The Notes that became A Head Full of Ghost

Paperback week continues with a notebook…

DO NOT LOOK AT THIS STUFF UNLESS YOU’VE READ THE BOOK BECAUSE SPOILERS ALL OVER THE PLACE. YES I AM YELLING!

When it gets down to the actual writing of the draft/story, it’s all on the laptop for me. I wish I could write longhand, but I can’t. Too many mistakes, too wedded to delete and cut and such. But I do keep a bunch of little notebooks around for ideas, character sketches, notes, etc. Here is the cover of one such notebook. Lisa gave it to me Christmas of 2012.

It ended up being the notebook in which I sketched out the idea for A Head Full of Ghosts. I wrote the following notes before sitting down to start the book.

I didn’t crack open the notebook until February of 2013. Here’s the first page.

(so much for that no cheap twists thing, yeah?)

Pages 2 and 3. Notice the working title was “My Head Is Full of Ghosts” (the Bad Religion tune)

Pages 3 and 4:

It would’ve been a different book if Marjorie was named Connie. Connie? And my “eh” summed up the do-gooder part, which quickly fell by the wayside.

Pages 4 and 5:

pgs 5 and 6

The yellow highlighted sides are some cleaned up notes I took during a Gothic fiction panel at Boskone. I remember Faye Ringel and Christopher Golden were on the panel and the discussion was very helpful to me.

pg 7

This list of notes came from Calum Waddell’s essay “Exorcising the Liberal,” which was reprinted in Centipede Press‘s The Exorcist: Studies in the Night Film collection of interviews and essays. Jason Zinoman’s excellent SHOCK VALUE was a great source/discussion of The Exorcist and its politics and place in pop culture too (I blabbed about that book here.)