Showing posts with label ghost. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ghost. Show all posts

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Gothic Barbie

Author Kitty Keswick recently received a gift in the mail from a fan. A goth Barbie modeled after the ghost, Ruby, in the Freaksville series. Thanks to 15-year-old Trisha from Montana. Here's a close up of the doll. Readers who also loved the goth ghost will be pleased to know that Ruby, with her snarky attitude and goth fashion sense, will play an even greater role in book 2 of the Freaksville series, Furry and Freaked. See the cover below...and look for it in 2011!
If you aren't sure who Ruby is, here's an excerpt from Furry and Freaked...

“You little minx! Two guys!” The familiar female voice shocked me. I tried to cover the fact that I was indeed sucking face with a guy almost two centuries deceased. But my uncoordinated feet had other plans. All in one move, I twisted, spun around, and took an ungraceful surge forward. My body fell one way and my cell phone the other. Isaac broke my fall. I pushed up from his very solid chest. He smiled crookedly at me. My heart betrayed me and skipped a little beat.

Clapping drew my attention. Ruby, the teenage ghost from Bridges Auditorium, nudged me with the toe of her blood-red, ankle-length, combat-style boots.

“I have to hand it to you, Valkyrie, that was pretty entertaining. I’ll give it an eight for ingenuity.”

“You’re dead. Go to the light!” I shouted at both of them. My supersonic Valkyrie powers hadn’t kicked in yet. Nothing happened.

“Sorry to burst your bubble, V-A-L-K-Y-R-I-E.” She dragged her pet name for me out. “But you can’t banish me. Him, you could banish”—she tossed her thumb in Isaac’s direction—“to the Netherworld, if you knew how, which you don’t.” She offered me a hand.

I accepted it and stood.

“I see the furball has competition,” Ruby snarked. She blinked and then was perched atop the fence post. Her long black-and-white-striped, stocking-clad legs swayed like a pendulum weighted by red punk boots.

Isaac teleported in behind her and poked her. “She is a spirit, but not? I do not understand.”

“You pick ’em bright, dontcha?” Ruby picked at her nails.

“Ruby, be nice.” I dusted the dirt from my jeans and walked closer to both ghosts. “Why are you here?” I asked as I folded my arms about my waist.

“I have all the time in the world to debate the matters of the universe, Valkyrie. You, on the other hand, don’t.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She hopped off the fence and stood inches from my face. I focused on the black eyeliner goop in the corners of her brown eyes.

“The Powers That Be felt you were a sorry excuse for a V-A-L-K-Y-R-I-E. and needed help. Ta-da! I’m your guide.”

“My guide?”

“Catch up, kid. Yes, you need training, and fast.”

“What? Why?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“What can you say?”

“I’m not at liberty to say what I can or cannot say.” She grinned. “Face it, you’re clueless, you need me.”


Saturday, June 26, 2010

Saturday Shivers

Another tale from Kat O'Shea, Editor-in-Chief at Leap Books:

When I was about eight, we went to visit my cousins in Maryland. They took us into the woods behind their house to this ramshackle old building that had once been a crude cabin, but was now falling apart. We stepped inside, but couldn't go far because the splintered, rotting boards of the floor gave way to a huge hole. The jagged edges of the floorboards exposed a dank cellar far below constructed of irregular stones.

Across the room in the dim light, we could see a staircase to the second floor with most of the treads gone. As we stared at the creepy railing, with gaps like missing teeth, festooned with cobwebs, we heard footsteps overhead. Not the scritchy-scratching of squirrels or rodents, but the heavy tread of a man's boots. It sounded as if it was coming toward us. We screamed and ran, tripping over each other in our haste to get away.

When we were some distance from the house and convinced that no one was chasing us, we looked back. In a first floor window, we could see the shadowy face of a man peering out at us. We hightailed it out of the woods and never went back.

Was the man a figment of our overactive imaginations? I don't think so. A tramp? But if he was, why was he standing in the exact spot where the floor had caved in? A ghost?


Photograph Courtesy of  Nick Coombs