A ghost in the house

I’m deep into my next book, a ghost sto­ry. “Do you believe in ghosts?” I can hear some­one ask­ing. No, I don’t, but I believe in ghost sto­ries. I have writ­ten a few, such as Some­thing Upstairs, Book with­out Words, and  Seer of Shad­ows. There are a cou­ple of short ghost sto­ries, too. 

I find ghost sto­ries inter­est­ing, and a chal­lenge to write, mak­ing what I don’t believe believ­able. Along the way I’ve learned that a lot of young read­ers like to be scared. I often ask them why and. although I don’t get exact answers, I get the impres­sion that young peo­ple enjoy the intense emo­tions such sto­ries gen­er­ate, emo­tions, more­over, wrapped in the safe blan­ket of a book. Ghost sto­ries are a reminder that not know­ing every­thing means that there is much in the world and beyond that has yet to be dis­cov­ered. For young peo­ple who have not taught them­selves (or who have been taught) to be com­plete­ly ratio­nal, ghosts hov­er on the fuzzy edge of real­i­ty, a place of end­less possibilities.