Thinkingdog Publishing

There’s a little thing that never shows up on an author bio page, or gets mentioned in the beautiful author interviews, though someone absolutely should. I don’t care how many books they’ve written – every writer will hit a wall. Not a little doubt, not just "hmm, I wonder if this scene is working" kind of thought. Oh no – a real wall, face first, seeing stars, hearing the sound effect kind of moment, and you are absolutely convicted that everything you’ve written is absolute, unmitigated rubbish. How do I know this? Because I have now written fifteen books. Fifteen. So you would think that I have done this often enough and I should, by all reasonable logic, have developed some kind of immunity. A vague memory perhaps, yeah, this usually happens, I’ve been here before, I know how this ends. Alas, there is no immunity. Here is exactly how it goes, in case you are a writer who needs to hear this, or a reader who wants to understand why authors occasionally look haunted ...

  Stone Walls, Secret Whispers, and Why My Books Are Haunted When you grow up in Germany , old buildings aren’t a novelty. They’re just… Tuesday. Crooked timber frames. Weathered stone staircases. Heavy wooden doors that creak even when you swear no one touched them. Windows that look like they’ve seen at least three wars and a scandal or two. Entire streets where the buildings lean toward each other like they’re sharing gossip. I lived in places like that. Apartments with stairwells that echoed just a little too long. Ceilings so high your imagination had room to stretch. Basements that absolutely, positively were not haunted… except, you know, maybe just a little. When you grow up surrounded by history, you don’t have to try very hard to believe that walls remember things. That footsteps linger. That stories don’t always end when people do. So yes. There are ghosts in my books. Not because I sat down one day and thought, “Let’s add a ghost for fun.” But because when you’v...