Literally.  I have to unplug every electronic leash attached to me and focus solely on my story right now.  I am woefully behind.  So, I have elected not to blog about anything today because if I do, I’ll have to come back and chat when I must write.  I must stave off all distractions.  It’s not going to be easy.  I love my bi-weekly Fridays here. 

By not blogging, I feel bad, like I’ve let everyone down, but I MUST write. It’s all my fault, I’m easily distracted.  Dangle anything shiny in front of me, and well, you have me.  So, sadly, my shiny lovelies, I have to completely close my eyes, cover my ears and refuse the urge to log on!  

Can I do it? 

I know I can’t.  I’m addicted.  I’m having withdrawal anxiety already and I haven’t even shut off my computer!  It’s a sickness, an addiction and I—I’m—an addict!

 There, I said it. I’m an addict.  Isn’t that step one in the twelve step program? A lot of good it’s going to do me.

I need a cigarette, but I don’t smoke anymore.  I need a drink but then I won’t be able to write.  Geez, I need to just sweat it out, yanno, fight it.  Fight it hard.  Yeah, that’s the ticket, detox.  I suppose I should pad my room.  This is going to be a lot harder then I imagined.  This addiction, it snuck up on me. But I can beat it.  I’m stronger than email and Twitter and Facebook and blog hopping. 

Oh, stop your smirking.  Look at you!  It’s what, early a.m for you? You probably haven’t even had your coffee yet coz you couldn’t wait to log on.  Hah! 

 <Banging head on keyboard>  We’re all addicts. 

 I’ll see you when the screws let me out of my rubber cell. 

 xoxo

Krazy K*

I’d never really been the kind of person who believed in ghosts until I lived with one.

Years ago, we bought our first house from the family of a woman who’d died there. That family had been the original owners back when that particular long-established neighborhood was nothing more than a field, and the city of Baton Rouge barely had electricity. The woman had grown up there as a child, married, lived there, had one daughter, and died there. By all accounts, she was a sweet old woman who loved children and was broken hearted to have not been able to have more. Her daughter had not been able to have any, either, and this was a constant source of sadness to her.

When we moved in, the house needed tremendous work, as it was still lodged back in the 30s and 40s. (I am not exaggerating, people. I saw wiring there that even antiques would think was antique.) We worked on the house while I was pregnant with our first kid, and I never really thought much of the fact that if I mentioned something was missing, it turned up a few minutes later in plain sight. I just thought, “hormones” and that I was overlooking easy stuff.

After Luke was born, a strange thing started happening–well, there was more of the finding things, but the rocking chair in the living room would just start rocking, all on its own. It would be different rhythms at different times–sometimes leisurely, sometimes a bit frantic. There’d be no one else in the house but me, Luke and that chair. I’d move the chair to other parts of the room, and then other rooms in the house, thinking that the rhythm of me walking across the floor was setting the thing into motion. Nope. I actually tried using walking across the floor to set the thing in motion and the damned thing remained stock still.

Cue Toni wondering about her sanity. (Sadly, not for the last time.)

Luke had colic, pretty awful, actually, and there were a lot of sleepless nights and catnaps caught whenever I could, because he was miserable. This went on for nine months, at which point I was pretty sure I had lost my mind back in month 6 and no one had bothered to tell me. All through this, the chair kept rocking, things kept turning up as I needed them. The mailman started asking after my ‘grandmother’ who he sometimes waved to when he was delivering the mail. I thought he meant my husband’s grandmother who lived across the street and visited often, but he actually knew her by name and said, “No, the other lady. The tall one.” I had exactly zero tall grandmothers present.

I took all of this in stride because frankly, I was so exhausted, that “crazy” wasn’t really all that far to go, and I figured that if I started talking about ghosts and rocking chairs and imaginary grandmas and things turning up, someone was going to come quietly take me away and I didn’t want my kid to know his mom had gone looney. (Poor thing has no choice now. But he’s old enough to handle it.)

One night, I heard Luke crying and I was so weary, I stumbled down the short hall to his room, looked in as I approached and the moon was shining through his window, illuminating an old woman bent over his crib. I screamed bloody murder. It is the one time in my life I am ashamed to say I didn’t act, didn’t move forward, just screamed. I scared the living hell out of Carl, who flew past me to see what was wrong, and the woman was gone. (We were blocking the only exit.) Luke, on the other hand, was sleeping for the first time in days, and continued to sleep, in spite of my freaking out. [As an older kid--when he was about six, he commented once on the old lady that came to visit him sometimes.]

