New Videos Available and New Books Forthcoming

I’ve been discovering new ways to use the Brom Bones Books YouTube channel. Coming up with an idea to promote Echoing Ghost Stories: Literary Reflections of Oral Tradition was pretty easy. I followed this procedure:

1. Go to my local wine bar,
2. ask permission to video their fireplace with the “switch-on” fire burning,
3. match that video with audio of myself reading three of the fireside tales in Echoing Ghost Stories,
4. upload the three videos to YouTube, and
5. cross my fingers.

Here’s the first one, and I apologize to all of Britannia for what no doubt is a wandering accent (sometimes, I bet, wandering all the way back to the Chicago area…where I grew up…not far from where Dick Van Dyke grew up…I’m not joking).

I want to do something similar with Enhanced by Eyes of Evil: Tales of Mesmerism and Mystery and Help for the Haunted: A Decade of Vera Van Slyke Ghostly Mysteries. However, I’m stumped regarding the video. I’d like something more than a static image of the book cover, but if I simply aimed the camera at my face and read a story, the edits would be embarrassingly frequent. Plus, I used to work in radio, and I’m very comfortable with remaining a disembodied voice, thank you very much.

Meanwhile, yesterday, I finished a “mock-up” for the cover of a forthcoming anthology: Ghostly Clients & Demonic Culprits: The Roots of Occult Detective Fiction. This book charts the history and evolution of fictional occult detectives — think Agents Mulder and Scully, if you aren’t familiar with such characters — from ancient Rome to the early 1900s. The anthology should be available by this summer.

Shifting from my editing to my writing, I’m well beyond halfway done with the follow-up to Help for the Haunted. It’s a novel titled Guilt Is a Ghost: A Vera Van Slyke Ghostly Mystery. Despite my progress, I still feel as if I’m behind schedule on this — but I suspect that’s pretty common in any large project that doesn’t actually have a schedule. Let’s pencil in the autumn of this year for when this will be available for purchase.

— Tim