I think I maybe said something like mouse because you do not say ghost when you haven’t been married all that long. I shook from the adrenaline, my husband went back to sleep and Luke? Didn’t cry for the rest of the night.

A few days later, we were battling another colic session, and I carried Luke around with me, dancing with him, keeping him moving, which seemed to bring his only relief. I stood in the kitchen, when I heard something creaking in the living room. When I looked through the kitchen door, through the dining room archway, the rocking chair… was rocking. By itself. Luke and I were the only people in the house. And it wasn’t just rocking, as if it had been bumped and was jostled, nor was it rocking as if to the rhythm of my movements with Luke, because I was standing still as a post and it kept rocking.

That rocking chair had been left by the daughter. It had belonged to her mother, she said, who’d never had the chance to rock grandchildren, and wouldn’t I like to have it? To which I’d said, "Sure," since at the time it seemed perfectly innocent to take a gift chair when I didn’t have a rocking chair yet.

I was seriously second guessing that decision as the chair rocked. By itself. For more than thirty minutes.

Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I was so beyond freaked out, that I actually looked at the rocking chair and said, "Would you please stop? You’re scaring the hell out of me."

And the chair stopped. Right then, just stopped. Mid rock.

Made it much worse, actually, because I knew then that I was losing my mind. Which then meant they were going to take away my child, so I just needed to shut up and not tell a soul.

So I didn’t.

The old woman returned many times after that. I used the rocking chair (see School of Denial, Valedictorian), and I got used to her being in Luke’s bedroom at night. I also got used to him sleeping more and giggling often and I ignored the fact that someone was leaving the room just as I entered and I started to enjoy the fact that I would always find exactly what I needed when I needed it, usually close by (especially if I was holding Luke). It was my own private little insanity, and I’d just as soon not advertise it.

We sold the house and moved when our second son came along and we needed more space; I took the rocking chair with me. I never saw her again, though, and the chair never rocked on its own at the new place. I also had to find stuff on my own, which was kind of annoying, but I got back into the habit.

One day, we were visiting my sister-in-law, who’d moved into a home down the street from our original house, and I noticed a ‘for sale’ sign up in our former front yard. The new owners hadn’t been there all that long, though, and it surprised me that they were moving already. I asked my sister-in-law why they were moving, and she rolled her eyes and said, "They think the house is haunted."

"Really? Why?"

"They claim that every time they fight, something breaks or someone throws something. The kids are little and the mom said that the dad gets really mad and when he starts yelling, something of his is usually broken,which just makes everything worse. And someone keeps messing with his keys. The wife claimed that one time, someone hurled the keys at his head, and it wasn’t her–she was supposedly on the other side of the room."

"Weird." I’m pretty sure I affected a completely innocent expression.

She went on to tell me other things that the wife had told various neighbors–and I nodded. I must have not seemed surprised enough, because she cut a cynical glance at me. "You don’t believe it’s really haunted, do you?"

I did a quick calculation of how old my kids were vs. the length of time it would take to declare me insane and said, "No, of course not."

Do we hang around after death? Can we do something that has a lasting, positive effect? I don’t know. Whether she was real or not, I know that I was a scared, exhausted mom and she helped. Sometimes when I felt particiularly impatient and worn down beyond coping, I would see the chair rocking and remember how much she’d wanted kids and grandkids and never had them, and that knowledge helped me dig in and find the patience I needed. I’m not entirely sure how we would have survived without her there.

I really wish I could see that chair rock on its own again.

So, ghost stories. Do you have one?