There was a particular stint, though, where Luke seemed to get worse instead of better and the doctors just kept assuring me he’d grow out of it. I think it had been about three or four days with only two hours of sleep here or there, and I was just so cranky and tired, it wasn’t funny. I hadn’t bathed, I don’t think I ate anything healthier than days-old pizza, and that damned rocker just kept going off and rocking frantically. The more Luke cried, the more the damned thing rocked, and finally, middle of the day, Luke screaming at the top of his lungs, the rocker going ninety-to-nothing, I snapped. I turned to the rocker and yelled at it and said, “Could you just stop it! You’re driving me nuts!”

And it stopped. Right there. Mid-rock. Just stopped.

The evidence of her presence didn’t go away–but it wasn’t as scary dramatic after that, which I greatly appreciated.

Later, we moved (I took the chair with me–it has never rocked on its own elsewhere). I had kinda forgotten about the ghost, but one day was visiting my sister-in-law who now lives on the same block as that old house. I commented on all of the improvements they’d just made, and she said they were moving out. Suddenly. She said, “the wife claims the house is haunted and won’t live there.” The woman told another neighbor that the ghost apparently didn’t like her husband much because his keys constantly went missing, even though they would put them in a place where the kids couldn’t reach them. His stuff was constantly falling off shelves and breaking. Buttons missing from shirts. But the crowning moment for them was when he was yelling at the kids and his keys came flying across the room and smacked him on the head–and there was no one standing where the keys had originated from. They swore they saw an old woman at times, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.

I have to admit, I’m really curious if the new owners have experienced the same thing, but I haven’t been brave enough to go knock on the door and ask. How do you explain that sort of thing without them calling the police and having you carted off?

So, how about you? Ever run into any ghosts? Know of a good ghost story? Believe? Don’t believe?

Ghosts, goblins, and ghoulies will out be soon. Not to mention vampires and rock stars, princes, princesses, Jedi warriors and more. Halloween.

It’s a fun holiday! It’s a religious holiday! It’s just the scene in Chinatown, it’s both, especially when you slap it all around.

For many of the ancient peoples, it was already a holiday. Especially in Great Britain, Ireland, and northern France, where pagan Druid and cultures and others similar were very real. The night, for them, was sacred to the harvest, the gods and godesses of harvest, and a Celtic festival known as Samhein. (For those of you, like him, who call this sam-hine, it’s closer to sowe-in.) It marked the end of one year, and the beginning of another. To honor that passing and beginning, the people dressed up in animals skins and other such array. They believed that the spirits of the dead came back on this night, and the priests and priestesses could better foretell the future, and help the people through a hard and lonely winter. The had great bonfires and sacrificed animals (animals, I can’t find a reference to people, though we kind of do know because of peat bodies that they did offer up human sacrifices!)

Ahha. Along came the Romans.

Feralia and Pomona! Let’s face, one did not conquer the known world by being stupid. The Romans wanted to keep control of subdued people who learned to co-abide. It was really difficult, you see, to instantly repopulate the known world with Romans. Feralia was a holiday that celebrated the spirits of the dead. The second of the imported celebrations, Pomono, celebrated fruit and the bounty of the earth.

Hey, folks, let’s have one holiday that we all acknowledge. And thus, from this, the concept of bobbing for apples became part of the holiday as well.

By the early eighteen-hundreds, Christianity had replaced what had come before–almost. In the collective soul of many of the people, the old holidays still existed. The pope was a bright man, too. He decreed that all Hallow’s Eve might be the eve of All Saints day, and therefore, all together in a holiday that was religious–and still one that celebrated the secrets of the human mind.

Some Christians dressed up as saints, angels, and demons. Others were still dressed up as animals. Trees, maybe Roman soldiers, Celtic priests and priestesses, and more.

Now, you will still see animals, saints, angels, trees, and demons. You’ll see warlocks, witches, and vampires. You might just bob for apples, though in these days of terrible flu strains, it’s unlikely!

