My 1st Novel - Part 1

Part One

Maggie McAuley is pretty sure she's dead. But that's the least of her problems.

Maggie's biggest problem is that I really had no experience in writing for print. I'd written dozens of commercials, plays, and (almost produced) film scripts, but Once Dead was my first serious and dedicated attempt to write a novel.

I was freelancing, had some time between projects, and I had an idea that seemed perfect for a book. I worked on it for about a year and pitched it at a few writers' conferences. Along with raised eyebrows of interest, I got requests for partials and fulls.

The rejections were personal and effusive...but something wasn't quite right, and a polite refusal is still a rejection. I worked on the synopsis and queried another targeted list of agents. The best rejection, after a request for a partial, was "Not what I expected."

 I was missing something, but I wasn't sure what.

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I wrote my first novel long-hand in a small notebook. With a fountain pen.

I'm certain I supported a good percentage of the American coffee trade, tucked away in a corner of the local coffee shop, sans computer, scribbling out the lives of my characters. It wasn't a matter of technophobia: I'd written all my scripts on a computer since 1980. The story for Once Dead simply seemed to want to be written by hand.

The idea began with a few notes. What if... we learned what happens when we die?

I knew I wanted to set the story in Santa Cruz, California. I'd moved back to Ohio and missed California. I loved living there; I figured even the dead would love it. Which led to thinking my protagonist might already be dead and maybe my heroine would be a ghost, but... why? And then what? Who could be a ghost's antagonist?

Usually, ghosts in novels and films tended to be connected (and able to communicate with) someone living... stuck being a ghost until they were released by assisting the living.

Poltergeist. Topper. Ghost. Ghostbusters. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Heaven Can Wait.

But what if that wasn't the  way it worked? Was there some underlying logic to becoming and remaining a ghost? We know how the living perceive ghosts: transparent forms, floating orbs, strange sounds, mists, moving objects. But how do the dead see the living?

Where to start. Who was dead and why? What was the story arc? Write what you know, but — except for one eerie episode when I was still in college — I didn't know much of anything about ghosts.