A few years back, I attended a writing workshop on the Oregon Coast, where I stayed in a funky old hotel. At breakfast one morning, our server warned us that the hotel ghost was particularly active lately.

Ghost?

I smiled and ignored her. I’m not a ghost person, and I don’t freak out. Then another participant assured me that the server wasn’t blowing smoke. There really was a ghost and she’d seen it.

Again, I ignored it. Takes more than a rumour to scare me. Then I repeated the story to the workshop leader, a woman I’d known for years and respected very much. She told me it was true and she’d seen the ghost herself, climbing the stairs to a no longer existing third floor.

That did it. I was officially freaked out. Couldn’t sleep the rest of the time I was there, imagining that I would open my eyes and see a ghost standing at the foot of the bed.

Then I brought the damned ghost home with me.

There was only one way to exorcise the ghost and finally get some sleep. I wrote Shelter. It worked. The only scary story I’ve ever written, but I had to do it, for the sake of my sanity.

Shelter crosses women’s fiction with suspense and a frisson of modern gothic. You can find it here: https://books2read.com/u/mYRKPd