The grueling part of writing novels is the need to promote your own work. This is especially true of authors who get published by small presses like me or those who go the self-publishing route. Promotion involves an extensive amount of activity on social media sites, and for many authors this is a real chore (that’s me, too).

I have found one social media format quite enjoyable: Bublish. Please note that this blog is not an advertisement for the platform, nor am I receiving any reimbursement for writing about it. I am just excited about Bublish and how I have been able to promote my work.

Basically, Bublish is a social platform that allows authors to display excerpts from their work. Authors can choose as many excerpts as they want and to display them on whatever timeline they prefer. What makes Bublish rather interesting is the ability of authors to also write insights about the passages. That is, authors can include “behind the scenes” information that highlights their perspective, logic, or state of mind related to that passage. Have you ever wanted to know how an author got an idea for a particular scene or why they wrote a passage the way they did? Well, here is an opportunity to find out.

Right now, I have my two horror novels, Dead Works (3 excerpts and insights) and Birth Offering (4 excerpts and insights) loaded on Bublish. Using Bublish, I was able to address why I used child sexual abuse as an underlying theme of my recent ghost story, Dead Works. I found writing about this topic, even in the vague sense that it appears in Dead Works, rather difficult, but I was able to explain the process very succinctly in a book bubble and relate it to an excerpt. I was also able to explain what a Practicum class looks like to readers who are not familiar with the training of graduate psychology students.  For my first novel, Birth Offering, I was able to describe how I got the idea for the novel while on vacation (nearly 20 years ago!), and tie it to the very passage that was my first mental glimpse of the book.

I should be preparing at least one more excerpt and insight for Dead Works. I don’t know why I think four passages per novel represents a nice round number – but at the moment, that is where I am stuck. You never know, however, maybe more will appear. In the meantime, here is the link to my author page on Bublish: http://t.co/c7BSg8Ipaq

Check it out, and see if you like it and the platform itself.

In preparation for writing Dead Works, I watched a couple of those ghost-hunter themed shows on TV. I convinced myself that this counted as in-the-field research. Well, in the final analysis, this was a waste of time. Quite frankly, I found these shows ridiculous.  Granted, I was not anticipating solid science. I fully expected the shows to be rather lame (full disclosure: I’m skeptical of all reality TV and suspect these shows are script-driven).  Still, I was rather taken aback at how awful these shows were. I couldn’t understand how these “experts” (who, after all are in this line of work and who have supposedly confronted all kinds of strange occurrences) yelp, squeal, and scream at the slightest noise or the tiniest flickering shadow (“Did you see/hear that!!!” – well, no, to be perfectly honest). In addition, hours of footage must be filmed to find something remotely eerie (like a piece of dust floating before the camera lens). The edited version which purportedly shows this unconvincing “evidence” (and which viewers cannot see or hear) is packed into 60 minutes of silly nonsense. These shows only convinced me that the entire ghost-hunting industry is a giant hoax. Sadly, none of these shows were at all helpful in my efforts to gather data to inform Dead Works. So, multiple hours of time wasted….

One of these shows did strike a chord with me, however. Since I work a lot with kids, and since my fiction efforts typically involve adolescent characters, I was drawn to a show called Psychic Kids. I never saw it when it was on the air, but did watch a couple of episodes via Netflix. My initial reaction was that these episodes were heavily scripted and used child actors. The “host” was a guy who had a reputation for producing schlocky paranormal TV shows. If I’m not mistaken, I think he also identified himself as a medium, or something paranormal-ish.  He’d escort two or three older children or adolescents around a supposedly haunted house and ask them if they felt anything. When the kids invariably said no, he would ask leading questions about energy or a presence of spirits, and the kids would get the hint to reply “Oh, yeah, I do feel that…” Then this host would fill in the blanks and ask more incredibly leading questions such that the kids would “report” seeing a ghost who, when alive, lived/visited/rented/owned/died in the house. Of course, the kids and the hosts would gasp or shriek at the right times when the lights are off. And the viewers would end up shaking their heads and thinking wtf?

This show was all in good fun, I suppose, if it was scripted TV. However, the producers swore up and down that the kids were legitimate. If that is the case, then, this takes on an entirely new meaning.

