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Name of Author: Brian K. Henry
Title of Book: I Was a Teenage Ghost Hunter II
Favorite Authors: Vladimir Nabokov, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, J.R.R. Tolkien, Don DeLillo
Bio: I'm a longtime writer and fiction fan. I've been writing stories since I was in 3rd grade and lately I've been self-publishing books on Amazon. I studied literature at the graduate level and read all kinds of stuff from classics to current YA. My writing all tends to be humorous, whatever the genre, but I try to build in a great story as well.
Can you explain what your book is all about?
This book is a sequel, as you can probably tell by the number 'II' in the title. In the first book, Devin Mulwray, a 16-year-old living in the town of Arcata in Northern California, realized he has the ability to see and communicate with ghosts. Devin tried to ignore the spirits he was seeing, but his friends finally pushed him into using his ability to handle some creepy hauntings. In this book, a girl at Devin's high school starts behaving really strangely and Devin's friends think ghosts are involved, so he gets drawn into another investigation.
Who is your target audience - and why?
The target audience is readers 12-18, but I think older readers will enjoy it too. The main characters are all teenagers and I tried to keep the characters grounded in a high school world, while still having these otherworldly experiences.
What is 'paranormal' about your story?
It's all about the ghosts! There are a bunch of different ghosts in the story, including a couple of vengeful spirits, a ghostly child who haunts the nearby forest, and the specter of a lady in white. There's also a séance where the characters try to contact the Spectral Realm.
Does it contain other genre elements, if so which ones - and why?
The main other genre is comedy. Most of this comes from the characters. Devin's two best friends, Rex and Clive, are pretty offbeat guys and they get into all sorts of unusual situations. I like to keep all of the characters a little quirky. There's also a mystery element since Devin has to figure out what's causing these spooky hauntings.
Tell us about your writing process - how do you get from story idea to a Wattpad published story?
I start out with an outline and decide what the main events in the story are going to be. In this case, I already had the main characters from Book I, so I wanted to come up with some challenges for Devin that would push him into continuing his paranormal investigations and finding out more about the ghostly world. I also wanted to push the other characters a little further along in their goals. So I came up with some situations for each of them.
Did you encounter any challenges when writing, if so - how did you overcome them?
It was a little difficult deciding what the ghosts would actually be able to do, since I wanted to make it somewhat in the tradition of documented ghost encounters and poltergeists, but still make it original and entertaining. It was also challenging to figure out how Devin would defeat the ghosts, since he doesn't have any superpowers – just the ability to see and communicate with the ghosts. So he has to use his wits to deal with them.
You often hear that 'writing well' is the baseline for success. What does that mean for you?
I try to keep the prose interesting on the level of vocabulary and rhythm and sentence structure. In other words, I try to vary the word choice, and have a mixture of longer paragraphs and sentences along with shorter, choppier ones. As a reader, I get bored with writers using the same words and same phrases over and over, so I try to keep things varied. I also rewrite everything several times to try to get every sequence as good as it can be.
One final question, this being the Paranormal genre: Have you ever had a paranormal experience?
No, actually I've never had any paranormal experiences, which is fine with me! The whole idea of ghosts is really fascinating though, and I always prefer writing about stuff that hasn't happened to me.
