Looking Back on 20 Years of Writing, Part 2: The Ghost in the Olive Grove (1999)

As I continue this journey through time that is a look back at the first twenty years of my writing career, I want to allow myself to be as transported as I can. I want to put myself back in the past, in order to recall everything that was going on around me as I wrote, every influence, every part of the story behind the story. Sometimes, there is an epic tale behind the tale; as with the last entry. Sometimes the work is fueled by my personal struggles, my personal pain.

"The Ghost in the Olive Grove," which turns twenty next month, is not one of those stories.

It was actually 1998 when I wrote it. To put it in context, as mentioned in "Part 1," I had written mostly bizarre short fiction since my teens. I had never fancied myself a serious writer, but I had so many stories within me. I wrote all the time, and it was a task. I seldom even used dialogue in these silly tales of mine. But writing was an urge I could not defy. When a story came into my mind, it always did so with an urgency, demanding to be brought forth into the realm in which I (mostly) lived.

My first attempt at "serious" fiction had been the novel Cry, Wolf, which I had finished a rough draft of the previous year. I had also written the short story "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep," which I had been utterly surprised by. As "The Ghost in the Olive Grove" came to me, I still had not quite gotten used to the idea that I might be a devoted writer of "serious fiction" someday. My novel was collecting dust. "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep" was safely tucked away in a folder. I thought these were things I might pull out from time to time and marvel that I had written them. I thought, at best, I would share them with friends, though I was dabbling with the idea of submitting Cry, Wolf. Still, I thought them to be more or less peculiar impulses that I had gotten out of my system. I was a cartoonist, really. My ambition was to go to film school; to make the cartoons in my head a reality. I had no interest in being a prose writer; especially in the horror genre.

As I said, "The Ghost in the Olive Grove" did not come from a place of pain or personal demons. In fact, as with my cartoons, it came from a fairly silly place. This was in the days of forwarded e-mails; surveys that existed for the sole purpose of amusing our friends and/or testing our knowledge of them. I received one such e-mail from my friend Amy Dolton. I no longer recall the specifics of the questionnaire that I was to fill out about her, but I do recall that one of my answers led to this story.

The question was about where I saw her in the future. My imagination had its way with the answer. I told her that I saw her surrounded by children and desperate for love, only able to find solace in her torrid affair with a ghost in the olive grove. We had a laugh over it, but the instant I had typed in the phrase, "ghost in the olive grove," the seed of a short story began to take root and grow in my imagination. What if some sad young woman actually were to seek love in the arms of a ghost?

Not long after, I was compelled, as is always the case, to sit down and write what I was thinking. I based the protagonist on my friend Amy, because it amused me to do so. But I knew the dark turn this story was to take even before I typed the first word of it. I usually see the ending of a story or a novel, or even a series, before I ever sit down to write. It's the ending that generally compels me to finally write the beginning; so, it was the plot twist at the end that  finally pushed my hands to the keyboard and forced me to bring this one into the world.

Even knowing the tale would be dark, and having already written an entire novel, with which I was fairly satisfied, I was still surprised how well this story, about a ghost attempting to seduce a recent divorcee, flowed. I think I wrote it in a single day, and I showed it to my friends soon after. I showed it in particular to Amy. Amy got a good laugh out of the plot twist at the end, referring to herself thereafter as the "ghost luster."

Other friends, who missed the inside joke, still gave me positive feedback; aside from my mother, who never liked a tragic ending.

My accidental writing career began in this way though. I was writing tragedies. "Depressing fiction," as one of my more toxic co-workers later called it. I wasn't doing it deliberately. I wasn't consciously aware of the theme at all in my work. I was just writing the stories that came to me as they came to me. Perhaps I was dealing with wrangling a number of inner demons at the time, but I never identified any of them as being of particular influence on "The Ghost in the Olive Grove." It was just a fun story.

I put it in the folder with "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep" and moved on with my life.

The following year, things had changed. I had continued to write "serious fiction" and found myself flooded with ideas. This was to be my life, and I had accepted it. My first novel was about to be published, and I had started a website to try to build a readership before it hit. I had intended to put up a new short story every month that could be read on the site for free, but it had been two months since "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep" had been posted. I don't recall precisely, but I think the primary reason for the delay was the lack of a graphic to accompany the story.

I finally posted "The Ghost in the Olive Grove" in August of 1999, without a graphic. I got plenty of feedback from readers. It sounds odd to say it, but I was mostly surprised by how much the story terrified people. I know it was technically a horror story, since it involved a ghost, but I had never personally found it frightening. In my mind, I wasn't writing "horror," I was writing a story that had interested me. I wasn't trying to scare people. I specifically recall laughing with one of my friends who went on and on about how he was so scared by the story that he couldn't even finish reading it. He couldn't sleep after what little he had read of it. It made no sense to me, but he was far from alone. Twenty years later, I still see it as an interesting story; not frightening in the least. But what does author intention really have to do with reader perception? We all experience the same stories differently, and I value that.

Back in '99, my website wasn't as expansive as it is today. I didn't keep an archive of works on display. "The Ghost in the Olive Grove" replaced "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep" and was, in turn, replaced by "Aries' Cage" the following month.

Two years later, I had a much better website for showcasing my work. I wanted to re-post all of the old fiction I had taken down, so that new readers could have a better sampling of my work to help them decide whether or not to buy my novel.

I asked my friend and co-worker, Molly Brimer, to create a graphic to go along with the story this time. I actually handed her a picture of my friend Amy to use as a reference, since the character was an homage to her. This marked the beginning of a wonderful professional collaboration that has spanned nearly twenty years itself. The graphic Molly painted for the story remains its cover art to this day.

I re-posted "The Ghost in the Olive Grove," with Molly's new art at the top of page 1, as a free Microsoft Word file on my site on August 3, 2001. It has since been re-issued a number of times; most recently as a Kindle e-book on Amazon.com, and it remains one of my most widely-read works.

Aside from unexpectedly launching my horror-writing career, it was also, technically, the first publication in an ever-expanding universe of horror fiction. But I'll come back to that. I've still got twenty years to cover in this new blog series!

Next up: "Aries' Cage."