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Friday, I passed 45 thousand words on my gay, cinephile, ’80s, horror novel set in the lovely city I call home, San Diego.

This has been and continues to be quite a different adventure in writing from what I have experienced with any of my previous novels. As I have mentioned in other posts, this one is being written without an outline, without a predetermined list of characters, with a terribly vague sense of how the five-act structure will work, and with only the concept of the darkest magic operating through old and dangerous nitrate motion picture film stock.

I am reaching sections of the novel where I must make definitive choices about some of the elements that have only been hinted at in the text as the characters’ investigation will begin uncovering some of the mysteries at work around them.

Because at heart this is actually a ghost story, with the ghost given ‘life’ by the old film stock, it is also essentially a mystery. Nearly all ghost stories are mysteries, often with some old and buried evil to be uncovered in order to clear the spirits’ torment and allow them to progress to whatever lies beyond life and death.

Ghost stories have always been my favorite genre of horror, and I cannot honestly say why. It is not because I was touched by death at an early age. Well before my father’s passing, I had books of ghost stories for children. One branded to Alfred Hitchcock and another of ‘Tar heel’ ghosts, Tar heel being the state nickname for North Carolina, the state of my childhood home. So, the fascination with ghosts has seemingly always been there, but I have written very few ghost stories. This untitled novel is the longest and most complex attempt at the sub-genre.

When it is completed, I will need a couple of sensitivity readers to make sure I have approached the lives of gay men in San Diego with respect and not stereotyping, but I feel I have made a good effort on that front.