But you will see a few handsome fellows from Twilight now, Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles, a few rock stars, and more. There’s always my favorite. Dropping by church one night, I saw a wolfman and a vampire walk in together. Luckily, I attend a university church, and the Father–dressed in his favorite Dolphin colors–went on with the rite of communion though his church was filled with costumed creatures–and then warned everyone to be careful!

So, whatever your mode of celebration, go forth and enjoy–and just be careful. As the good Father said, “We don’t need to be adding any more souls in for next year, we’ve plenty to honor as it is!”

Heather Graham

It’s my pleasure to welcome CJ Lyons! CJ is a dear friend and a great writer. But, like most of us, CJ once had a “day” job. As a pediatric ER doctor, CJ has lived the life she writes about in her cutting edge suspense novels. Her debut, LIFELINES (Berkley, March 2008), became a National Bestseller and Publishers Weekly proclaimed it a “breathtakingly fast-paced medical thriller.”  The second in the series, WARNING SIGNS, was released January, 2009 and the third, URGENT CARE, is due out October, 2009. Please give a warm welcome to CJ Lyons!

I want to thank Deb and everyone here at Murder She Writes for inviting me to join them here this week.  I’m CJ Lyons, a pediatric ER doctor who has turned to a life of crime. My crimes take place in and around Pittsburgh’s Angels of Mercy medical center, a place where no one is immune to danger.

Caught up in my murder and mayhem are four special women:

Lydia Fiore, a street-smart newly fledged emergency medicine attending who lives her life guided by the first law of the ER: trust no one.  She’s new to Pittsburgh and quickly overwhelmed not by her new job of saving lives, but rather by the people who invite her to join their family—the men and women of Angels of Mercy whose lives she now feels responsible for.  She starts her new life at Angels of Mercy on the most dangerous day of the year, in LIFELINES.

Amanda Mason, a medical student, the first in her family to leave her rural home and go to college.  Her family means everything to her, yet she’s still compelled to break away and find her own path—something they see as a betrayal. Alone in the big city, far from home, Amanda finds friends who become her new family, but more importantly she learns that she is smart enough and strong enough to do anything she wants with her life.  But even that knowledge isn’t enough to protect her when she begins to investigate patients’ mysterious deaths and then experiences their same deadly symptoms in WARNING SIGNS.

Nora Halloran, ER charge nurse, embodies the best of all the nurses I’ve been privileged to work with during my seventeen years in pediatrics.  She’s compassionate yet tough; fair but understands that there are good reasons behind the rules she enforces; she can multi-task yet still slow down to care for a patient; and she is fiercely protective of her patients.  Nora has a secret—one that will return to haunt her with devastating and deadly consequences in URGENT CARE.

Gina Freeman is an emergency medicine resident.  Because they have “MD” after their names, residents have all the power of being a doctor.  But because they’re still in training, they’re treated as if they have no power.  Internship and residency is a lot like going back to high school—that terrible state of knowing what you want but not being allowed to have it.  And yes, Gina acts like a typical adolescent: cocky, scared but defiant, in denial about what life is really about, and focused on superficial things like clothes and her place in the ER’s pecking order.  Gina has a lot of growing up to do.  It’s painful, not easy, but in each book she takes a step further along her path.

If it sounds like there’s a part of me in each of these characters, that’s because there is. Like Lydia, I’ve lived all my life on the edge of the bell-shaped curve.  If I believed in the laws of averages or played by the rules of statistics, then I’d be living a very different life than the one I have now.  Instead, I’ve chosen to break those laws and ignore the rules.

It hasn’t been easy—from deciding to go to college (none of my siblings did) with no money to pay for it (but some scholarships, thankfully) to further deciding (oh, the impertinence!) to go to medical school and apply to some of the top (and most expensive) schools on the East coast.  Just like Amanda, after leaving my rural hometown at the age of seventeen, I was on my own, forging my own path.

For my pediatric internship and residency I returned to my home state of Pennsylvania and my favorite city, Pittsburgh.  During my internship year, something happened that would change me forever. One of my fellow interns was killed.  Murdered.  In the most heinous ways imaginable. His death hit us all.  We were all very close, the twelve—now eleven—of us.  We had to be—no one else understood what we were going through that first year as a doctor when you hold life and death in your hands and have no experience to follow, forced to trust your gut and your heart to make the right decisions.  No one else worked our crazy hours, no one spoke our short-hand, stressed-out, sleep-deprived language.

