Behind “Protection Spell”
My latest Alondra story was just published on The Fabulist magazine online. You can read it for free here.
This one is a little ghost story. It was inspired by author Jenny Bitner, who treated herself to a writing retreat in a lovely old hotel in the Gold Country a couple of years ago. The story also takes inspiration from my time at the Haunted Mansion Writers Retreat ten years ago. I didn’t have anything loom over me while I was in bed, although other writers did. I did, however, have something touch me in the middle of the night. That was freaky enough. (You can read that adventure in my essay collection, This Morbid Life.)
I’ve been writing stories about Alondra DeCourval pretty much my entire life. I started a novel about her in high school, then actually “finished” a novel about her after I moved to San Francisco in the late 1980s. I keep thinking I will revise that and see about getting it published, but it keeps being preempted by my nonfiction work.
“Guardian of the Golden Gate” appears in my ebook, Alondra’s Exploits. Find it on Amazon.
In the meantime, I’ve written almost 30 stories about Alondra as she travels the world meeting supernatural creatures. The first story with her girlfriend Stella in it was actually written for the first volume of The Haunted Mansion Project anthology. In that story, Stella is a guest at a writers retreat, investigating the things that ghosts fear. She invites Alondra up to help clear the atmosphere.
Most of the time, Stella works in Curios and Candles, selling magical jewelry, and lives in an apartment on the corner of Haight Street. She shows up in my story about the creature that lives beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and in the story about the Feejee mermaids climbing out of the surf.
“Protection Spell” is the first Alondra story from any point of view other than Alondra’s. It made sense for Stella to tell the story, since she sees just how hard Alondra works to solve the supernatural mysteries people bring to her.
It’s a love story, too. I hope you’ll check it out.
