(Note: This piece originally ran in Women Writers ~ Women’s Books Online Magazine in early September 2024. I thought it would be fun to share in my own space during this most ghostly month of all. Enjoy!)
The ghosts came to town in 2020. October, to be exact. That’s when I contemplated taking a stab at my first National Novel Writers Month (NANOWRIMO), the challenge to draft a 50,000-word book in the month of November. The experience resulted in the first whispers of SECRETS OF THE BLUE MOON. My debut novel follows Marnie Putnam, a grieving woman who battles her own personal ghosts as she chronicles the haunted history of a quaint Georgia town.
Did I set out to write a ghost story? No. The tale began as balm for my soul at a time when I’d grown tired of people spouting their thoughts on vaccines and Presidential politics. Many were shouting; few listened. Travel was off the table, as was visiting favorite restaurants and funky shops in the lake town near where I live. I mourned my old life. Yet I considered myself lucky. I didn’t have to get up each morning, go out into the world, and face the unknown.
When I sat down to write, I created a town like the one I was missing. I named it Lake Gardner. Then Marnie appeared to me. She said her marriage was rocky after losing two pregnancies and a job. To heal, she briefly fled to Lake Gardner for space. There she was haunted by past regrets and an unknown future. Something more sinister too. Something not of this world.
Enter the ghosts, who came in myriad forms, appearing as flames, orbs, and even a crow. They represented fear and longing, sorrow and guilt. And maybe—maybe?—even hope.
At first, I thought those ghosts came from nowhere and just for Marnie. Later, I realized that they also came, in part, for me. They came to buffer me from my obsessions of too many lives lost. They came to distract me from thoughts of my own death. They came with a kick-butt warning: “Don’t you lose hope, old lady! Your grandkids still have plenty to teach you.”
Each of us needs to find a way to process our fears during uncertain times. My way was to write.
For more than a year, I honed Marnie’s story, struggling through workshops and major revisions, beta reads and edits. When a small press offered a contract, I was elated. But it came with two caveats: Take the pandemic out and remove any references to the Presidential election. “No one,” the editor said, “wants to re-visit the events of 2020.”
I pondered that because those very events drive Marnie’s story. She loses her job due to COVID. She runs to Lake Gardner, feeling isolated from a husband who can’t understand how deeply she mourns yet another loss. In Lake Gardner, she experiences even more isolation and loneliness.
And then there’s the blue moon. In 2020, it rose on Halloween night, an anomaly that happens only once every nineteen years.
Marnie’s search for peace is interrupted on Halloween night 2020 when a tragedy occurs in Lake Gardner. It mirrors another horror that happened there in 2012, under another blue moon. It stirs up spirits, old and new, who refuse to leave Marnie alone until she helps them find the answers they desperately seek. She believes helping them will help her too. If she can survive.
When the ghosts came to town in October 2020, it’s true, they came for Marnie. The pandemic and pesky politics, coupled with ghosts, all factored into her journey. They affected her judgment and faith, as well as her sense of purpose. They influenced how she experienced life and how she made a plan to move forward.
Yet those ghosts came for me, too. They came to help me process my own fears in those difficult times. Given all that, how could I bury all the 2020 references that clung to my pages?
Turns out I couldn't.
If a quaint town in Georgia could refuse to bury its ghosts, I decided I could too. And I did.
**
Secrets of the Blue Moon serves up speculative book club fiction that celebrates family and friendship and small-town Southern living. It’s sprinkled with gentle humor and mystery and ghosts that don’t want to let the past go. At times a bit gristly, it deals with topics including grief, self-harm, and death. Yet at its core, it is an uplifting story of hope, resilience, and redemption.
If you like stories that haunt you while also filling your heart, pick up Secrets of the Blue Moon today…and read it with the lights on tonight. Go to www(dot)janheidrichrice(dot)com to order.
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