Friday Night Ghost Story 26SEP26- “Charleston Highway Lady” -US HWY 128 South Carolina. Tonight I tell the story I heard as a boy. It was on the highway my mother, sister, and I would drive on to Charleston every so often from the spring to early fall. Generally off tourist season. I hope you enjoy my yarn about a time in my life as well as the ghost stories I lived around. Thank you for your time, ears, and eyes.
I want to make it clear that in NO stage of my creative process, writing, and editing my stories do I use AI. NONE. My work ‘Cost of the Heart: Vol I Into the Fire” has been rated by an individual as AI created in no flattering terms. I do not need AI to create stories and write them. I use a human to edit. Please see my blog series on how I created this book. https://costoftheheart.com/2026/09/15/writing-a-book-for-the-first-time/ Thank you, Peace. -d²
As I had said in the last post it took about two weeks to do the edits from my editor. She pushed me which I truly appreciated. I felt like my manuscript was worth creating a book with. One reason it took so long was as I would reread my writing and push the scene a little more I would cry, not just tear up but tears streaming down my cheeks; not being able to see the screen crying. I would get up walk a bit around the house till my eyes and emotions cleared up then back at it. By now I had also started my author blog site, this one to be specific. I used the same schedule as I did to write.
To take breaks between editing I would work on the graphics of my book and the order I wanted the pages to be in. Created my bio for the book as well as the dedications page. Please know I had hoped to have at least my ePub files created to share for reviews and rankings. We were in middle of June and I pushed my original release date from June 21st, my mother’s birthday to a month from that, then ended up pushing it to Aug 1st.
With the document edited and ready for my typesetter we began to work on it. Again my time line expectations were not realistic. My typesetter even said we will be going back and forth a few times. I said ok and continued to lay out how I wanted the book to look on the interior, the size a 9″X6″ format on cream paper. Interior picture placement and style. I wanted a “Penny Dreadful” style to the art that I submitted to be used in the book. Only the image of Lilith is my original work. The other two image plates are graphically designed from my descriptions and a few rounds of corrections.
While waiting for the first typeset copy to come back I started writing my blog story “Under a Dark Star” to keep in the practice of writing. It is very easy to get out of the habit of creating stories or posts such as this one. One of my cousins and I were talking and she purchased my book directly from me so she could have it signed. I thanked her and I cried. She aske why would I cry. I told here that it is very humbling to have someone purchase your work. I write and hope that people will like my work. I don’t know, I do test it with friends reading it and thinking about the story if it’s worth telling. There are a lot of stories that don’t even get past my thoughts. Some I really just don’t think are interesting or would be worth someone’s time to read.
As I write I become invested in my characters and what I am going to do to them. I cry, laugh, and such as I write their tales. I know what I am going to do to them, my stories are not rainbows and unicorns, it is science fantasy but tragic and bittersweet. My stories generally center around love and the heart regardless if that was my intent at the start of the story creation process. My work is pulp fiction, speculative, science fantasy, not something that will change society or predicts any great future-scapes to come true. Just plain old sci-fi/f tragic love stories with a dark “Night Gallery” type of twist. I worked through this to help refine my target genre and marketing/ad copy with use of AI. A stack I had put together to help me with marketing and creating images for Under a Dark Star blog poems.
My files came back. I went through them with a pdf reader then printed them out to see how it laid out. I noticed that most of my 3 line breaks to indicate time passage or point of view change were missing. This will break a short story especially mine that may move hours to years and sometimes eons in the story timeline. This took was unreal in the back and forth it took to get the files. The pdf files were finally set but the ePub files were still missing not just some but ALL the 3 line spaces throughout all three stories. It took a week to have a picture corrected. My Aug 1st release date was approaching and nothing was being corrected. I told my typesetter thankyou, you have been paid, I will take these files and work with them.
I found another typesetter to get the files corrected with all my line edits from the author copy I had printed on Amazon KDP. That was all I needed but in my panic I was over sold on what I wanted in services and mislead on marketing services. It cost me another $800.00 to have the files I needed to go to print and Kindle. Looking back now and what I have built with my AI stack I will probably be able to do my own typesetting for my next book due out late Winter.
