Today, for the sake of the Halloween season, The Roanoke Times (my employer!) published my new ghost story “
The Helping Hand.” This was an unexpected boon! I’m honored that my colleagues in the Features Department gave me a chance to exercise my fiction-writing chops for the paper, something I’ve only gotten to do once before.* This tale is much more family-friendly than my usual work, but it was still a lot of fun to write.
And talk all you want about the problems newspapers are having: this story was seen by thousands upon thousands more people than would ever see it in any given genre venue, hee. (Alas, too bad I can’t do this every day.)
On my work blog,
I offered a little explanation of what I had in mind when I put the story together. Click the photo illustration by my co-worker Stephanie Klein-Davis below to give the tale a read.
*The first time was in 2004, when I wrote a Christmas story with a sci-fi twist called “
A Ghost of Christmas Future.” No literal ghosts in that one - it was all metaphor. Trust me. #SFWApro
Originally published at
DESCENT INTO LIGHT. You can comment here or
there.