The Haunting of Leigh Harker is a modern ghost story told from the perspective of a woman who lives an incredibly solitary life, and how her home–the home she has lived in for the past decade–has somehow attracted a presence.
That’s as much as I can say without getting into spoiler territory!
Leigh Harker was a challenging book to write, but it was absolutely worth it. A few pieces of trivia…
— Leigh Harker divides into almost perfect thirds. Each third involves a major shift in the story that challenges the characters and subtly changes the book’s tone.
— I knew what the final few paragraphs would say before I started writing.
— Leigh Harker was designed to be re-read. You should be able to catch a multitude of tiny details the second time through.
— I wanted the first chapter to be intense. It’s the sort of first chapter you expect to act as a teaser: a glimpse of the dangerous element before the book winds back time or switches to another character. But I didn’t want that to happen here. I wanted the first chapter to be intense, and to stay intense, and every time you think it’s about to end, it rises another notch.
Since we’re pre-publication, I don’t yet know how well that first chapter will work… but, wow, it was fun and stressful and exhilarating to write!
One final bit of trivia… Leigh Harker is written in first-person present tense. That means it reads like this:
“The something outside my bedroom creeps nearer. Just an inch, enough to reinforce its presence, to make sure that I won’t begin to doubt my senses. I don’t dare avert my eyes.”
Most of my stories are written in third-person past tense, which would read something like, “Leigh didn’t dare avert her eyes”.
That’s the style I’m most comfortable with, so when I started work on Leigh Harker, I wrote its first page in past tense. It wasn’t good. I deleted it, then rewrote it, then deleted it again.
First chapters are always a nerve-inducing experience as you try to transplant ideas from your mind to the page and inevitably fumble them in the process, but something about past tense sounded wrong for Leigh.
So I tried again, this time in first-person present tense. And it just worked.
I went on to finish the first chapter in one session. I’ve got to be honest… sometimes writing is hard work. But when it flows like that, it’s one of the best experiences in the world.
I’d love to invite you to try the first chapter now. It’s spoiler free, and will give you a chance to see what I meant when I said the first chapter was written like a teaser, but without stopping where a teaser would normally stop.
Leigh Harker arrives in stores on the 7th of September, and pre-orders are available just about everywhere books are sold: