My father got sick pre-vaccine and his life will never be the same. My daughter was isolated and homeschooling. My day job is in communications for a healthcare company and COVID was part of every conversation and every email.
I wrote – and more importantly, revised – The Promise of Lost Things in the heart of the pandemic. But in retrospect there is something almost removed and, dare I say, manageable, about their grieving process.
The grief in Prelude – published in 2020 but written pre-pandemic – is obvious, one of my main characters has lost his beloved parents, another is grieving her teacher/guardian. The entire business of mediums is to help people manage their grief, like some sort of otherworldly therapists. After all, you can’t have a ghost without a death and without people left alive to grieve them. What I kept coming back to was grief and loss. When that didn’t really work, I moved the story further and further from the truth. I started drafting a fictional retelling about the Fox sisters, two teen girls who had been accused of faking their purported powers as mediums.
How cool would it be, I thought, to set a YA book in a town filled with mediums and ghosts. Hilaire books came from an episode of Mysteries at the Museum and a piece they did on the spiritualist community of Lily Dale, NY. Most of my books have been inspired by news stories of one sort or the other and my St. Or at least not horrific in the typical sense.
That said, it was never where my interests fell and so, when I started developing the idea for my 2020 book, Prelude for Lost Souls, which is set in a town where everyone speaks to the dead, and it’s companion book, The Promise of Lost Things, which comes out today (July 5, 2022), I tasked myself with writing the tale of a haunted town in a way that wasn’t horrific. I was a little more open to horror books (and remember staying up multiple nights in a row to read Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches and then being unable to go to sleep).
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