Sometimes, it’s hard to identify the specific moment when a story idea was born. In the case of The Lightning Ghost, I remember the precise moment I had the original idea for this novel.
On May 19th, 2016, at 8:38 PM, my mother sent me a text with an attached photo. The photo was a scan of an old black and white print. Centered in the photo were two little boys, probably four years old. One had his arm around the other. In the background were farm fields, and in the distance, a gravel road.
The two little boys are me and my cousin, Rick. We were at my uncle’s farm near Monroe Center, Illinois.
I stared at the photo, taking in every detail. I think I remembered the shirt I was wearing that day. A portion of an old windmill tower is off to one side. There seems to be some piece of trash in the foreground, perhaps a discarded box.
While looking at that photo, I thought, wouldn’t it be great if I could go back in time to the moment this photo was taken?
I would love to know what we were doing that day, and who else was there. I was wearing shorts in the photo, so it must have been warm. The corn seems to have been up, perhaps knee-high. Could it have been the 4th of July?
And out of my wondering, the Lightning Ghost story was born. I remember working out the basic storyline that same night, and I wrote it down in my story ideas file. I was working on another book at the time, and the title The Lightning Ghost didn’t come around for a while after the story was well underway.
And now, the Lightning Ghost is published and I’ve started book two of this series. If you like ghost stories (and this is a different kind of ghost story) and if you like time travel (and yes, it’s a different kind of time travel) then give this book a try. Just to make it easy, here’s a link:
There is always a trigger that starts the mind on the path of the next story. I can see how this one did. Looks like the dark shafow things in the sky there, also. Thanks for sharing.