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