Ghosts – Patricia Lillie

I’ve been sporadic (to put it mildly) about blogging. It’s a new year, but I’m going to skip the good intentions and promises to do better this year. However, it’s traditional to look back and look ahead when the calendar turns over, so in an effort to prove I can do traditional, here goes.

Night view outside the Adam and Eve, reputed to be the oldest pub in Norwich, England.

In 2018, I wrote some new short stories and submitted stories both new and old. Rejection occurred (of course), but two were accepted (more on that later). Definitely one for the win column.

I left one job and found another. Big win. In between, I worked three days at a Dairy Queen, but that’s a story for another time. A time with alcohol. Lots and lots of alcohol.

I went to Europe twice. Norwich remains a favorite city, and I’ve added Düsseldorf to the list. How can this be anything but a win?

The publisher of my two novels, The Ceiling Man and Ghosts in Glass Houses (by my much nicer alter ego, Kay Charles) stopped accepting and publishing new books. However, they didn’t completely close-up shop, and both books are still available. This makes me much luckier than the many authors whose books lost their homes in the shuttering of too many publishers last year. (Note: The Kindle version of Ghosts is on sale in the US for 99¢ through Wednesday, January 9th.) Not a win, but not a total loss either.

In Düsseldorf bin ich als die Katzenfrau von Maya bekannt.

Tantor Media offered me a contract for the audio rights to The Ceiling Man, and I gladly took it. A win.

I remembered to get my flu shot. Another win.

There were a few more ups and downs but overall, despite horrible happenings in the world, my little corner of the universe wasn’t so bad. I’ll take it. And I am grateful to all who helped make it a good year.

♦

Looking forward to this year, I’m excited.

Tantor’s audio edition of The Ceiling Man is scheduled for release on January 29th. (As I write this, the cover image at that link is a placeholder.) It should be available through Audible, Amazon, iTunes, and all the other usual audiobook outlets. It may even show up in Overdrive or Hoopla—check your local library.

A restaurant window in Cologne. Yes, we ate there.

On February 22nd, C.M. Muller’s new anthology Twice-Told: A Collection of Doubles will be released. It includes my story, “Zwillingslied.” I’ve read the proofs on this one folks, and it’s not to be missed. Twenty-two original takes on the doppelgänger theme and all of them wonderful. (Well, at least 21 are. Not so sure about that “Zwillingslied.”)

Sometime in 2019, date to be announced, “That’s What Friends Are For” will appear in David Longhorn’s Supernatural Tales. This weird little haunted house story has netted me the best rejection letters ever. The kind you read to make yourself feel better when the writing isn’t going well. (Yes, that sort of rejection letter does exist!) I am so glad it’s found a home and a wonderful home at that.

♦

The first thing I did in 2019 was pull out a piece of knitting I started on June 8, 2015 and put away a month later in frustration over what turned out to be an error in the pattern.

You could point out all the errors (mine—the pattern’s been corrected) and half-assed fixes, but please don’t.

I intended to unravel it and use the wool for something else. Instead, I decided to finish it. It was complicated enough that I couldn’t listen to an audiobook or watch a movie or otherwise multitask while working. Which made it a contemplative experience. Which is not necessarily good thing for a pathological over-thinker. (Okay, I will make a New Year’s resolution: No more introspection for the next 365 days.)

Somewhere along the line, with all the unknitting, ripping out, and reknitting, the mistakes I tried to fix and those I decided to ignore, and the hole that appeared while I was neglecting and avoiding it, the thing became a metaphor for my entire life.

After three and a half years, I finished it.

And I’m going to wear the hell out of it, badly applied patch and all.

Happy New Year all.

Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol

Wood engraving by Sol Eytinge, form the 1839 Ticknor and FIelds edition. — Wood engraving by Sol Eytinge, from the 1839 Ticknor and FIelds edition.

It’s the holiday season, full of stress and cookies and stress and family and stress. Part of me wants to hibernate until June and another part doesn’t want to miss all the fun. In honor of the holidays, I’m rerunning a post I wrote for school, a year and a half ago.

