Monday, October 31, 2016

Games of Death

Th's the season when graveyards speak and we've added our two-bits to the fray. Ghosts, spirits, and haunts are all the rage - our stories are aimed at a general audience of mixed ages and for the most part the stories are meant to be read aloud for entertainment.
  The stories come closer to being eerie more than scary as Lynnwood Montell mentioned about an earlier volume they are both "plausible and possible." 

   I'd like to say they were planned and constructed according to all the writing rules, but it isn't true. The stories evolved as we record the speech of the storyteller. The narrator tells the story and we follow them with our fingers on the computer keys, so that some are rather complex as the human mind and its experience.
   Ford Nashett's non-fiction piece from this collection, 'Ghosts of Baseball' was posted earlier this month when the World Series began.    
   Games of Death is a collection we had fun writing, because we took simple games and sports we enjoyed then twisted them into ghost stories.
   How many of you have played mumblety-peg in a vacant or behind a building where no adult can see and tell on you? We were warned not to play with knives, maybe that was why it was so much fun learning to put the right torque on the tip of the blade to bury it in the circle. I still have my 'Barlow Knife.' I carry it in my camera bag.
   'Snow on the Track' is built around snow mobile racing. A friend of Nash's was present about forty years ago when a driver was decapitated. Coincidence? Maybe, but just after he wrote the story a photo appeared on Piniterest of a driver with his helmet on a table beside him. In the helmet is a ghost's head - you explain it because I can't.
  I've read about haunted dolls being possessed. Our doll has waited for 100 years for someone to find her, and then free her from the roots of an ancient lilac bush. 'Swing in the Lilacs' is a ghost tale of a mother's grief at the loss of her child who found a new lease on life through the ghost of another little girl.

   Have a scary Halloween!
      

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