About Chalk Ghost

I’m an “active status” member of Mystery Writers of America. That means the MWA has “certified” me as a professional mystery writer. (Odd, isn’t it?) I had to submit proof of having earned money as a mystery writer along with my application for membership. One of the benefits of membership in the MWA is that I’m permitted to submit short-story manuscripts for possible publication in each year's MWA anthology.

• Oddly enough, in 2012 my short story "The Very Private Detectress" was selected for the MWA anthology. Look for it in Grand Central Publishing's The Mystery Box (2013).

A few years ago a mystery-writer famous for her paranormal mysteries, Charlaine Harris, was selected to edit the anthology. Ms. Harris was said to be looking for paranormal-mystery short stories. I thought about writing a short story specifically for that year’s anthology. But as I kicked around ideas, I realized that the traditional short-story form is too limiting for most of what I’m interested in writing. Since anthology submissions for the year had to be “paranormal,” it seemed abnormal to write a normal short story.
I feel a good short story is a work of art, but there’s something about the specifications for the anthology that struck me as, well, prehistoric: submissions couldn't exceed 7,000 words and had to “play fair with the reader,” whatever that meant in a paranormal story.

I thought briefly about writing a traditional short story and then giving it an online “extension.” I could have set up a blog with links and images and videos related to the ideas in the story, but the MWA was unlikely to approve of the idea or to promote the blog. That would mean that readers of the anthology (assuming my story was selected, which was an unlikely event) would have no way of knowing the interactive enhancements were “out there.”

Then I remembered www.textnovel.com. This website permits writers to post text-only stories formatted for access via cell phones, and it also permits serialization of stories, and—better than the MWA anthology's pennies per word—it offered an annual $1000 prize for the best serialized novel of the year. So, I posted my long short story, Chalk Ghost, on www.textnovel.com with hyperlinks, including links to this blog.

Then a miracle occurred: Chalk Ghost in it's incarnation as a long short story was selected as the www.textnovel.com 2009 Grand Prize Co-Winner. I use the word "incarnation" because for the next three years I rewrote and rewrote the story, first to please the agent who was interested in representing Chalk Ghost if it grew into a novel, then to please myself. In early 2012 Chalk Ghost had become a completely new creature: Snow Ghost, a novel. Then I realized that the Chalk Ghost still longed to return to earth and find her grave.

Now Chalk Ghost is about to manifest herself as a novella in both e-book and paperback format.

In the meantime, while Chalk Ghost is in process, my short-story collection The Evil That Men Do is now available for the Kindle.

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Chalk Ghost: eBook-Jacket Blurb

Once upon a moonless Halloween, long after the last shouts of “trick or treat” had echoed in the night, a cloaked figure emerged from the fog and walked along a dirt road that cut through a neighborhood of rundown Victorian houses. In front of the only house with a lighted window, the shadowy figure turned up the flagstone path to the front porch and climbed the steps. There the figure peered inside through a gap in the curtains that hung across a plateglass window. A border collie inside growled at the figure on the porch.

“Mauks, where ah you?” a young woman’s voice called from another room. The dog’s ears perked up. He growled again as he backed away from the window and then turned and padded out of the room.

The figure drew something from a fold in its billowy white cloak—a cellphone—then tapped in a phone number. Somewhere behind the plateglass window a muffled ringtone sounded a dozen times. The dog returned to the front room followed by a black-haired young woman who picked up a cellphone from the sofa and flipped it open but did not bother to put it to her ear.

The Chalk Ghost left a voice message on her phone that she would never hear: “Death calling.”

In October 2012, the Chalk Ghost will manifest herself in e-book and paperback format.

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