Welcome – thank you for being here. I hope your Thanksgiving holiday was free of zombies and that no blood sucking creatures found you. I am deeply aware of how much I have to be grateful for this year. I’m thrilled at the family and friends who distract me from writing, for example, because there was a time when I had little company. Life is better with noisy people in it, no doubt. I’m also immensely grateful to Ghastly for one sole reason:

Sometimes Ghastly is Right.

We all know that the traditional publishing model in which someone else decided what was publishable is gone. Blogs and digital publishing allow anyone to self-publish. This change gives a lot of writers the opportunity to share their work. For a guy like me, that’s a blessing. But it’s a curse for consumers because publishable (as determined by the traditional publishing industry) related to highly readable. In other words, a publishable story was deemed worthy of someone’s investment of time and money because it had all the essential elements; conflict, a complex character, a major hook that addicted the reader and all the subsequent structural plot points needed to give readers a vicarious experience. Now, anyone with a little free time can put up a blog and post what they consider a story. This is where it gets complicated because there’s a world of difference between typed pages and a STORY. The elements aren’t optional – they’re the way it is and nothing stands between the public and a story that lacks them but a writer’s Ghastly.

So, I’ve learned that the sinking feeling that something’s not quite right with a manuscript may not be a case of self-doubt, but a dose of truth. It’s writer-instinct raising a red flag about the character’s development or the sequence of plot points. Sure, Ghastly twists this in a nasty way and rubs it in my face, but he’s still worth paying attention to. The last thing any writer can afford to do, after all, is fall prey to a delusion that his muse is perfect, that story telling principles don’t apply to him or that his work somehow transcends the requirements of storytelling. Ghastly, I know, is my motivating force behind acquiring new knowledge and putting it in action. He’s forced me to read as a writer, to study, to experiment and to listen. He’s made me a better writer and, for that, I am in his debt.

Sinister – Chapter 46 went live this morning. Ghastly had a lot to say about the chapter. He’s not completely at ease with it, but for the draft we’re in now that’s okay. I’ll listen to his croaking whispers in the revision phase. For now, I’m going to give him a hug and offer him the last turkey sandwich. Sure, he’ll always be my mortal enemy, a hideous visage of self-doubt and deceit. But in the quiet moments before hitting Publish in WordPress, he’s also my all-time-best-pal. For that reason alone, I’ll never banish him completely.

See you soon. Tell your Ghastly thank you and let me know what you think of the story. Peace and wicked dreams. LL