Happy Halloween! My ghost story, “Wait!,” about an unexpected encounter in the parking lot outside of a nightclub, is now online at Velvet Mafia through December 31, 2008. "Wait!" is one of a dozen stories that are now part of The Haunted Heart and Other Tales, a collection of gay-themed ghost stories that I have been working on for the past six years.
Some background on this ghost story: After reading several horror anthologies and ghost story encyclopedias, I decided that I wanted to write a gay version of “the phantom hitchhiker” legend and I began writing this story in 2002. I was never satisfied with the original ending I had created — I had the story end after Clay’s visit to Lisa Braden’s house — and I let the story sit unfinished for several years. Then, when I finally sat down to revise the story, I realized that the story did not end at Lisa’s and that Clay’s search for the meaning of the haunting should continue for many years, and that the phantoms Clay witnesses are not a random encounter or his own haunting, but belonged to Mitch, the guy he had originally tried to pick up at the club.
Some background on this ghost story: After reading several horror anthologies and ghost story encyclopedias, I decided that I wanted to write a gay version of “the phantom hitchhiker” legend and I began writing this story in 2002. I was never satisfied with the original ending I had created — I had the story end after Clay’s visit to Lisa Braden’s house — and I let the story sit unfinished for several years. Then, when I finally sat down to revise the story, I realized that the story did not end at Lisa’s and that Clay’s search for the meaning of the haunting should continue for many years, and that the phantoms Clay witnesses are not a random encounter or his own haunting, but belonged to Mitch, the guy he had originally tried to pick up at the club.
