Excerpt: Thirty Days of Writing Hell, or How I discovered my Muse has ADD

The knocking and banging noises are now my constant companion. I suppose it’s my own fault really, my curiosity won the match against my common sense and now the unquiet dead are my constant companion. That’s really what they are you know, unquiet. Some can be a bit mischievous, they like hiding things like keys and pens, small items that take little effort to move. The trick to getting that stuff back is staying calm and asking nicely. 99.9% of the time, they’ll give you that final hint to where the item is and you can go on with your life. A rare handful of them are really grumpy with the living and want to do things to make life miserable. Thankfully not many of those ever come by here. What I seem to get are the lonely ones, the ones who just want someone to talk to. For them it’s been so long since someone heard them, since someone could respond to what they had to say that now they just don’t know when to shut up.

It all began when I started getting interested in EVPs. You know, ‘electronic voice phenomena.’ If I was one of the folks on Ghost Hunters, I’d now go into this potentially sonorous explanation of the ‘who, what, where, when and why’ of EVPs. Suffice to say, it really just works out to voices on tape that can’t be explained away by rational, scientific means. I read up on it, everything I could get my hands on. I learned how best to ‘capture’ EVPs, what software worked best to clean up the background noise so you could hear them better, things like that. Before long, it wasn’t unusual to always see a recorder in my hand or pocket. Then I heard about the ‘ghost box’ or ‘Frank’s box’ as some call it.

Some people believe that Ouija boards are dangerous things and that in the wrong hands this mass produced toy made from pressboard and plastic can open a gateway to the other side. I’m not sure I believe that. I do know that it’s harder to gauge something’s intention when you don’t have any inflection to work with and you have no idea what your subconscious is spewing out in the meantime. So as a matter of principle, I avoid them. Part of me wished I’d done the same with the ghost box.

A ghost box starts out its electronic life as a little armband am/fm radio from Radio Shack. Some clever cog named Frank figured out that if you clipped a certain wire you could get it to constantly scan the bands, never resting on one station and ceaselessly spew static and audio clips. What a person is supposed to do then is to ask questions and listen carefully, trying to decide if what they’re hearing is an answer or just the randomness of life. As far as the ghost hunting community in general is concerned, the jury is still out on the veracity of this tool.

Needless to say, it piqued my interest and before I knew it,

Today in local news, the body of a woman was found at the bottom of the ravine near Cliffside Cemetery. Details are sketchy at the moment, but witnesses say that clutched in her hand was a small radio that was still working. The oddest part about it is that all it seemed to play was part of the refrain from “I’ll be home for Christmas…”

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Stephen King had it right when he had Mort Rainey (the writer’s block suffering author from Secret Window) use the quote “All that matters is the ending, …and this one is perfect”. I have the perfect ending for a short story, albeit a dark one. It’s the paragraph just before this one and I love it. I know the story is supposed to be about a woman fascinated with ghost hunting. She gets herself deeper and deeper, allowing it to consume her life. Eventually, it ends up being the death of her. I intentionally wanted to leave readers guessing if it was suicide or murder and I didn’t want to fall into the trap of that trash flick ‘White Noise’ by having mysterious shadowy ‘evil ghost’ figures kill her.

However, I’ve run into a problem, namely getting from point A to point B. I have a start that I feel isn’t horrible and certainly doesn’t rank as ‘bad writing’… or at least not in my opinion. Yet, 4 paragraphs in, I’m stalled. Frankly I’m worried that if I keep going in the vein I’ve started in, I’m going to bore the reader… or myself writing it! My mind is already drifting onto other tracks, other ideas, leaving this one broken and discarded on the side of the road.

What happened to me? I used to be a prolific writer! I could crank out chapter after chapter, book after book and still have more ideas brewing that would keep my attention for more than three paragraphs. Now I’m lucky to get one idea a day. Is there some exhaustible source inside us all and I’m finally reaching the bottom of my own idea barrel? What am I going to do if I can’t write anymore?? Dear god, I don’t want to work retail hell again!!!