GUEST BLOGGER: Deborah Woehr

Please allow me to introduce Deborah Woehr, my special guest blogger for today. This is just one of her many stops on her virtual book tour. For more information on her book, Prosperity: A Ghost Story, you can check out http://www.virtualbooktoursforauthors.blogspot.com/ (look in right hand sidebar for her name if you want to be taken directly to her page). You can visit her website at http://www.deborahwoehr.com/





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Writing Prosperity 1998:

The idea for novel came to me as a “mind movie” of a woman who was standing on a small island in the middle of Hell, searching for the soul of her late husband. It was to be a book about a man who used black magic to lure an unsuspecting town into his cult. That was the very beginning.





Fast-forward one year. The story wasn’t coming together as I hoped that it would. I didn’t know enough about black magic to create a plausible story. And, I had way too many characters vying for attention.





Fast-forward two years. I had long since ditched the idea of black magic and cults. My characters were still unknown to me, although I was getting to know my main character, Amanda. The title of my novel was Prosperity, a once-thriving town turned into a literal ghost town. I was still having problems creating a cohesive plot. Who are the ghosts? Why are they haunting the area?





I signed up for a mentor through the Horror Writer Association for help in writing my novel. A wonderfully helpful guy named Dan faithfully critiqued each chapter. I managed to type the words “The End” at the end of my ghost story, but I wasn’t satisfied with the ending. His advice was to keep editing until I wrote the story to the best that it can be.





Two more revisions later, I still wasn’t happy. Although I had whittled down the characters to three and had a good idea of who they were, I still didn’t know why the ghosts were haunting. I set my novel aside to write the ghosts’ back story on a blog for my first entry in the National Novel Writer’s Month contest.





That was the best decision I made because I finally came to understand who the ghosts were and why they were haunting Prosperity. It was now up to Amanda and her sidekick, Travis, to unravel the mystery that surrounded the lynching of the former mayor and his entire family.





Did they solve the mystery? You’ll have to read the published book to find out!