The Story of How to Survive a Ghost Story

Every story has their own story behind it on how it was created, how the universe came together and allowed the words to create a narrative out of thin air. Sometimes that story is just as compelling as the story it was meant to express. For How to Survive a Ghost Story, that story begins in 2012 at the peak of my Tumblr obsession. In between shipping wars and reblogging countless Team Starkid gifs, I came across a graphic for tips on “how to survive a horror movie” similar to this one: 

In my mind, the layout of these tips translated as chapter titles that only needed a narrative to connect them all. However, believe it or not, the original narrative I chose to connect these tips was not a light-hearted comedy featuring a colorful cast of characters exploring the powers of friendship, murder, and exploding ducks. It was originally a gritty and dark novel where, by the end of it, only the main character Lucy Vitalis survived the gruesome slaughter by following the tips that led each chapter. For this version of Ghost Story, I only wrote as far as halfway through chapter one but this effort still introduces us to a version of Lucy Vitalis that is peppy and smiling while she takes photographs in her new home of Sterben, Kansas, her single father “Victor” Vitalis, her absent mother “Tanya”, and the kind Chase Hunter who offers to help carry boxes for the newcomers to his small town.

For my writing style, the first chapter makes or breaks a manuscript. While I enjoy outlining and typically punch out a rough skeleton of a novel before getting to work on actually writing it, I’ve found that the first chapter is where the book really comes alive. This is where I can set the tone for the rest of the novel, establish the prose, and let the characters speak for the first time to establish their personalities. Lucy Vitalis speaking with a pep in her step in a gritty Sterben, Kansas was like playing pop music at a funeral - not a great vibe and the dissonance between the two moods made it a struggle to write a world where they could both survive for the long haul eg the rest of the novel.

But I loved the characters I developed and the setting of the small town so, even after abandoning that first chapter, I kept it running in the back of my mind as I explored other projects. During this time, I ended up attending college in a rural Nebraska small town that thrived off of inconsequential drama and reminded me strongly of my own upbringing in a rural Kansas small town. Don’t get me wrong - I have a very endearing love for small towns and would love to live in one for the rest of my life. But anyone who has lived in small towns knows how knowing so many people in such a small space can create situations and characters not necessarily seen in larger cities where it’s easier to become anonymous and let ridiculous situations die faster. So, in the margins of my college notebooks when I got bored in class, I would brainstorm character ideas and potential situations that they could find themselves in while stuck in a small town plagued by a larger paranormal threat. Some were inspired by real life people I encountered during my college days, others were gross over-satirized generalizations of common people seen in most real life small towns, such as everyone’s favorite PTO mom/town photographer Carol Carroll. 

Artwork by the amazing @starship15_a2 on Instagram! https://www.instagram.com/starship15_a2/

Slowly, the narrative became less gritty and into an over the top comedy where anything could happen. Lucy toned down her smiles and pep to play the necessary straight man reporting the antics of the colorful cast of comedic characters in stark honesty. Chris and Kierra were added to the mix after my friend Kierra asked me to write her into a book married to her celebrity crush so a lot of their over the top romance was just me teasing about her crush and abiding to her “make us madly in love” demands. It was a fun distraction from miserable college classes and general small town drama exhaustion.

How to Survive a Ghost Story was supposed to stay as a backburner of my projects. It was sillier than the other down to earth manuscripts I wanted to write and it was supposed to serve only as a distraction from those darker projects. Kind of as a dumping ground for the lost one liners or plot points I cut from other manuscripts I was working on, to put it nicely. Maybe I’d publish it later as a fun book in between all of my much more serious and important novels, but it was never supposed to be the start of my writing career. 

Artwork by the amazing @starship15_a2 on Instagram! https://www.instagram.com/starship15_a2/

Then I found myself unexpectedly unemployed in March 2018 after the company I was working for went bankrupt. My post-grad employment options were lacking in stability and quality until that point anyways, but it was the first time in my life where I found myself truly fully unemployed. I had gone from working three part-time jobs while managing full-time school and a moderately active and successful YouTube channel (still not sure how I had pulled that one off tbh) to absolutely nothing. I also held very little hope for anything soon because my professional resume was riddled with shotgun blasts of random overlapping jobs as I struggled to find something to pay my bills. All I had with me was time and this little half-chapter of a novel written mostly in the margins of my college notebooks when I needed to distract myself from the tedium of school. 

So, in between submitting countless job applications, I finished How to Survive a Ghost Story. I let this ragtag group of characters take me on their silly misadventure hunting ghosts and solving a small town mystery as I dealt with a brutal time in my life. At one point, I wrote 20k words in one weekend because I was so enthralled with their story and was desperate to fill my days with their joy. By April 2018, I had a completed first draft of the novel and two new jobs to help me pay the bills. 

For the next six months, I worked on publishing Ghost Story while working a hodgepodge of part time gigs ranging from nannying to freelance writing to running events for the local radio station to returning to my old college gig with the local drive-in movie theater. I did query my manuscript with a couple traditional publishing agents for a spell before deciding that it was too odd of a story for the traditional publishing market. Plus, the avenue of self-publishing truly intrigued me and I thought this would be the perfect project to experiment with for the endeavor. Especially since my experience with traditional publishing had been poor at that point, I wanted to see if self-publishing could work long term for my writing career goals (spoiler alert: it does.)

It was honestly a great time. I would have my laptop on my lap and work on edits for the book while watching the girls I nannied at their practices. The book cover was designed at my parents’ kitchen table over eggs and cold coffee as I submitted job applications for more stable employment and freelance writing gigs. There were a couple nights that I only slept 3-4 hours as I would arrive home late from a closing shift at my night job at the movie theater, work on the book until I was too exhausted to keep my eyes open, and then wake up early the next day for an opening shift at another job. The publishing process certainly wasn’t glamorous and the sacrifices I made to get it done were likely not sacrifices I would make now in my life, but the effort fulfilled an emptiness in my life and brought me a joy that affirmed that writing was my destiny.  

Artwork by the amazing @starship15_a2 on Instagram! https://www.instagram.com/starship15_a2/

By September 2018, I had a completed novel ready for the world to read. It wasn’t the debut book I expected to introduce my writing to the world with and honestly the book could’ve used another couple months of editing, but I don’t think I would have it any other way at this point. My internet friends received the book with open arms I don’t believe I fully deserved and supported it with endless retweets and posts to boost my mediocre social media marketing efforts. My co-workers at my various part-time jobs bought copies of it and had me sign them with the same Sharpies we wrote orders down with. People I hadn’t spoken to in years reached out to congratulate me on the effort. My favorite local bookstore, Old Firehouse Books, that I admired for years fulfilled a small dream of mine by agreeing to carry copies of it and continues to promote it unconditionally to this day.  

Four years later, I’m still floored by the response to How to Survive a Ghost Story. This was just supposed to be the little project that served as a crutch as I navigated the unstable turbulence of my early-20’s. The fact that others can also find joy from it, loving the characters and story that carried me through an incredibly tough time, thrills me to no end. It has honestly made developing and publishing my sophomore novel a daunting task as I hope to match the same energy created with How to Survive a Ghost Story for both my experience and the readers’ experiences. However, if the story of how How to Survive a Ghost Story developed proves anything, it’s that each novel has their own unique path to follow and, most of the time, that path is mostly outside of my control. I’m very excited to see how my sophomore novel’s story ends. 

Hopefully in May 2023, but we’ll see.