A Letter to My Readers
“Where do you get your stories from?” is a question I frequently get asked.
The answer is, I was a really bored kid. Like, really, really bored. Bored. All. Of. The. Time.
School bored me. Everyone in my family was an adult, so they bored me. I lived in a small town, and it bored me.
So, I spent a lot of time telling myself stories to entertain myself. When I should have been paying attention in class? Telling myself stories about what-if-the-school-was-haunted. When I was forced to go along on family walks? Making up stories about finding a body and all of the exciting investigating that would follow. Biking around town? Imagining what it looked like back in the Olden Days when everyone wore fancy clothes and lived in big houses (or so I assumed).
I had plenty of fuel for my imagination. My Grandma Miller lived in the house she’d grown up in, which was the house that her mother had grown up in. Built in the 1860s, I don’t think anything brought into it ever left again. It was full of antique furniture, pictures dating back to the 1880s, and a hundred years’ worth of clothes and toys.
And dolls.
So many dolls.
Sitting everywhere. Some of them with their arms outstretched. Like they wanted you to pick them up.
Or, you know, like they were coming to murder you in the night.
It’s hard to tell with dolls.
My other grandmother, Grandma Hines, lived in a house overlooking the town graveyard. Where her yard ended, the gravestones began. Cemeteries are actually quite lovely places. They’re shady, with lots of trees and flowers everywhere. The mausoleums worried me, however. They looked like playhouses for the dead.
I really wanted to know when and why the dead would need playhouses.
In spite of my fears that either the dolls or the dead would come back to life, nothing like that ever happened. You would think that would be a relief. But when you’re a bored kid, that’s a huge disappointment.
Who wouldn’t rather be fighting zombies or solving crimes instead of going to school? Sure, not all kids.
But I would’ve taken the zombies and the criminals every time.
As an adult, I live in a house free of both dolls and nearby graveyards, but that bored kid is still inside me. I still get stuck in traffic or never-ending meetings. My mind still spins stories, whether I want it to or not. I still love history and mystery, so when I write, it feels natural to combine them together. When I do so, I find that I’m writing for that bored middle schooler I once was. The one who desperately wanted something – anything! – interesting to happen.
Because of that, in my stories, all sorts of strange and exciting things happen to my characters. In ERNESTINE, CATASTROPHE QUEEN, a zombie maybe appears while a would-be-murderer most definitely does. In TANGLED UP IN LUCK, two 7th grade girls are able to solve crimes that have confused adults for years.
Oh, and those adults?
They’re always weird. Because people are weird. Me included.