If Psychic Kids was not a fictitious production, then the portrayal of actual kids was extremely bad taste – if not abusive. These kids, again if they were real (or portraying themselves), were troubled youngsters. They were struggling with something (and it wasn’t ghosts), and the network was exploiting them for entertainment purposes.  Did they have emotional or behavioral problems? There were hints that the kids had been struggling with personal problems (to make the urgency of the “haunting” more evident or to somehow add credence to the ghostly visions). For instance, the kids were breathlessly described as having issues with isolation, anger, anxiety, parent-child conflicts, and so on – often in response to being psychic. The episodes of the first season even employed a psychologist who served as co-star/co-host (or whatever you call it) and who took part in the “process”. I was especially irritated with her presence and her on-screen comments when talking with the kids and their parents. Psychologists should “first do no harm” – a basic ethical principle. Yet, she was earnestly trying to convince these kids that their emotional difficulties were the results of being haunted. How could this possibly be construed as doing no harm? Then, of course, there could have been other troubled kids who viewed the show on a frequent basis who may have been struggling with their own problems. What was the impact on them? Could this have diverted them or their parents away from the help they needed and pushed them towards an interpretation that was unhelpful? I hope not.

So, I certainly hoped the show was scripted with actors playing the roles of the kids. Otherwise, we had a disturbing portrayal of TV at its exploitive worst.

When it comes to ghosts and the paranormal, I have occasionally been asked, “Do you believe this stuff?”

People are often surprised to hear that the answer is “no”. I don’t believe in ghosts. I’ve not had any experiences with hauntings – although I have scared myself silly at times over the course of my life. The reason for this, of course, is that I love horror.

Ghost stories and supernatural tales are probably my favorite. Giant monsters are cool. Zombies and vampires…meh. Slasher tales? No, those are tiring and boring. For me, gore and vivid portrayals of flying body parts are not frightening. The imagination is more intense.

What? Love horror but not believe it ghosts (or monsters or demons or…whatever)? Why not?

Basically, I’ve been trained as a scientist – a psychologist, but a scientist nonetheless. Empirical support is important to the field of psychology.  You will see this perspective in Eric, the graduate student character in my second novel Dead Works (releasing soon). Like him, I believe much of the supernatural experiences reported by people can be described by natural causes. My goal is not to alienate or anger people with this comment (heaven knows I love horror tales), but this reflects my world-view based on the reliance of scientific evidence. Things like hallucinations, dreams, sleep paralysis, confirmation biases, errors in logic, memory and perceptual errors – these account for just about everything that is considered “supernatural”. I haven’t seen compelling evidence to suggest otherwise.

A fair number of supernatural claims are also hoaxes. I love looking at photos of ghosts and reading reports of possession. One of my favorite photos is a picture of a head of a youth looking around a doorway in the Amityville Horror house. This was supposed to be a picture of one of the kids murdered in the residence. Many of you have seen it, and it is downright creepy. I love it. However, it is actually a photo of a college student who was serving as a research assistant for Ed and Lorraine Warren who were conducting a psychic “investigation” of the house.  Too bad. (I still loved the movie The Conjuring based on one of the Warren’s cases.)

By the way, the stories behind such “true” accounts as the Amityville Horror and The Exorcist have been disclosed as hoaxes – sad but true. However, they remain dynamite stories just the same. I can – and do - enjoy them on that basis.

Dead Works is a psychological ghost story is about a teenager in therapy because he is seeing ghosts. I realize this sentence makes it sound like the movie The Sixth Sense, but the plot is considerably different. The psychologist character is a graduate student in counseling psychology who was working on his PhD. The young therapist is doing his practicum placement at the university counseling center and he is assigned a teenage client who is seeing ‘things’. 

I mentioned in my previous blog that I tried to make the therapy sessions between Eric, the doctoral counseling psychology student, and Greg, his teenage client, authentic as possible. However, while I think the portrayal is authentic, I wasn’t necessarily factual as I had to edit some of the more mundane components of therapy for dramatic purposes.  In addition, Greg comes off as more verbal and insightful than the average adolescent male, who tends to respond with monosyllabic utterances in these situations until feeling comfortable.

A critical skill all therapists need to display is empathy - which helps establish a therapeutic alliance and helps the client explore his/her problems. Part of being empathic involves being genuine and non-judgmental, which means accepting what the client says and not making critical evaluations of the person. Therefore, in Dead Works, when Greg talks about seeing ghosts, Eric listens and reacts as if he was talking about everyday adolescent concerns like problems in school or conflicts with siblings. He works hard at not judging or ridiculing his client.

