My flash ghost story Desmond was published last week in Rawhead’s Bloody Bones Special Issue #1.
I will be reading a portion of this tale on zoom (Sunday, November 2nd from 12 – 2 PM ET) during the The Launch Party for Rawhead’s Fall 2025 releases, Issue One and Special Issue One: Bloody Bones
It will take place via Zoom on Sunday, November 2nd from 12 – 2 PM ET. You can register for the event here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/UUxsrgltTmCKMrSu_7w8tA.
“alien? where did you come from?”, by gryffyn m, Unsplash, 2020
This story started out as a poem called French House Shadows about a haunting at Oberlin back in the nineties. Or was it mass psychosis? Who knows?
I personally experienced some of the more innocuous bits of this haunting but it was the former RA of the dorm who relayed his tale to us impressionable sophomores that has remained with me after all these years.
One of the older students in the dorm was friends with him. She started to tell him about all the weird occurrences happening over winter term. He immediately demanded to speak to us all. He wanted to know who told us about the ghost and Desmond. But honestly no one did. (Or no one did to me). He had just returned to campus from taking off a year for his health. He rationalized that the dorm experienced mass psychosis and it wasn’t a haunting at all. He had also been very sick during the first haunting with pneumonia. But it wasn’t all explainable.
I first completed the fiction version of this story in June 2021 submitting it to The Molotov Cocktail’s Flash Vision Contest. Contests often inspire me to finish a story and even write a new one. If you’re ever uninspired, submit to a contest.
This story of madness and/or ghosts took submitting to 19 places and many revisions to get accepted. It was rejected 16 times (withdrawn twice).
It has been almost 2 years since I’ve gotten a piece accepted. To be fair, I wasn’t submitting enough but this year I set a goal of submitting to 100 places. I’ve made it to 59. In 2024, I only submitted to 22 places and 2023 (when I was last published) to 56.
My point is don’t give up, keep working, revising, reading and submitting. The very process of submitting makes one a better writer.
I wanted to post about this sooner but I’ve been recovering from surgery and contracted food poisoning. Desmond’s revenge, maybe?