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.

Dead Works is a psychological ghost story is about a teenager in therapy because he is seeing ghosts. 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.

Writing fictional accounts of therapy can be tricky for a number of reasons. First, therapy does not necessarily proceed in a linear fashion. That’s not to say there aren’t identifiable phases and predictable sequences. The sequences and phases that make up the therapy process, along with specific therapist behaviors and skills, can be objectively measured. It’s just that the process isn’t necessarily neat. Second, client gains occur incrementally over time. You don’t get those dramatic insightful “aha” moments that are portrayed in movies in which the client is cured in one theatrical session. Third, since change can be incremental, the process may not make for exciting reading. Thus, I had to sacrifice some factual preciseness when writing Dead Works to keep the pace at a dramatic clip.

The therapeutic process tends to proceed through certain phases. When clients begin therapy, they have the opportunity to tell their story. That is, talk about what is troubling them and what they are looking for in therapy. In the first session, the therapist may ask a lot of questions to help the client with this process – essentially the therapist does an intake. During this first session and with every session that follows, the therapist uses a series of active listening and empathy skills to display positive regard for the client and to enhance the therapeutic relationship. Let’s be clear, people may find the prospect of going into an office and telling a complete stranger about their most private thoughts and feelings quite unnerving. So, the therapist has to work hard to gain the client’s trust. He/she does this by listening, being non-judgmental, and being empathic.

As client concerns become clarified and the relationship develops, goals become clearer. The therapist often has a number of different strategies at his/her disposal to help the client make the necessary changes in order to meet those goals. There strategies are heavily tied to the therapist’s theoretical orientation. You’ve heard of these theoretical orientations before – they have readily slipped into everyday usage: cognitive therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy, psychodynamic therapy, solution-focused therapy, and so on. My personal theoretical orientation is cognitive-behavioral – and this influences my training of students, my research, and my therapy when I have conducted it in the past.

All therapists, regardless of theoretical orientation, engage in empathy and active listening in order to develop a trusting relationship.  However, the speed through which they move through the phases of therapy or the factors that they focus on with the clients may differ based on the orientation.  Clients will have homework, though, regardless of orientation. The process moves a bit more quickly if clients are willing to do take what they learn in therapy and apply it in real life in between sessions.

When I started Dead Works, I knew I would have to give up a lot of the therapy process. Much of the work takes place “off-screen”. It may not be readily noticeable, but Eric’s theoretical orientation is cognitive-behavioral. You can “see” this by his focus on what Greg is thinking and doing as he is coping with his problems. At the same time, however, Eric is not ignoring Greg’s emotions. He uses active listening and empathy and reflects what Greg is feeling. I try to demonstrate this for the purpose of making their developing relationship appear authentic.

I’ll talk about the content of their sessions in an upcoming blog… 

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 suppose I should be embarrassed – a person my age loving snow as much as I do. No one anywhere remotely near my age seems to share my childlike enthusiasm for winter precipitation as much as me. In fact, most people can’t understand it. My neighbor gives me a dirty look every time we run into each other shoveling driveways – as if I am to blame for the snowfall.

I loved it as a kid of course. I grew up in Port Chester, NY, a village just northeast of New York City, bordering Connecticut – and sits right on Long Island Sound. The ocean has a huge influence on snowfall, and it is usually adverse. Unless positioned just right with an adequate amount of cold air to the north, the storm systems moving up the coast have a habit of drawing in the relatively warmer air over the Atlantic. This typically turns falling snow into rain about midway through the storm. I just hated that – and it happened more often than not. I always felt cheated as a couple of inches of pristine snow turned into a slushy mess as the air mass warmed and turned the flakes into raindrops.

There were some memorable snowstorms and blizzards, however, when I was a kid. My favorite was dubbed the Lindsay-Storm in February 1969. Mayor Lindsay of New York City was widely criticized for his ability, or in this case, inability to clear the metro area of over 20 inches of snow. The worst hit was Queens which was snowbound for days.

I remember the storm vividly. There was a chance for an inch or two before it was forecasted to turn to rain. That didn’t happen, and the meteorologists were taken by surprised by the intensity of the storm. As it turned out, I broke my arm three days before in a track meet. I was a freshman in high school and I was tripped within the first 10-20 yards of a 440 yard run. In bracing for the fall, my left elbow took the brunt of the force. Snap. I got up and finished the race, and it was only after I calmed down that I realized how much my arm was hurting. Incidentally, I badly scraped my right arm at the same time – it was almost like a burn. The scar still remains visible.

Anyhow, with a broken arm, I couldn’t shovel the driveway. That task was left to my father. The snow was so heavy, that school was closed for days (4 if I remember correctly). The snow fell on a Sunday and school was cancelled through Thursday.

Another memorable storm, one that can never be experienced again, was the blizzard of 1978 which hit the Midwest. I was a graduate psychology student at the University of Notre Dame. South Bend, Indiana received nearly 40 inches of snow - a total that I will never forget. I believe there was also about a foot of snow on the ground before the storm hit. Classes at Notre Dame were canceled for the first time in its history – and they were shut for a number of days.

