Book Tour: She Sees Ghosts by David Fitz-Gerald [Guest Post]

She Sees Ghosts

by David Fitz-Gerald

Author: David Fitz-Gerald 

Publication Date: 25th October 2020

Publisher: Outskirts Press

Number of pages: 270

Genre: Historical / Supernatural 

Purchase Links: Amazon UK

Synopsis:

A blazing fire killed her family and devoured her home. A vengeful demon haunted her. Ghosts of the Revolutionary War needed help that only she could provide. A young woman languished, desperate to survive, and teetered on the edge of sanity.

Mehitable grew up in a freshly tamed town, carved from the primeval forest. Family, friends, and working at the mercantile filled her days and warmed her heart. For Mehitable, life was simple and safe, until tragedy struck. When her family perished in their burning home, she retreated into a world of her own making.

As a young girl, she had seen glimmers, glimpses, and flickers of the spirit world. She closed her eyes. She turned her back. She ignored the apparitions that she never spoke of, desperately hoping they would leave her in peace. She was mistaken.

Grief-stricken, Mehitable withdrew from the human world. Ghosts were everywhere. They became bolder. She could no longer turn her back on the spirit world. Her friends feared for her survival. Nobody understood her. She would have to find her own way.

Fans of TV's Ghost Whisperer and Long Island Medium will especially love She Sees Ghosts. This historical novel features memorable characters and delivers bone-tingling, spine chilling goosebumps. It stands on its own and it is the next installment in the Adirondack Spirit Series by the award-winning author of Wanders Far―An Unlikely Hero's Journey. David Fitz-Gerald delivers a historical novel with a bittersweet ending that you won't see coming.

Guest Post

The Inspiration Behind She Sees Ghosts, by David Fitz-Gerald

Despite the fact that this book is called She Sees Ghosts and my series is called the Adirondack Spirit Series, this book is historical fiction. When I was in high school, a long time ago, I took an elective class called The Novel as History. I loved that class, and I think it was the only class I got an “A” in that year. Many years later, that inspiration has become a passion for writing historical fiction.

Maybe I’m gullible or highly open to suggestion. If there is a case to be made, I’m likely to believe. I am happy to entertain the possibilities, whether it’s the loch ness monster, aliens, bigfoot, portals, ESP, reincarnation, or ghosts. What makes ghosts stand out from other phenomena is that I believe I’ve seen a ghost myself―the ghost of my grandfather. He visited me in the 1980s, and I haven’t stopped thinking about that encounter after all of these years. It was just a moment. I don’t think he was expecting me to be in his study. It was a very peaceful visitation, yet it scared me to the core. I’m still not sure I’m open to being visited by spirits myself, but I am always intrigued by supernatural and paranormal possibilities. Who says those concepts can’t stand alongside proven historical facts?

 

She Sees Ghosts is the story of Mehitable Munch, a young woman who turned sixteen on New Year’s Eve in 1799. She was born in one rural frontier town at the edge of the woods and moved with her friends to another unsettled wilderness.

 

What inspired the character of Mehitable Munch? She grew within my head as I was finishing the first book in my Adirondack Spirit Series. She revealed herself to me, shyly, a little bit at a time. I was trying to write the next installment, set immediately after the end of Wanders Far, but Mehitable forced me to set that story aside, so that I could tell her story instead. I would claim that she is a fictional character, created within my imagination, but for a fictional character, she sure seemed to insist on telling the story that appears in She Sees Ghosts. I can’t prove her existence, but perhaps she isn’t fictional after all.

 

I love it when I’m working on a story. Usually, my inspiration for characters and storylines come to me as I’m lying awake, getting ready to fall asleep. I often have to email myself a note so that I won’t forget it when I wake up. As a writer, I like to always have a story percolating in my head. I think readers feel the same way. We always want to have a book that we’re in the process of reading.

 

This book is my first attempt to write an entire novel from a woman’s point of view. I wasn’t sure how it would come out, but the first two women who read She Sees Ghosts told me that I did a good job meeting that challenge. As an author, I enjoy imagining that I am walking in the shoes of characters who are very unlike myself. That might be my favorite thing about creating fiction. We are told that we can become anything we want when we are children. For authors, that’s certainly true. Since I completed writing She Sees Ghosts, I’ve been working on two books, and I’m writing both of them in the first person. I wish I had done that for She Sees Ghosts. I find writing in the first person very inspiring.

 

What inspires me while I’m writing? For one thing, I am grateful for the existence of coconut mocha coffee. My other muse is music.

 

As I was writing She Sees Ghosts, new wave music was resurgent on my playlists. I think I’ve listened to Erasure, Pet Shop Boys, New Order, Yaz, and the Thompson Twins more in the last two years than I did in the 1980s―also, Tammy Wynette. I’m sure that Spotify is counting, and I can’t imagine that anyone has played The Essential Tammy Wynette album more than I have. There is so much more to her music than that one song everybody knows, Stand By Your Man. I find it helps me get into the zone when I listen to very familiar music repetitively. I credited Joan Jett and the Blackhearts when I passed the CPA exam in 1991. For She Sees Ghosts, I have to thank Tammy Wynette. Her 1969 album titled Inspiration was my “go-to.” When I hit play on that, my brain knew that it was time to write.

 

What inspires me most as a writer is the hope of creating something that readers will love. Recently, someone told me that I was her favorite author, and I was blown away. Did you ever read a book that you couldn’t get off of your mind, even months after you were done reading it? I want to write books like that.

 

What better time to get lost in fiction than right now? 

About the author:

David Fitz-Gerald writes fiction that is grounded in history and soars with the spirits. Dave enjoys getting lost in the settings he imagines and spending time with the characters he creates. Writing historical fiction is like making paintings of the past. He loves to weave fact and fiction together, stirring in action, adventure, romance, and a heavy dose of the supernatural with the hope of transporting the reader to another time and place. He is an Adirondack 46-er, which means that he has hiked all of the highest peaks in New York State, so it should not be surprising when Dave attempts to glorify hikers as swashbuckling superheroes in his writing. She Sees Ghosts―A Story of a Woman Who Rescues Lost Souls is the next instalment in the Adirondack Spirit Series.

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