Hard At It,June 2014

When I think about it, it’s no wonder that I’m feeling more like it’s mid-summer, not almost fall. I lost the entire month of June in a flurry of meeting a July 1^st book deadline. There were ten and twelve and even fourteen-hour days at my computer – days that I never took a step outside the house and sometimes only left my little office to eat.

So… I’m feeling a month short in the Calendar Department, and it isn’t helping that we are having 90° days here in Oysterville. It’s hard to wrap my mind around the reality that school has begun and that this is Rod Run Weekend. And when it was announced to me last week that said book will be on bookstore shelves September 30^th and is ready for pre-orders now, I was sore amazed!

The book is a History Press publication – available in paperback and also as an e-book. The title is Ghost Stories of the Long Beach Peninsula and is an expanded version of the series I did for the Chinook Observer years ago and that became a Kindle book sometime after that. The current version has additional stories and additional photographs, to say nothing of new information about some of the ghosts who hang out among us here on at the beach.

Ghost Stories – Book Cover

I was told that the early deadline for the completed manuscript was to ensure the book’s availability by Halloween. It is part of History Press’s Haunted America series and, of course, a Halloween marketing scheme makes sense. But, not being too canny about the selling end of books, I was thinking more like mid-October. Which, due to my lost month (see paragraph one above), I wasn’t expecting for quite a while yet.

It wasn’t exactly that I didn’t believe the September 30^th ‘pub date’ (as they say in the biz), but I did check out historypress.org and amazon.com and sure enough! There was the book information, complete with a picture of the cover and directions about how to pre-order! Wow! And, to satisfy myself that our local bookstores will also take pre-orders, I checked in with a few of the proprietors and was totally reassured.

I want to point out to you that this is not just your average Casper-the-friendly-ghost book or the scary rattling-chains-of-Scrooge book. It is about the people and places of our Peninsula – real people who you may know and real places where you may have been. That’s what the History Press is all about — Since starting in 2004, we have published nearly two thousand of the highest quality local and regional history titles from coast to coast says their website. They are all about preserving and enriching community by empowering history enthusiasts to write local stories for local audience.

So… whether or not you celebrate Halloween, and whether or not you believe in ghosts, I urge you to get the book. I guarantee you’ll learn a few shivery secrets about our beloved and not-so-benign beach that you didn’t know before!