You can probably sense my love for snow – who else can remember such stupid facts. When my wife and I moved to Milwaukee in 1986, I was hoping to living in a land of heavy snow. Sadly, that hasn’t been quite the case. True, it snows a fair amount in Milwaukee, but we don’t seem to get the huge storms. There have been some nice 10-15 inch snowfalls over the years, but Milwaukee seems to get a lot of 2-4 inch snowfalls – which add up of course. Generally, though, we seem too far north with no big or particularly close source of moisture (the biggest being the Gulf of Mexico). Sigh.

One of these days, though, maybe we’ll get on of those Midwest super-bombs like 1978….

I probably do not represent the typical demographic of horror lovers (but really, who does - the fan base is more diverse than I originally thought). Nonetheless, I have found that the current trend in horror movies towards atmospheric chills instead of gore and torture porn is much to my liking. I watched Insidious 2 last night and loved it - as much as I enjoyed the original Insidious. Also this year, Sinister, Mama, Dark Skies, The Conjuring, and Jug Face were all pleasant surprises. I suppose you cannot call these subtle films, but they are creepy and spooky instead of blood fests. Anyway, they have been excellent examples of horror - great characters, fine acting and technically well accomplished. I hope to see more of these similar films in the future.

I've been taking a respite thanks to the Christmas holidays. One of the benefits of being a university professor is the breather you get over the holidays after you finish your fall semester final grading (a few days before Christmas) and before the preparation of the spring semester after January first. I went snowshoeing for the first time since my wife's stroke (the accompanying picture is one that I took in the process). Other than that, I've been reading Doctor Sleep by Stephen King. I saved this one for the holidays when I could hunker down and enjoy it. A few things have gotten in the way of long stretches of reading time, so I am no as far along as I had hoped I would be (plus, I am a slow reader), but I am enjoying it immensely. 

My novel Birth Offering has been in release since mid-September. Like most other first time authors, I revised the work more times than I could count - and reread it a few more times than that figure (whatever it is). I thought I had captured every typo, every grammatical error, every homonym error, every misplaced comma, and every extra space. Then the publisher's editor read and reread Birth Offering and found a few more. Then I found a few additional ones after the editing process, and finally caught a handful more when looking at the proofs. 
 
I thought I had found them all.

Alas, no. 

As friends grabbed the first available copies, many gave me high marks for the story, but would whisper, "you know, there were a few mistakes, errors, typos... your editor missed a few..." So on and so forth. 

I really am quite embarrassed about this. As a university professor, I get after my graduate students about catching this stuff. As a psychologist, I consider myself a pretty decent researcher and scholarly writer. So, to make these mistakes is rather humiliating. (As I write this blog, I am almost fearful of some hidden typos seeing the light of day after I hit "publish".) Some friends have said that "you need a second set of eyes" and have graciously volunteered to read the galley proofs of the second novel coming sometime in 2014 (Dead Works). I'll definitely take them up on it. Some say that my editor should have caught these errors. Maybe so. Probably so. Still my name is on the book, so I consider it my responsibility.

Over the past few months, I have offered reviews of numerous horror novels on this blog. In some of them I would indicate that typos existed - and even contact the author to let him/her know. I never did this to embarrass them. Rather, I thought they would want to know. At the time, I thought I would certainly want to know. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, I feel the embarrassment - and subsequently feel bad about possibly humiliating any other author by pointing out the mistakes. 

Now that I know what it the experience is like to find out that your book has errors, do I still hold the view that I want to know these things? Actually, yes. As humbling as it is, how else are you going to improve your craft? I suppose knowing is better than not knowing.

I think.

Once the demands of caretaking for my wife began to take their toll, I knew that I needed professional help. I won’t go through the details of my therapy. I saw a psychologist for a year for psychotherapy, and a psychiatrist for medication. To be honest, I wondered if the psychologist could do anything for someone who “knew all the tricks”, but she was great – she took therapy in directions that I didn’t see coming. We developed strategies to deal with the immediate stressors (including the constant vomiting) and then addressed the long term personal and existential issues. She was close to retirement age when we started, and she retired after a year. But by that time, I felt like I was in pretty decent shape. I have kept seeing my psychiatrist, though. She picked up the slack of the therapy as crises came and went over the past few years, but we also decided staying on the medication would be a good course of action as anxiety has always been a part of my life.

Since that time, my wife’s recovery has proceeded well, although she will always have fairly extensive stroke-related disabilities. Our lives have been irrevocably changed, but in many ways our relationship has improved. We take things in stride considerably better that we used to. Things are not as stressful or upsetting. We have more fun together. How all this happened is hard to describe. But it has. Even when she was hospitalized again for a perforated bowel that involved surgery, more complications, and six months with a colostomy bag, the feelings of dread and anguish never returned to the levels they were. By the way, just like my inability to handle vomit, I never was one for handling shit. I had to look away when changing diapers, for instance. But, I was able to handle daily colostomy bag changes like a pro. Actually, that procedure is astounding. It’s amazing what physicians can do.

So, there it is. This is the end (at least for now) of my multiple blogs covering our own personal horror story. How we made it through that first year is beyond me. Yet, making it through has taught me (and us) much. The most obvious outcomes have been an increased sense of inner calmness and patience. While we were in the midst of it all, I was never able to see the end. I felt swallowed into a black morass, and I was so afraid all of the time. Hence the horror. Maybe this deepened my fondness for horror stories. Who knows?