Sunday 27 June 2010

Told Ghosts on Amazon

It seems like only last week that I was blogging about how my story The Untold Ghost had been picked up by Pill Hill Press for their Haunted anthology - and soon after, on how it had been selected as the editor's choice and headline tale.  Now, already, Haunted is out to buy from both Amazon US and Amazon UK.

While I've seen the proofs I didn't do more that flick through, so as usual I can't comment on the collection as a whole, except to say that I've had a good vibe about Pill Hill ever since they began.  As for The Untold Ghost, it's another of my older stories, dating from about four years ago if memory serves correctly, although it got a hefty overhall before I sent it out this final time.  It's an unusual one for me in that there's a fair bit of truth mixed in with the fiction.  I don't normally hold with the old "write what you know" adage, and would argue that unless you get routinely whisked off to faerie kingdoms, kidnapped by aliens or stalked by psyschotic killers, it's pretty dim-witted advice for the genre writer.

The Untold Ghost was different in that I went to a place that cried out for its own ghost story, and elements of what I saw and did there were just interesting enough to provide the basic furniture for one.  The hotel described is based on a real one that I stayed at, and a few things that the protagonist  does - like a reckless trip out onto a rickety fire escape - were my own experiences with a few dashes of added colour.  As for the ghost?  Sadly, (or come to think of it, perhaps happily), she's cut from whole cloth, although the place was easily spooky enough to have had a couple lurking in the rafters.  Maybe I was just too busy thinking my own tale up to notice them?

No comments:

Post a Comment