Thursday, December 9, 2010

Spook books

Not long ago (up until the 1800s, to be precise), some people did not "believe" in giant squid.

Sailors swore they saw such creatures but lacked cameras to document rare sightings, so landlubbers attributed the outlandish claims to a trick of the eye or scurvy. (Wait, does scurvy bring about hallucinations or dementia? Well, they chalked it up to
some kind of sea disease.)

I would've been one of the believing landlubbers. The unknown is all around us, and sometimes we don't even know that we don't know. Whenever possible, I write about the supernatural, particularly ghosts.

One is a practical guidebook in trying to prove whether or not ghosts are real:

One is part of a series of high-interest nonfiction books:

For this series, called Atomic!, I also wrote on vampires (though this was several years ago, the topic was already long overdone then), aliens and UFOs, and mummies (addressing both the real deal, meaning preserved corpses, and the supernatural qualities associated with them).

Speaking of E.T.s, for a Weekly Reader publication, I pitched and wrote a short play about a strange visitor from another school...or possibly planet.

I've written several novels involving the supernatural. One is a quirky spin on werewolves, though you'd have a hard time knowing that from the title:

My proposed title was Instant Instinct. Maybe that's no better, but the point was to immediately indicate that this is not your typical werewolf treatment. (Another short play I wrote was built around another twist on lycanthropy.)

The following is my favorite of the bunch, partly because it focuses on a supernatural denizen that doesn't get as much attention as the ones above. Do you know that this is?:

My original title was The Lightning Gnomes. I thought that would be quite a curiosity, more so than what it was changed to. But there was a concern that gnomes, not widely considered one of the hipper of mythical creatures, would not grab eyeballs (whereas I think their relative scarcity is what makes them marketable).

Another I wrote, The Ghost Champion, is forthcoming. Exactly when?

Appropriately enough, that is still unknown.

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