Spotlight & Guest Post: A Ghost of a Chance by Minnette Meador + Giveaway

Keenan’s eyes fluttered open, expecting to be in his bed. Instead, he had his face buried in the porcelain altar, throwing up his guts, listening to Reggie cooing encouragements.

“There you go, old bugger. Get all of it out. That’s the lad.”

Coughing until he thought his lungs would come up, Keenan tried to figure out what had just happened. All he could focus on was the splattered white inside of his toilet, his splitting head, and a persistent ringing in his ears. The sexual encounter was very fuzzy.

“What the fuck?” His voice was sandpaper against his throat.

He pulled his head out of the toilet and drew as much air into his lungs as they would take. Sitting on his haunches, he held his stomach and rocked, giving Reggie the dirtiest look he could muster. The shining specter smiled down at him, floating nonchalantly by the sink. Everything else was black. A random thought scampered through Keenan’s addled brain. I wish I glowed in the dark.

“Are you better, my friend?”

“What the fuck?” Keenan repeated more forcefully and lurched to his feet.

“You asked that already.”

Keenan stumbled to the sink. Turning on the tap lighted only by Reggie’s ghostly glow, he put his head under the water and tried to drown himself in it.

The cold made the ringing and the muddle go away, but his head still pounded like murder. Keenan grabbed the towel from the shower curtain rod and ran it violently over his head and face, hoping the weird sickness would saturate the towel instead of his brain.

He felt dirty, violated, as if someone had pulled his pants down in front of cheerleaders. Yet, there was another part of him that wallowed in fulfillment, satisfied, satiated. It made him want to puke again.

Keenan threw the towel through the specter, stomped into his bedroom, and then stopped with a jolt. Reggie almost ran “into” him.

In the soft light from his window, he could see the bed. The mattress tilted sideways and touched the ground like a beached whale. Everything not otherwise tied down was on the floor. Three pictures looked like someone had pitched them against the wall. Worse, except for the window, there was not a single piece of glass in the room that had not been shattered, including the screen to his ancient rabbit-eared TV. The fragmented remnants covered everything.

“I think you need a drink, my friend.” Reggie pirouetted across Keenan’s path and glided to the door, but Keenan only blinked at him.

“What?”

“A drink. You know… ice, booze, perhaps soda or a wedge of lime.”

Keenan shook his head long enough to get the daze out of it, then tip-toed through the minefield of glass to pull on his coat and step into his sneakers. He didn’t even bother to untie them. Miraculously, the shoes were glass-free, and the coat was right side out, though, in his state, it probably didn’t matter.

It dawned on Keenan as he followed Reggie out to the living room that the familiar disembodied noise was back. Arguments, low conversations, whispers, and even a little song flitted in and out of the surrounding air. It was reassuring.

The group of visible ghosts was light: three screamers Keenan couldn’t see clearly, a Hindi named Nihar who was standing on his head amongst fake flowers on the windowsill, and a crowd of loggers dancing on the kitchen table. Three of them were swilling pale mugs of beer. The stringent smell of faded incense and warm beer made Keenan’s eyes water.

Keenan searched the room. “Constance?”

Reggie spun around and gave him a ghostly wink. “Sorry, old chap. Not here tonight. Besides…” He floated over to the door and made a grand gesture with his arm. “… for this, you’ll need a gentleman’s perspective, I think.”

“What do you—”

“I’ll explain all of it after you’ve had a drink or two. Off we go.”

GHOSTS AND ANGELS AND DEMONS, OH, MY!

by Minnette Meador

Reggie shrugged and rubbed his nose with a long forefinger. “The succubus is drawn to powerful men…psychics.”

“That’s horseshit, Reggie. I’m no psychic.”

Reggie nailed him with a cold gaze and chuckled under his ghostly breath. “Let’s see…you see dead people. Not only do you see them, but you talk to them as well. As a matter of fact, some of your best friends are dead. Sounds rather psychic to me. But what do I know?”

Keenan licked his lips. “Oh.” – A GHOST OF A CHANCE (Resplendence Publishing – June 2011)

Writing about ghosts, angels, and demons was not what I originally set out to do, but then sometimes books take on life (or death) of their own. Keenan arrived fully-grown one fateful evening when I was trying to sleep and I just had to get him down. His problem: He sees ghosts… lots and lots of ghosts…

They were costing him a fortune. The TV, the radio, and even his computer were always on. Lights went off and on constantly. The heat would soar to eighty degrees in the middle of the summer and then plunge to fifty when the winter freeze set in. He couldn’t keep any pets; the instant they came into the house they hissed or yelped in terror and ran away. The neighborhood was full of cats that had once belonged to Keenan.

He couldn’t keep girlfriends either. The closer they got, the more convinced they were that he was on drugs, a serial killer, or terminally cracked. He hadn’t had a girl at his house in years; for some reason they got all heebie-jeebie on him when things started flying around or cold blasts of air unexpectedly lifted their skirts. One girl even had her panties removed, but not by Keenan. He was in the kitchen at the time.

Friends? Forget it. They had a tendency to search for the exit when he told them he saw dead people…and not in the good way. Moviemakers had it all wrong. These weren’t people who wanted release; they were freeloaders who wanted nothing more than to torture the living, especially those who could see them. Keenan had lost count of how many pranks he had endured over the years. Somewhere in the thousands, he was sure.

But this book became a culmination of things I love: ghost stories, Catholic mysticism, psychic abilities, and even history. Add steaming sex scenes, reluctant heroes, a kick ass heroine, and a very special HEA, mix well and you’ve got a modern story of ghosts meet boy, boy meets girl, boy loses girl and ghosts, boy dies, boy gets girl and ghosts back, boy and girl save the world.

I hope you will take a look. I think you might laugh a bit and maybe even cry. Thanks so much to Sarah for sharing her amazing blog site. I’m honored to be here.