Can you hear them?

Can you hear them?

A short story for Halloween 2020 from Paul White

I have a small multi-tool. It is much like a penknife; a type of ‘Swiss Army’ knife for the handyman. I keep it in a small compartment in the top draw.

That compartment is its ‘home’. When it is not in use, it is where it ‘lives’.

Two weeks ago I needed this knife. It was not in the draw. I could not find it.

Today I was fetching another item and the knife was back in the draw, back in its small compartment. Back in its ‘home’.

This is not the first time some of my possessions have gone ‘missing’ or have moved; seemingly at will.

Sometimes things appear in my home. They may be objects I have lost, misplaced and… this is one of the strangest, items I have never purchased, ones I do not own.

Generally, these are small articles, inconsequential stuff, general household or personal belongings. The type of artefacts we all acquire during our lifetime.

I hear you saying ‘so what’? This happens to us all and you would be right, it does.

But, I ask you, how many times have you been certain the item in question was not where you left it?

I do not mean the times you may have been mistaken, but those times when you were totally and absolutely sure; times when you know your certainty is more than mere conviction?

I hear people say ‘we must have ghosts,’ or that ‘Mr Nobody’ must have moved it.

The fact is, when said and done, it is not too far from the truth. Only it was not a ‘Mr Nobody’, or a spectral entity who moved or misplaced your item.

It is something real.

Something which lives amongst us. Something which lives in all our homes, in our workplaces, our schools and colleges. Something which is with us at all times.

Even while we sleep.

Especially while we sleep.

It has been said, the best trick the Devil ever played was to make people believe he does not exist.

This is also true of the Gremlin.

I am not speaking of those cute(ish) furry characters portrayed in the film, but of the true Gremlin. Those tiny flitty little beasts.

The leathery-skinned ones with luminous green eyes and teeth like wild piranha.

I doubt if you have seen one, unless you are particularly susceptible to the spirit world, or you are a young innocent child.

Then you may have heard one scuttling under your bed, or in the closet, or outside your bedroom door in the darkness of the hallway.

You may have, on the odd occasion have glimpsed at one. That fractional shadow, the one which flicked past the corner of your eye yesterday.

The silhouette under the bathroom door, the one you see when you are home alone.

They are the Gremlin.

They watch you.

Constantly.

Hear a bang, the unexplainable crash from the room or upstairs. Like when the jar toppled over in your kitchen, or the picture fell from the wall.

All the tapping noises, those creaks and rasps you hear as you try to fall asleep at night.

What causes them?

Gremlin.

Gremlin love the night.

Gremlin love the darkness.

They are the creatures who moved your lip gloss from your handbag and hid it in the back of the bathroom cabinet.

The Gremlins took your car keys and tossed them into your sneakers, pushed them right down into the toe section so you could not find them.

The older the Gremlin get the more insidious their pranks. Messing with your machines. That is why your dishwasher rattles and your car now pulls to the left.

That accident you passed… it was no accident.

The Gremlin have been playing.

Trains crashes. Ships capsize. Planes disappear.

Gremlin.

They are in the machines. Your TV, your Vacuum cleaner, even the device your reading from now.

They are in the rear of your closet, the dark corner of your garage, and under your bed.

Turn your TV off. Turn the radio off.

Be quiet.

Be still for just a moment.

Listen… that noise… the faint noise…

Hold your breath and listen…Listen hard to the background noise, the constant drone which accompanies our lives.

Strain your ears.

You can hear it now, just there in the background… yes, that. It’s Gremlin going about their work.

Quickly look into the corner now, did you see it? In the shadow by the cabinet, shooting behind the sofa?

No?

Sneaky aren’t they.

Try again… use the corners of your eyes.

They are there. In your lounge, in your bedroom.

In the dryer, the car, your garden shed.

They are in the darkness at the top of the staircase, waiting in the loft, in the eaves of your roof.

They are watching you now, right now. Watching your every move.

Doggedly.

They are waiting for the right time, the right moment.

Trust me, I know.

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Would you like to read more short stories with a little ‘spookiness’? Then download your copy of these Electric Eclectic Novella today…

North to Maynard, is a ‘ghost in the machine‘ story with and ending you will not expect. Download today.

Or how about a bit of fun?

Miriam’s Hex is a tale of greed and latent curses. This is light hearted black humor at its best.

Available to download now, or order as a Pocketbook Paperback

The Amulet is a ‘feel good’ tale of ancient magic in the modern world.

Download your copy, click here.

You are welcome to visit my website where you can find all my books, artworks & photography, http://bit.ly/paulswebsite

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Creepy Things

by Karen J Mossman

I’m not a fan of horror or paranormal. I get spooked easily and have a very active imagination. As a teenager I would be plagued by nightmares for weeks. As I grew up I knew to stay away from anything that would frighten me. Recently, I watched Gogglebox, a TV programme that features people watching television. It’s their reactions and discussions about the what they are watching that make it interesting and funny. It showed them watching The Haunting of Hill House. I found it terrifying and I only saw bits of it!