Please do not expect me to make sense or show any critical or dispassionate judgment. Ever since Mr. Magoo first introduced us, fifty years (plus a few months) ago, I have been in love with A Christmas Carol.

I own multiple hardcover editions of the book. (They all have different illustrations. Don’t judge.) I have copies of the movies starring Alastair Sim, Albert Finney, George C. Patton—excuse me—Scott, Patrick Stewart, Bill Murray, The Muppets, and, of course, Mr. Magoo.

I watch at least one, usually two, of the movies every December.

When I hit the ohmygawd, Christmas is almost here and I haven’t done any shopping and I hate wrapping and I’ll never be ready why don’t we just cancel it this year and if I’m forced to listen to another Christmas song I’m going to f&#$ing hurt somebody point, I read the book.

Afterward, I always feel like Christmas. I stop thinking about how awful taking down the tree is and remember that if I put it up, I have ornaments of Scrooge, Marley, Tiny Tim, and all three Ghosts to hang on it. Last year, when the budget was tight and I was worried about running my credit cards up with gift shopping, I read the book and spent the rest of the day baking cookies for gifts. I used a lot of chocolate. Everyone was happy. (I did buy toys for the wee ones, because they are the world’s cutest kids. The toys were the kind that flew around the house and made noise and annoyed parents. That’s what aunts are for.)

I’m not sure when I first read A Chirstmas Carol, but I know it was before I hit seventh grade, when Mrs. Peake had us read the story aloud as a class. Seventh graders aren’t known for their read-aloud skills. I didn’t care; I’d already read it and loved it. Mrs. Peake told us of the British tradition of Christmas ghost stories.¹ There’s a good chance finding out some people got ghost stories while I got Andy Williams or Perry Como was responsible for part of my adolescent angst. (Now they get Doctor Who, and I get—oh, wait. Doctor Who. And hey, I still have A Christmas Carol. It’s all good.)

Wood engraving by Sol Eytinge, from the 1839 Ticknor and FIelds edition.

As a ghost story, Christmas Carol has its moments of terror: the phantoms in the night sky, the twins of Ignorance and Want, Scrooge’s horror at seeing his future and his legacy.² Above all, it is a tale of redemption, and it makes me happy. Even thinking and writing about the book in April makes me happy. A Christmas Carol is Gerald McBoing-Boing/Tiny Tim’s Razzleberry Dressing.³

If you haven’t read the book, go read it. I don’t care how many movie or animated versions you’ve seen. It doesn’t matter if it’s not December. Read the book. If you are one of our country’s political or corporate leaders (is there any difference?), read it twice. Maybe three times. So many of those who spend the Christmas shopping season decrying the war on Christmas spend the other eleven months of the year embracing this attitude:

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

Our politicians, corporations, and media could make the world a better place if they embraced Scrooge’s new attitude year round:

He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.

I suspect A Christmas Carol inspired much of my sense of social justice and my views in general. Thank you, Charles Dickens and Mr. Magoo.

After you read the real thing, look up the Mr. Magoo version. It, and the 1966 animated Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, narrated by Boris Karloff and directed by the late, great Chuck Jones, are the two best Christmas television specials ever.⁴

I’ll leave you with a little bit of joy from 1962’s Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol, the first animated Christmas special made specifically for television. Why this clip? It makes me happy. I hope it has the same effect on you.

NOTES:

Yes, in Mrs. Peake’s class I got Shirley Jackson and A Christmas Carol. And The Hobbit. Don’t think it was all fun and games and ghosts and Middle Earth. We also diagrammed sentences. Many, many sentences. Not to mention, we were all terrified of her.
At four years old, I had no experience with death, and yet the scene where Future shows Scrooge (Magoo) his grave made me hide my face. It wasn’t the grave that scared me, it was Scrooge’s reaction. I knew this is something bad. A Christmas Carol may have helped form my taste in horror.
Razzleberry is a combination of raspberries and blackberries. I don’t like raspberries; I adore blackberries. I think the latter cancels out the effect of the former. A Christmas Carol always makes me optimistic.
I am detecting a pattern here. You don’t have to point it out to me.