First off, Happy Halloween!!

Second, I'll admit I've been in a funk of late and really haven't felt like writing this newsletter. What few creative juices I've had have gone into my WIP, which haven't been much, as it's not finished, either, although releasing "Into Another World" did give me a release for September. My apologies to those who've missed receiving a newsletter. However, I knew that if I didn't do a book focus segment on this particular book right now, I'd have to wait another year, until next Halloween. Because, when else are you going to write about a ghost story set on Halloween except on Halloween? Especially with a full moon tonight?

So, here we are. I'm writing, looking out my window at the full moon which has just risen, while my granddaughters are out trick-or-treating.

Anyway, about the story... I originally wrote this as an entry for a Literotica Halloween contest. I didn't win, but I still like it. The basic idea was to take the "Couple inherits a haunted house" trope in a different direction, where the couple ultimately befriends and helps the ghost escape from being trapped inside the house -- by having sex while the ghost possesses the wife on Halloween night!

From that idea, I needed to establish a brief back story for how Joe and Mari inherit the house from a member of Joe's family, without ever having visited it before. So, namesake great-uncle Joseph becomes a recluse, specifically because he admitted as a child that he could talk to the spirit of his late mother Rebecca, who died giving birth to him in that very house, and the predictable reaction of the town-folk calling him Crazy Joe his whole life, leaving him shy and alone.

Having Rebecca die in childbirth also let me stay out of the incest category, by having my younger Joe be a descendant of his great-grandfather's second marriage, making him unrelated biologically to Rebecca and having Uncle Joseph be the half-brother to Joe's grandfather. I didn't want to waste time arguing that it isn't really incest when it's your great-grandmother's ghost, but in your wife's body. So, I simply made her not his great-grandmother.

And I still got in some trouble with Apple Books for a blurb saying that she's great uncle Joseph's mother, simply because of the word mother, so I had to strike that from the blurb and just call Rebecca "the horny ghost trapped there."

So, that's my Halloween night's tale of how that story was written. I hope you've been having fun tonight. Vote safely, if you haven't already.