At this point in the story I now have my files to submit to KDP, booksy.by, and Ingram/Spark for publishing.
Next week I will talk about tools and being lost in where to go now.
Writing a book and getting out to the public was quite an experience and learning opportunities abound. I have been asked a few times about how long it took to get the book written as well as what was my writing process and insperations.
First thing in the process was ideas for stories, my book is a themed set of short stories. Then making the commitment to write. No matter what get up in the morning, do morning chores, get coffee and write. Now I may write in a note book, in my reMarkable, or on my PC. Write and write until you can’t. That is ok, get up and finish household chores, go shopping, read, anything to revive.
I did this every morning, getting up at 7.30A. Doing my morning ritual and writing. My first story took two weeks doing this. I was happy with it, made some edits over the next week and had friends read it to give me feedback. I also will sometimes sketch drawings of main characters or locations. I include some of them in my books as the opening page for a short story.
During the writings of the main part of the book I am also working on the opening poem. Once satisfied with “Demon Tears” I moved on to writing the next story. The next story “Statue of Love” only took three days to write the raw story. The first day was my usual get up and write. I wrote a bit then went out and ended up at my friends house for the evening. Coming back home I was inspired. I sat in front of the PC and started banging on the keyboard, I wrote and would cry. I would get up and pace the length of the house. Coming back to write more. I did this all night to the dawn of the new day. At that time I all I needed was to write the ending I had already seen. Exhausted I climbed into bed and slept most of the day. I got up and finished the story that evening and the following day.
“Heart of the Dead” took much longer. The story took almost a month to write and have my friends read it. Once I had all three of the main stories written and edited by me; now I started putting the book together, writing the three 6 line stories to introduce the main set of stories. Once done, another week, I go through the set of stories, editing, and making sure that they hang together in this collection.
At this point I needed to have the document gone through and professionally edited. I looked on line and found Readsy.com where I could find the professionals I needed. I went through the listed professional editors finding a group in my genre I sent out requests for bids with a sample and what I needed. I got back a few rejections and two bids. I hired one of them and plan to use her again on this current book I am putting together.
Now while my manuscript is with my editor I begin to look for a typesetter and graphic designer for book cover. Once I found my designer we began to work together off of a brief I sent him. After a few rounds of examples and finetuning color pallets I have a draft to use on my website to start promotion. It took about a month to get the book cover finished and ready to use for production.
Now with the cover finished I can move on to the typesetting and internal images to open each main story. Not having the edited copy back yet I focus on the three images for the book. This I work with my graphic designer to take my drawing and create the graphic plates for the book. This took a bit to do and some back and forth.
During the back and forth of the image creation I received my edited copy back. Here I go through the edits that have been made and approve them or change the wording to what I want. Now also at this time I have blocks where my editor would tell me “show don’t tell.” She pushed me and my manuscript is better for it. With her guidance on this book, my next set of stories will be a bit longer and will have four stories in “Cost of the Heart; Vol II Ghosts from the Machine” This process I thought would be a few days turned into two weeks.
I am roughly two months into the book now. I am ready to start the process of the book layout and typesetting.
I will post about that process as it took the longest and was the most frustrating. It also ended up adding another $800.00 to my cost already of just under $3K, with my book awareness ad campaign this puts my cost now at a little over $4K. More on this next post. See you Thursday.
Hello fellow netizens. Tonight I will be posting a reel of me telling one of the many true ghost stories that have happened to me.
This tale concerns a cat that followed me long after its death. Since my current page subscription doesn’t allow video posting on my page without an upgrade I will be posting the videos on my Cost of the Heart Facebook page tonight before midnight.
I have been working to get back in the groove of posting and writing the next set of stories. Life has intervened but I march on. My book was approved to be in our local library. I haven’t seen any orders from Ingram/Spark so no other copies have been placed in our parish library system. It feels good though to have a book I wrote in the public library. I spent so much time as I boy in libraries across the country.
I also received my first review on Amazon. It was a 5 star review with encouraging words for my pulp work! Thank you! Please if you enjoy my work please give me an honest review on Amazon, that will help my ranking so my book gets in front of readers. Thank all of you for your continued support.
