The Ghosts of Skullhaven

Here's a teaser. This is a spooky (yet fun) middle grade book. I'm including Chapter 1 below for your enjoyment. It is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble in digital (ebook) form. Enjoy!


CHAPTER 1

It was a day Lilly would never forget.

She could smell the sweet scent of lilac perfume when her mother kissed her goodbye for the last time. She didn’t know it was the smell of lilacs, nor did she realize it was her mother’s last kiss, because Lilly was only four years old. But she would remember both of these things—forever.

Be a good little girl now, Lilly, and don’t give Nana any trouble, her mother had told her. I’ll be right back.

Lilly watched from the railing of the wooden porch as her mother got into the car and headed it down the driveway. While she drove away, the tailpipe puffed out a tiny stream of grey smoke that dissipated quickly in the cool autumn air. After the car had turned the corner and disappeared from sight, Lilly remembered her mother’s last words.

I’ll be right back, she had said. Right back.

But Lilly’s mother didn’t come right back.

She didn’t come back the next day. Or the next. And even though Lilly kept asking where her mother was, no one could tell her, because no one knew what had become of her.

And Lilly wondered what she had done wrong.

When Nana died in her sleep a short time after that, Lilly was left all alone in the world. And since there was no one remaining to watch after her, Lilly was sent to the Sacred Heart Orphanage in Skullhaven.

Not to visit. To live there. With Sister Rosemary and Sister Carmen and a lot of other children she didn’t know. To Lilly, it was very scary and unfamiliar. The other children played and laughed, but Lilly mostly sat by herself, wondering. And crying.

When she had first arrived, Lilly spent her time looking out the big living room window. She would part the delicate lace curtains and watch the cars as they passed by on the highway, wishing one of them would turn into the gravel drive and her mother would be inside it. But she never was.

Lilly never stopped hoping. And wishing. But, after a year had passed, she stopped sitting by the window so often. After two years, she only glanced out it when she walked past. On the rare occasions when she heard the sound of car tires crunching on the gravel drive, her heart still raced. Could it be? But it was never the person she was waiting for. And wishing for.

As time passed, the other children were adopted. One by one, they moved away to start their new lives with their new families. Eventually, there were no children left at the Sacred Heart Orphanage—except Lilly.

What writers say...

When trying to come up with something of value for today’s post, I decided to ask some of my old writing friends about writing and see if they had any ideas or suggestions they could share. They actually had quite a bit to say. Quite a bit, on the various aspects of writing, that is far more valuable than anything I could come up with this morning.

C.S. Lewis spoke about originality. Here’s the comment: 

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

My dear friend, John Steinbeck, had this to say when we discussed the option of giving up:

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

Anne Sexton agreed and added this:

When I am writing I am doing the thing I was meant to do.

Ray Bradbury put it a little more graphically:

If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both – you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

I love the advice I received from my dear old friend, Ernest Hemingway:

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you’re rewriting a novel you will never be stuck.

I like Philip Martin's take on the whole writing thing:

In the end, writing skills are mostly absorbed, not learned. Like learning to speak as a native speaker, learning to write well is not just learning a set of rules or techniques. It’s a huge, messy body of deep language, inspired by bits of readings, conversations, incidents; it’s affected by how you were taught and where you live and who you want to become. For every convention, there is another way that may work better. For every rule, there are mavericks who succeed by flaunting it. There is no right or wrong way to write, no ten easy steps.

Anton Chekhov had some good advice on showing vs. telling:

Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

On giving up, George Orwell said:

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.  One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

And finally, Sinclair Lewis brought it all full circle when he said:

It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.

Opening Paragraph Critique

If you have a Work in Progress (aka WIP), I would love to read the opening paragraph. I'm sure some of my readers would love to read it as well. So, here's what you need to do. Click the LINK here and go to my website. Go to the COMMENTS page and fill out the form, pasting your opening paragraph into the comment. I will create a separate post of each writer's work, so that readers can comment on each post.

I hope everyone will be honest, constructive, yet kind in their critiques of the works posted.

CLICK THIS LINK

Something is Waiting in Morro Bay

Book 1 is on sale this month (May). The sequel, Deja Vu, is scheduled to be released in June, so you might want to read this one first so you're up to speed, so to speak. There's a link below if you'd like to check it out and see if it's something you might enjoy reading. It's a great choice for young readers who enjoy a dash of mystery mixed with a smidgeon of magic.

Book 1 will be priced at only 99 cents during the month of May. Just click the link below to check it out!

HERE'S A LINK

Also, if you'd like to check out the rest of my books, visit my website.

HERE'S A LINK