Then we were twelve no more.

His killer was caught—thanks to the hard work of several law enforcement agencies.  Four days later we were all back to work.  He was gone. But not forgotten, never forgotten. We each found our path out of the darkness.  Just like Nora finds her way in my new book, URGENT CARE.

For me, my path was through my writing.  I put aside the science-fiction and fantasy I wrote in school and turned to the gritty, dark world of crime fiction. I didn’t write for publication—not back then—but for myself.  To break out of my numbness.  To feel. What it felt like to be a victim of crime. The exultation of being a criminal, getting away with murder.  The triumph of bringing a killer to justice—and the price justice exacted from hero and villain alike.

Writing has always been an addiction for me—my spiritual comfort food.  It’s not something I want to do, it’s something I need to do.

As time went on and it became harder and harder to carve time for myself out of eighty-hour work weeks, yet I still found time to write.  Creating new worlds, being able to change things for the better in them, was intoxicating.  I decided to see if my stories resonated with anyone else and began to pursue writing as a second career—since practicing medicine was a dream come true, I guess you could say I dared to try for a second dream come true.

What hubris!  Leaving an established (although exhausting!) career with job security to jump off the cliff and trust my future to the whimsy of the publishing industry?  Insane! But oh so much fun!  I can’t describe the thrill of seeing other people reading my books—total strangers, immersing themselves in worlds and characters I created! Or the fan mail—wow, what a rush!  So many of you have written to tell me how much you’ve enjoyed spending time with the ladies of Angels of Mercy.  Most touching are the ones that describe how you’ve been inspired or empowered by the books—my books. I’ve heard from cancer patients unable to sleep because of their pain but who felt comforted by escaping into my books for a few hours.  Women who have faced struggles I can’t even imagine but who write to tell me they aspire to be as brave and bold as my characters.  Men and women working the frontlines of EMS, police, and medicine who write to thank me for “telling it like it really is.”

You are all my heroes.  Thank you for joining me and the women of Angels of Mercy in my life of crime! Most of all, thanks for reading! Have you made a career move? I would love to hear from you with your own career story or any questions you have for me!

I need your opinion. Am I too cranky?

Last week, I was vacuuming when I was rudely interrupted. I hate housework, but when I am doing it, I just like the world to stay out of my way so I can get it done. Over. Finished.

But two young men thought I needed to be interrupted. They pounded on my front door repeatedly. Loudly. I shut off the vacuum and opened the door.

The man holding a clip board stuck his hand out.

Yeah right. No idea who this guy is and I’m not shaking hands. Yes, I am that cranky. But I don’t know where that hand has been and I hate DDSCs (Door to Door Sales-Crazies) on principle.

“What can I do for you?” I asked, struggling for a tone that was just this side of a cat screech.

Big fake stupid smiles and “Mrs. Apodaca, we’re here to find out why you haven’t signed up for Verizon FIOS!”

First, I had major creeps that they knew my name. Yes they had nifty shirts with Verizon stamped on them, and a fancy smancy clipboard, but I am not a trusting woman. Not when it comes to my safety or my personal information. I say, “I am not interested.”

And there it got rather ugly. This man insisted that Verizon wanted to know why I had not taken the opportunity to sign up and more crap until I finally slammed the door and locked it. At which time they made rude comments on the other side.

I was furious. I have no idea if they were Verizon drones or just sent from hell to annoy me. I don’t like being forced to act in a rude manner, but they left me no choice. And damn it, this is MY home and I feel like I’m being accosted.

It really got me to thinking, does door to door sales even work anymore? The only time I buy anything from the door to door folks is either 1) Girl Scout cookies or 2) neighbor kids selling candy for fundraisers. That is it.

So I’m wondering, what’s your experience with DDSCs? Do you ever buy from door to door salesfolks? Do you think I’m unreasonably cranky?

To celebrate the release of SOUL MAGIC, which will hit the stores tomorrow, I’m going to give away one copy of the first book in the series, BLOOD MAGIC, to one commenter. I’ll announce the winner over the weekend on the blog.