There are lots of scary horror books on the market, and plenty of people who love a good horror film. Why would a perfectly sensible and normal human being enjoy being scared? If that’s you, perhaps you could comment below and tell me why you like it and why it doesn’t give you nightmares as it does me.

I once wrote a story called Embers of Webster Street and it was about a girl dealing with her mum who suffers from dementia. It’s heart-breaking seeing someone you love forgetting things, and not even recognising her family.

My Nana showed signs of it for years before we recognised what it was. We thought she was just a bit batty. Because Nana was always a little eccentric, she was forever the joker, keeping us entertained with her silly antics. I remember the turning point when we finally knew something had changed. She was getting out of the car one day, and struggled, stumbling a little. We laughed, as we normally did, and instead of making a joke about it, she asked if we were laughing at her.

My Auntie Mavis took her in when she could no longer care for herself. She looked after her for years and it became more and more difficult. Being a carer is very much in the media spotlight, but back in the eighties we didn’t understand what it really meant and all that Mavis did. Occasionally stories came back through mum after her phone calls to her sister. Nana had blurted out swear words or refused to get dressed.  It was a very difficult time. Eventually Mavis had no choice but to let her go into hospital and by this time Nana had stopped talking altogether.

My sister and I went to visit. She was no longer the person we knew. She was just a shell with nothing inside. She had no idea who we were, and I don’t think she even knew where she was. It was the strangest thing because although she looked like Nana, the same face and the Nana who was funny and who never stopped talking, this person stared with blank eyes. It was heart-breaking, it really was.

In the Embers of Webster Street, dementia was the main topic.  Only something happened as I was writing, my pen took on a life of its own. It was supposed to tell the story of Jen, who felt tremendous guilt at having to put her mum in a home. Instead it introduced the ghosts of all the people who had lived in the family home before they did. It brought in a twin sister with problems of her own.  Their mum could never accept that Jen saw things and it was the undoing of her.

This turned out to be the first of paranormal stories I suddenly found I loved to write

It is one of the stories featured in The Magic of Stories, a collection of short stories, articles, poetry, flash fiction, and shorts.

I found my pen wandered in all sorts of directions as I wrote this book. It turned into an eclectic collection of different genres.

Like Embers of Webster Street, many of the stories were taken from real life situations.

Happy reading!

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One of the other stories in the book is They Came For Him. This was based on my Dad once telling me to keep away from Ouija boards.

Ghosts in Crime

By Karen J. Mossman

I’ve never believed in ghost or of psychic ability but as I’ve got older I’ve opened my mind a little. I now believe that for other people, it’s different. I believe, they believe, and perhaps something has happened to them to make it that way.

As a writer, it’s a pot of gold. I love anything like that, but only if I can control it. I can’t control films or other people’s stories because my imagination is far too active after the event. Whereas if I write it, it is active before. Does that make sense?

So, what am I leading up to? Halloween. It’s lasts one day and I have a free book that you can read in one sitting. Then, if you like the character, you may wish to read more about her.

Cassidy Newbold is a clairvoyant and also an Official PrisonVisitor. This enables her to help her brother, a detective to crack his cases.

Shaking the hand of prisoner Ronnie Gunner, suspected of abducting two girls, Cassie sees everything. This horrific case would shake her to the core. With the lives of two young girls at stake, she must force herself to enter the farmhouse where Gunner kept them captive.

Can she locate them before it is too late?

Download for free here

Pocketbooks

by Karen J Mossman

Meet our creater, Paul White. He is the mastermind behind all things Electric Eclectic.

Sometimes it is hard explaining why we need pocketbooks as not everyone likes to read on Kindle. I’ve always said you can read these books on a journey, or in a waiting room. Except, Paul has said it better than I have. With Christmas on the horizon, these make really good gifts and it is not the giving an ebook as a gift.

Now as many people are in lockdown and seeing each other is difficult. These are ideal to put in the post because they really don’t cost a lot in postage either.

As an extra bonus, Paul and I are in the UK and would be happy to send a signed copy to someone also in the UK on your behalf. All you need to do is contact us here.

Below is the list of Paul’s books as shown in the video, and my pocketbooks. If you go to Amazon and put Electric Eclectic books in the search bar, you will find a few others too.

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Short Stories

by Karen J Mossman

Some writers don’t like or can’t write short stories and this came as a surprise to me as I thought every writer did. I began writing them before progressing to novels. I still love to write a short story and I’ve found a home for them in anthologies.

There are some great books around featuring a host of different writers. They can vary in length, some have stories up to 10K words, some have many stories, and some just a few.

We produced three anthologies here at Electric Eclectic and decided to go for a shorter book of just a few stories up to 3k. It gave an opportunity for the reader to discover Electric Eclectic authors, and should you find one you like, then check out their fuller works. I did that and found several writers with a style I enjoyed.

This are ours. They are perfect for you to allocate a little me time to sit and read in one weekend.

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WRITER BEWARE

We welcome, Brian O’Hare as our guest blogger.

Brian O’Hare has written a number of fiction novels. His first was Fallen Men, a contemporary novel set in Ireland, which won Top Medallist Honours in the General Fiction Category of the prestigious New Apple Awards for Excellence in Literature.