Dramatic readings- Next week I will post one more reading of “Demon Tears” before I believe the text gets a little too suggestive for Facebook. This Friday I will post a true ghost story that I personally experienced. I had the spirit of a cat follow me for years. This Friday I will tell that tale. I plan to post a ghost story every Friday till Halloween. Some will be true some will be expanded stories and or legends as well as out right yarns spun by me.
-d²
My first Amazon rating and it’s 5 stars! Thank you!
I have been working through a minor health issue that is now on the mend and I am of better mind and spirit to write and interact again in social media and such. Just like drunk texting, I don’t post while on pain killers. 🙂 I have some good stories though now to write in the blog and my next volumes.
My book has been selling I have a total of 11 actual sales! I thank all of you who have purchased my work. I truly hope you enjoy my stories. Volume II: “Ghosts from the Machine” will have a one or two more stories than “Vol I: Into the Fire”. A few on Amazon, from my own book printer, a local book store, as well as out of the back of my truck. I carry a box and ask: “Do you read fiction?” I try to have a book in hand. I have made the majority of my sales here local.
My Blog stories “Under a Dark Star” got paused as I work on getting my book out there and purchased. That’s the only way I can keep writing, is selling. haha. I am in a good place with Asha and Talas with the story and the step back was good. Knowing where the story is going is the hard part and I want Asha and Talas to just enjoy a reprieve even for a day or two. Most posts this week will deal with my book. I have had some interesting reoccurring questions from people. I will post a video on my Facebook page: Cost of the Heart talking about Lilith and why I write, where my ideas come from, and a few other things.
A Big thank you to My Secret Shelves book store here in Pineville Louisiana. My first sales in an actual book store. Someone picked it up, opened it, read a few things and Bought IT!!! Who ever you are THANK YOU!
-d²
I sold one!! A book sold after a week on the shelf at My Secret Shelves!
Pip: There is a spider-like alien crying tearless sobs in a cave, and a human holding her anyway — and somehow that is the most functional relationship dynamic I have encountered this week.
Mara: That scene is the heart of what d² is working through in this episode — grief, love, and what it costs to feel things for the first time. Let’s start with the cave, the pool, and the family that forms in the dark.
Under a Dark Star: Love as a New and Painful Thing
Pip: The tension here is specific: what happens when a creature built for detachment — one who has never mourned, never loved — suddenly does both at once?
Mara: The post sets it up plainly. Asha tells Talas: “I not Love before. I no care how many live or die. I just train as many for the reaping as I can. Only 10 can be reaped. Rest die. I don’t want babies to go to reaping now. I hurt for other babies now. This love hurt. I no like it.”
Pip: That is a complete moral transformation in about fifty words. She has moved from a system — train them, reap them, accept the loss — to grief. The system no longer holds.
Mara: And the post makes clear this is not abstract. Asha started with roughly twenty babies surviving out of more. She is sitting at the edge of a pool, egg sack in hand, crying sobs that echo through the cave — tearless, because that is what her body does, but raw and primal all the same.
Pip: Talas does not explain the grief away. He just pulls her in, chitin armor and all, and holds her.
Mara: The post describes his response not as words but as something felt: “Talas held that thought not as an echo of words but as a blanket of pure caring and balm for her heart.” He extends that same blanket outward to the remaining babies, who are young enough that being loved is new but not foreign.
Pip: So the web of thought that connects them becomes, in the space of one night, something closer to a family.
Mara: The closing image earns that word. Every mind in the cave — Asha, Talas, the babies — is held in the same shared warmth, and the post names it directly: unity, oneness, family, forged under a dark star.
Pip: Grief taught her love, and love is already remaking what comes next.
Mara: What stays with me is that Asha’s first experience of love and her first experience of loss arrive at exactly the same moment.
Pip: That tracks. The heart does not hand you one without the other. More from this world next time.
Pip: There’s a moment in this episode where two beings with incompatible bodies find each other anyway — which, honestly, is either the most romantic thing in speculative fiction or a very pointed comment on how love actually works.
Mara: d² gives us that moment in a piece of serial fiction about two alien lovers, and it’s the territory we’re spending our time in today — what it costs, and what it builds.
