So Much Fun, So Little Time

Life is racing along like a bullet train on crack. Okay, technically I don’t think drugs affect mechanical devices, but you get the idea.

I have been busy. Two weeks ago I had my launch party for Shepherd’s Fall. Thank you to everyone who attended, I am so grateful for your support. Last weekend I participated in an author panel with Cate Masters, Larry Kerr, Jennifer Harlow, Regge Episale, and Dennis Royer at Supernatural Saturday sponsored by the Mechanicsburg Mystery Bookshop and had a blast.

To top it off, I am working on the final draft of my first book in a new mystery series. More on that later. So, yeah I’m having more fun than circus clown on… well you know what I mean.

All Work And No Play

In honor of father’s day I just wanted to reflect on good dads and bad dads in fiction. Of course we all remember that Jack Torrance from The Shining was not exactly father of year. I don’t think I will ever forget the scenes of him chasing Danny through that haunted hotel.
And then on the good side there was… hmmm. I’m trying to come up with an exemplary father. Of course Harry Potter’s was dead, and Dorothy’s was dead, and Luke’s was thought dead, but turned out to be Darth, but in the end he turned out okay, I guess. Hercules had Zeus, and he was satisfactory in the father department, but he could be fairly tough. There was Pa in the Waltons and Pa on Little House on the Prairie, but I’m hard pressed to come up with a whole baseball team of fine fictitious dads.

Why is it so many dad’s are out of the picture in popular fiction?

I’m sure there are more examples in fiction; they just aren’t coming to mind. Because I have a great dad in real life, I guess I never thought about it before.

So on this Father’s day I want to say thanks to all the great real and fictitious dads. We don’t intend to take you for granted, but when you do your job well, we sometimes fail to remember.

Can you come up with any great dads in fiction?

The Eye of Sauron

With heartfelt apologies to J. R. R. Tolkien I titled my current post. After hearing this latest tale of a supernatural encounter, I had no choice.

Now anyone who knows me, understands I like chilling tales, at least from the safe distance of my imagination, but this story actually disturbed me.
I recently met a guy named Bob who sold me my new cell phone. In the course of him showing me how to use the cool device we started talking about the web, and I showed him my book trailer for Shepherd’s Fall. (I never miss an opportunity to hand out a bookmark or mention my novel. And why not? It took ten years of pounding away at the keyboard to get to this point, so I promote it everywhere I go.)

Anyway I digress. When Bob learned that I write ghost stories, you guessed it, he had one to tell me. And boy was this one a killer.
As a teenager, Bob awoke one night to discover a little girl standing next to his bed sobbing. The fact that he could see through her sent him crabbing backward and slamming into the wall his bed was up against. The girl vanished, and Bob spent a sleepless night.

Over the next few years he saw the girl several times--sometimes her entire figure, other times just a suggestion of body.

Once, a visiting friend took a break from playing video games and went downstairs to the kitchen in the middle of the night. He saw the ghostly girl standing facing the refrigerator. The friend didn’t want her to turn around and see him, so he crept back up to Bob’s room without a snack.
Bob has no idea who the girl is. His family built the home, so it is not like she had lived in it before she became a life-challenged entity.

Bad enough to have one ghost in the house, his father had an even stranger experience. This is the one I find most disturbing.

On the night his father got baptized as a Christian, he came home and saw a giant red eye staring in a window to the master bedroom on the second floor. Angered by the apparition, Bob’s dad charged outside to the window in question and searched for the specter. This to me seemed like one of those bad moves in a horror movie, but then again, this part scares me.
He didn’t see it, but he walked around the yard commanding the spirit in the name of Christ to leave the house, because it was protected by God. This was several years ago and things have quieted down since.

I’m not sure why I find the big red eye more disturbing than other hauntings, but I do, maybe because it reminds me of the red pig eyes in the Amityville Horror.

Luckily Bob and his family haven’t experienced any paranormal events for some time, and he is comfortable in the home. I think I would sleep with one eye open, but that’s just me.