After the Ball Is Over, After the Book Is Finished

After the ball is over, does the melody linger on? I can’t speak for all writers, but this writer is a puzzle, a bundle of contradictions. How can a book that I’ve worked on, groaned and moaned over, re-written, edited, worried about, fluffed up, lengthened, shortened, and at last declared finished, be so hard to put down? I’ve yearned for that moment when I could look at it and say it’s done. And, now that it is, I miss it! What a quandary. I want to go back to Ednalee, Oklahoma one more time and take a peek at Ned and her friends. What will happen between Ned and Cade? Did Ned really answer all the questions about the Victorian house she inherited, or are there more secrets? And, most of all, what threat will pop up next? Will all the characters pictured in the last scene be there in the next? I guess I feel sort of like the 1929 song, After the Ball Is Over.

Some scenes in the books are my favorites–well, actually, I guess a lot of them are. I really enjoy writing the scary parts, the parts that get your blood to percolating. Here is a peek between the covers of the sequel to Moonlight Can Be Murder, which I’ve chosen to title By the Fright of the Silvery Moon, to be released by Pen-L Publishing this year.

Fog

With an effort, I opened my eyes. My head felt as if someone was banging on it in time to my heart beat. I was cold. I was damp. But, why? When I began this jaunt, the sun was shining, but now, a weird grayness covered my surroundings. How long had I been unconscious? However long it was, it was long enough for fog to roll in and cover everything with an eerie, opaque curtain.

     Very carefully holding my head to keep from jarring it, I sat up. I seemed to be at the bottom of a rocky ravine. Trees crowded around me, their limbs like the grotesque shapes of ghostly arms. Where was the trail I had been following? My heart skipped a beat then thudded like a weight in my chest. I had no idea where I was. The fog covered everything familiar and I could see no further than twenty feet around me. I was lost!

     Panic rose in my throat, threatening to blot out everything but the fearful feeling of being alone in an alien world. Then, through my fuzzy thinking, I remembered my phone! I’d phone someone.

     Thank goodness for the miracle of technology. What a relief it would be to hear Cade’s voice or Jackie’s or Pat’s. I felt in my pocket. Nothing. Frantically, I searched my second jacket pocket, then the pockets of my jeans. I had no phone nor gun. I was firmly and frighteningly lost and completely without any sort of protection, except the mercies of God.