Since Dead Works is ostensibly a ghost story, much of the plot takes this “problem” and runs with it. It reality, Eric would have explored other issues or factors that might be playing a role in Greg’s life. With a little digging, Eric and Greg may begin to see the ghost issue as a byproduct of something else like trauma or abuse. The hauntings could actually “fall away” or become unimportant as other issues are addressed. In the case of Dead Works, though, I kept the ghosts front and center in the therapy process and had a blast doing it. For instance, I was able to weave in features of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as Eric helped Greg consider alternative explanations for the hauntings. Eric also considers Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as a possible intervention for Greg. Finally, Eric’s discussion of Greg in his practicum class also demonstrates how student therapists can explore difficult cases in a supportive atmosphere

Ghosts have not been a frequent occurrence in therapy sessions in my professional experience. My love of horror has not been fed by professional circumstances. That comes from my own twisted enjoyment of things spooky. The heartbreaking, disturbing, and sad experiences related by kids with whom I’ve worked (or discussed by my practicum students in class) are all decidedly human and earthbound. Trauma, abuse, poverty, dysfunctional families, illness, stress, anxiety, anger, depression… the list goes on and on – these are the topics of therapy.

My follow-up fiction-writing efforts after Birth Offering have resulted in two different novellas: Dead Works and Sweet Aswang. Both are around 50,000 words, but tell two completely different types of stories. Sweet Aswang, which was started before Dead Works, is an effort of mine to recapture the monster stories/movies of my youth in the 1950s and 1960s. Sweet Aswang is the first, as far as I know, Type 1 diabetes themed horror books.  I am still tinkering with SA, so it will probably not see the light of day until 2015 (if I’m lucky).  I will have more to say about SA when the time is right.

Dead Works is a psychological ghost story is about a teenager in therapy because he is seeing ghosts. I realize this sentence makes it sound like the movie The Sixth Sense, but the plot is considerably different. My professional life as a professor and a psychologist contributed a chunk of the source material. The psychologist character is a graduate student in counseling psychology who was working on his PhD. The young therapist is doing his practicum placement at the university counseling center and he is assigned a teenage client who is seeing ‘things’.  I regularly teach a Practicum course where the students are being supervised while they provide therapy. Much of the context for the novel takes place within the counseling relationship between the teen and the student therapist, the story is told from the graduate student’s point of view. The book was a lot of fun to write.

The original intent of DW was to describe a ghost hunting expedition in a local that does not go according to plan. I had the basic outline in my head, including a shocking ending – well, which seemed shocking at the time I thought of it. One of the characters had a backstory that involved him seeing a therapist when he was a child – in part due to his paranormal experiences (that is, seeing ghosts). I became increasingly interested in this detail to the point that this plot line took over and became the entire focus of Dead Works.

Once I gave in to the urge to make this episode a book in itself, I had to flesh out the story. I knew almost immediately that the bulk of the story had to take place within the context of therapy sessions. Now, conducting therapy is both a humbling and a challenging endeavor. The work can be exciting and interesting, especially for the client and therapist. But to a casual observer, or a reader, the process of therapy may often be as exciting as watching paint dry. Therefore, the dilemma involved finding a way to be accurate and authentic in describing the process, but not necessarily factual. Factually presenting therapy would drive most readers to boredom. I ended up only illustrating the plot-relevant portions of the therapy and not writing about the mundane stuff.

In addition to the “editing job” on the counseling exchanges, I also decided to provide some backdrop to the two main characters: Eric, the grad student psychologist-in-training and Greg, the teenage client. The vast majority of the story is told from Eric’s point of view. About 60% of the time he is in sessions with Greg. Eric’s remaining time is with friends and in class. Eric also needed a complex past for him to handle Greg’s difficult case – so this is covered at length.

The only time the point of view switches to Greg is during some of his counseling sessions. I decided that having him exclusively narrate his ghostly experiences ran the risk of emotionally distancing the impact of these events for the reader. So, to shake things up, the perspective often shifted to Greg as he is relating his accounts. This doesn’t occur all of the time, but enough to provide variety. I think it works well.

More to talk about in future blogs: skepticism, what therapy is like, impact of abuse, and who knows what else.

I have recently completed the editorial process on my second novel, Dead Works. Damnation Books will publish the novel sometime later in 2014 - I think. My first novel, Birth Offering, was also published by Damnation Books. A short teaser:

Dead Works is a horror novel in which a doctoral student in counseling psychology must help a boy make sense of ghostly and terrifying visions - while simultaneously struggling against a world where acts of brutal evil threaten to destroy them both. 

More information to come...