Brian is currently writing more books in the award-winning The Inspector Sheehan Mysteries Series, which are detective novels set in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Five books are in the series so far, all having garnishing numerous five, or four, star reviews. The Doom Murders; The 11:05 Murders; The Coven Murders; The Dark Web Murders; and The Trafficking Murders which has recently been released.

Further information can be found on Brian’s Amazon author page

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If you are an aspiring writer, a novice writer, an Indie writer, an experienced writer, or even a published writer, you will come to learn that the actual product you have produced, or are about to produce, is only the beginning of a long and complex journey.

Your work is finished, it’s not far from a masterpiece, and you just can’t wait to get it out there to the reading public. You rub your hands in anticipation and wait for the sales you know are inevitable.

And you wait.

And you wait. 

What on earth is happening? I mean, this is great piece of work. Why isn’t it on the New York Times Top Ten already? 

Why indeed?

Have you any idea of the numbers of books out there that your work is competing with? A quick visit to Amazon’s ranking lists on Author Central will reveal that there are some 6 to 8 million books there alone. It’s like a huge warehouse that is about half a mile long, shelved from floor to ceiling on both sides and somewhere in there, occupying about an inch width in that vast space, is your book.

How likely is it that someone browsing that huge cavern of books will happen upon (and actually purchase) yours? 

That’s why marketing and social media work are so essential. You have to do something to get awareness of your book’s existence before the reading public.

And that still doesn’t mean that they will actually purchase and read it. Worse still, hundreds of thousands of kindle books are offered at bargain prices, often even free.

Thousands of kindle readers buy these books. But research has shown that a huge percentage of them end up lying in people’s kindles, never to be read. 

Oh?! Yes, oh! So you decide, “Geez! Unless I start marketing, my book has no chance.”

And that is what brings me to the point of this short article.

The marketing world is huge, and it is full of wolves in sheep’s clothing, snakes with the siren voices of the serpent in Disney’s Jungle book, sharks with more rows of teeth than you can count, all ready to dive on the innocent, naive writer who is seeking help to get his book noticed.

Oh, yes. You WILL have to market your book, you WILL have to accept that there are costs attached to this, you WILL have to rely on the expertise and support of those who know what they are doing. But how does one know who is the shark and who is genuine? 

One vital and important step you must take before you do anything is to visit Writer Beware.

Victoria Strauss and her team have been fighting valiantly for years to identify the scammers – the Vanity publishers who promise the earth and deliver nothing, the contests and awards schemes that only line the pockets of the organisers, the many marketing services that cost the earth but more often than not result in nil sales. 

Writer Beware names and shames the fake publishers, the fake agents, the grasping marketers, and offers pages and pages of advice and information on what signs to watch out for if you are approached by anyone offering to promote your work. 

Writer Beware is operated by an extraordinary group of people who selflessly work prodigious hours to help writers. I don’t know anything about them or why they do what they do, and, by the way, I have no connection with them whatever.

I just happened upon their website and I have been fascinated by the essays and articles they write about all the scams and scammers out there in the literary world. I have learned so much from them and, doubtless, since I tend to spend a bit on marking my own books, have been saved hundreds of pounds that I might otherwise have tossed to the scavengers. 

This is the link to Writer Beware. Check them out.

No writer can afford to live in ignorance of the work they do. https://www.sfwa.org/other-resources/for-authors/writer-beware/

Do You Know What An Indie Author is?

by Karen J Mossman

I’m sure you do, and we all take it for granted everyone knows what and who an Indie author is.

Recently, I gave a talk to a group of ladies and asked them the same question, already knowing what their answer would be. Imagine my surprise when the majority of people said no. It then occured how I frequent two worlds, online and reality.

In the latter, people are impressed you are a writer. They will happily buy a paperback and are interestered in what you say. In the online world readers are very different, they download books and not interested in paperbacks. Neither are they impressed you being a writer because so is everyone else is. You are not unique, you are just one of many.

For those reasons, I believe we should be treating the two differently.

We need to address the question about Indie authors and once I explained to the group what an Indie author was, the next question was, “How do we find them?”

There is no central point; nothing on Amazon that says this book is published by an independent author, so what would you do?

Well, send them to Amazon and put Electric Eclectic Books in the search bar. It also works in Google and on Goodreads. Launched in November 2017 by author Paul White, the brand has grown and grown. It originally started out as offereing novelettes to find your new favourite author but now offers novels too.

Or just head over to their website and find a genre that you would enjoy, choose a novelette, and if you like the writing style go on to read their novels. There is a lot of choice, and a lot of great Indie authors just waiting to be discovered!

When I told Paul White about this, he thought process set to work and he wrote an interesting blog article about Indie and Readers. Head over and give it a read.

Answering Questions

by Karen J Mossman

Ever wondered what Electric Eclectic books are? Seen the name around? Well this is an article direct from the horse’s mouth, as they say.

I write for them. I have those stories in my drawer.

Being a busy author/blogger amongst many other things, I often want to read a shorter book, and discovered new authors. I’ve then gone on to read their novels.

Elizabeth Horton Newton is a great example. Her novels are terrific, just what I love reading.

Check out this blog and do subscribe! You’ll love it!

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