Pip: Let’s start with Talas and Asha, underwater, in the dark.
Under a Dark Star: Become One
Mara: The question this installment puts on the table is whether two minds can genuinely merge when the bodies cannot — and what it means when the answer turns out to be yes.
Pip: The post frames that answer directly. Talas reflects on the impossibility and then watches it dissolve anyway: “There could be no physical coupling between these two. The body make up would not allow it. Asha though danced and spun webs of desire and passion within Talas’s mind.”
Mara: So the upshot is that the story doesn’t treat the physical barrier as a tragedy to mourn — it treats it as the door to something more complete. The intimacy runs deeper precisely because it has nowhere else to go.
Pip: And the scene earns that. Three full cycles of a solar storm, both of them suspended in that half-awake, half-dreaming state, and the writing keeps finding new angles on the same feeling rather than just repeating it.
Mara: What lands hardest is the asymmetry the post builds between them. Talas carries a broken heart from boyhood. Asha carries a void — no loving memories at all. The exchange is almost transactional in the best sense: he lays his history bare, she finds it and consumes it, and in doing so she grows the thing she never had.
Pip: “It was through Talas’s own heart that Asha grew one.” That’s doing a lot of quiet work for eight words.
Mara: The closing exchange earns its place too. Talas thanks her, with genuine lightness, for not eating him. She says she’s glad she didn’t. And then his tears go unnoticed in the pool — which is either devastating or perfect, depending on how you’re reading it.
Pip: Both, I’d argue. The “(continued)” tag at the end is doing its own kind of damage — this is a chapter in something larger, and the story is clearly building toward a cost that hasn’t arrived yet.
Mara: Which makes the warmth of this installment feel all the more deliberate. Right now, they have each other. The dark star is still burning outside.
Pip: Love built from incompatibility, intimacy without contact — this story keeps finding the harder version of every tender thing.
Mara: Next time, we’ll see what the cost looks like when the storm clears.
Pip: A solar flare, an alien mother, and a man who can’t quite admit what he’s feeling — Cost of the Heart is doing a lot of heavy lifting in a single cave.
Mara: This episode follows d²’s serialized science fiction story, where survival and something that might be love are getting harder to tell apart. Let’s start with the flare itself.
Under a Dark Star: Firestorm
Pip: The setup here is almost classical — two characters, one catastrophe, a shelter they barely reach in time. But the catastrophe is a solar flare on an alien moon, and one of the characters is an arthropod mother whose children are cooking in their egg sacks while she runs.
Mara: The post captures the telepathic link between Asha and Talas right at the moment of crisis: “Asha’s warning hit him just as he watched a huge angry bloody red solar flare fill the sky. Blinded and pulling up his arms extinctive he felt Asha’s pain and mental push to get inside.”
Pip: So Talas is blind, crawling toward a cave entrance by memory, narrating his progress to himself — “Ow, there’s a rock there, ok, more left” — while Asha is being cooked alive through her own chitin. The stakes are immediate and physical.
Mara: And then the losses compound. Asha saves one egg sack — a third of her children. The others don’t survive the flare reaching the moon’s outer atmosphere. She tells the remaining babies to eat their dead sisters. It’s brutal and matter-of-fact in the same breath.
Pip: The underwater scene is where the story earns its title. Asha holds Talas under to protect him from a second flare, and when he needs air, she pulls him close and breathes for him directly — which Talas’s brain immediately categorizes as a “kiss of life” and then immediately second-guesses.
Mara: The post closes on that ambiguity made explicit: “Talas not repulsed by Asha now. Talas kiss Asha, Talas Love Asha now. These thoughts not only echoed around in Asha’s own mind but gently caressed Talas’s as they both drifted in a pool of water entangled through deep shared dreams.”
Pip: He falls asleep curled into her body, and she knows something shifted. The flare is the engine, but what it burns away is his resistance.
Mara: Survival as the condition for honesty — when there’s nothing left to protect, what remains is what was always true.
Pip: A solar flare as emotional catalyst — hard to argue with the efficiency.
Mara: Next time, we’ll see where those shared dreams lead. The water won’t stay cool forever.
