Houdini, suburban vampires, and ghostly guests...

By A.G. Howard

One of my favorite things about being a writer is meeting other writers. I love to see the way their minds work: what gives them the idea for a story, how they go about researching and plotting, what their writing process is. I always come away feeling like I've learned something about myself and my process just by sharing theirs.

It's also true that I'm a huge fan of historical fiction, romance, and ghost stories which is why I wrote a gothic/literary YA set in Victorian England with a unique love triangle between a deaf heroine, a gypsy viscount, and a ghost ... sort of Jane Eyre meets A Certain Slant of Light. I'm hoping to pique my editor's interest in this story, tenatively titled GhostFlower, when I pitch second book ideas to her this week.

All that to say, when I met the lovely and talented Cat Winters (the brilliant mind behind The Suburban Vampire blog), whose historical ghost YA will be published through Amulet in Spring 2013, I knew I couldn't wait to pick her brain for details.  She graciously accepted my invitation to drop by today and give us the inside scoop. 

Please welcome Cat, and her debut novel In the Shadow of Blackbirds to the ADR3NALIN3 stage.

Cat Winters was born and raised just a short drive down the freeway from Disneyland, which probably explains her obsession with haunted mansions, bygone eras, and fantasylands. Her debut novel, In the Shadow of Blackbirds, a YA historical ghost tale illustrated with early-twentieth-century photographs, is coming Spring 2013 from Amulet Books. She lives outside of Portland, Oregon, with her husband and two kids.

I suppose I've been preparing to write my upcoming novel, In the Shadow of Blackbirds, since I first fell in love with ghost stories. My fascination with spirits started way back in elementary school, when a book about haunted locales called to me from a shelf in my school's library. Up until that point, I had only thought of ghosts as fictional creatures that showed up in spooky stories and movies, and because I was growing up in Orange County, California, not far from Disneyland, I thought they looked something like this: 

Yet here was a book telling me that real people believed in real ghosts.

After I read that library text, I found myself continually drawn to spine-chilling tales. One of my favorite movies growing up was The Watcher in the Woods—another one of Disney's contributions to my obsession with all things eerie. The movie is packed with menacing music and so many psychological thrills that both my sister and my daughter refuse to even talk about the film.

Here's the trailer so you can see what appealed to little horror-loving me:

I spent my teen years gobbling up classic Gothic literature (Shelley, Poe, the Brontës, etc.) and watching The Twilight Zone reruns and old Alfred Hitchcock films. Then, in my adulthood, I stumbled upon the history of séances in a Smithsonian Magazine article and started playing around with a historical novel involving séances. That particular book didn't go far, but several years later I landed an agent and chatted with her about an entirely new take on my basic plot ideas. I proposed showing a teen's perspective of the Spiritualism craze that resulted from the horrors of WWI.

One year later, I turned in the first draft of In the Shadow of Blackbirds. A year after that, I received an offer from Amulet Books.

In the Shadow of Blackbirds explores the nightmare world of 1918, when both WWI and the Spanish Influenza killed millions of people around the globe, and desperate Americans turned to séances, spirit photographers, and folk remedies for comfort.

To research the ghostly side of the story, I pored over spirit photographs from the era and read books that tackled the dark and dangerous aspects of spirit communication, like Harry Houdini's A Magician among the Spirits and Mary Roach's Spook.

Click the picture to find on Amazon

I've always felt some of the most moving tales about war and other atrocities are the ones told from the point of view of young people, so I picked a brutally honest sixteen-year-old girl to be my protagonist. She's forced to deal with death, spiritual tricksters, national paranoia, some highly creepy birds … and a ghost (of course).

Would the kid in me who loved to be scared out of her wits enjoy this novel? Definitely.

What about you? Are you typically drawn to ghostly tales? And do you believe in ghosts?

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Want to keep tabs on Cat and her upcoming novel? Check out her online haunts:

http://www.catwinters.com
http://twitter.com/catwinters
http://www.facebook.com/catwintersbooks

http://www.goodreads.com/catwinters
http://suburbanvampire.blogspot.com/