It's funny to run a top paranormal blog and write horror when people know me as a kind, lighthearted, person full of gratitude and childlike wonder. 

How is a horror writer born? Most folks would assume we are all Poe'esque, depressed, gothic people who see the world in tones of gray and black. 

This particular horror screenwriter had influences that funneled me right to my ideal career. Later in life, it becomes prophetic in retrospect. There are no coincidences. Is it fate? Is it manifesting? Is it the intuit guiding choices? 

I was born in a spooky 200+ year old Civil War hospital home. 

My mom, being an historian, loaded the house down with period antiques, heavy drapes, dark furnishings. The wooden floors were still stained black with the blood of the soldiers. Both the North and South used the house as a hospital at various times. I dug up relics to fill the cabinets, and found a hidden room that was an underground railroad space. 

The house was also extremely haunted and I told about this in my award-winning book, "Growing Up With Ghosts." TV shows and newspapers reported on the ghostly goings on. 

I wandered the forest around the property, the boxwood mazes at night under the moonlight. I excitedly counted the days until I could costume up for Halloween and parade around the elementary school and rush out into the night with a pillowcase.

Our family had an old Victorian summer home on the Chesapeake that had very strong haunted vibes and the waterfront was truly haunted, as well as an old cemetery across the street. Creaking floorboards, dim lighting, dusty libraries, antiques all created atmosphere, along with fog, fog horns, and diving for oysters at 4 am in the bay when the tide was low. I wrote about this in my book, "Vacationing With Ghosts." 

Our home had a big library and I would sit with ancient books with spooky images, musty smelling pages, creaking spines. Left to my own devices when my much older sibs were running about, I learned to be creative. I braved the unfinished basement and the crawlspace, dug up some soldier's bones and reburied them with a prayer. This was a "normal" childhood. 

My friends found I was a great storyteller, so I would make up stories as we sat around in the dark on sleepovers. There was a romance to the forests, the orchards, the boxwood mazes, the seasons, and those stormy nights when the power went out and we carried around hurricane lamps. 

Starting in adolescence, I began six years of acting. I wrote spooky things and loved to see scary movies from the black and white era until the 70s. Later, I tried 80s slasher movies as they were titled as horror, but they weren't scary, just gross. 

I then read Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House" and saw the movie "The Haunting" based on it and it so strongly affected my storytelling senses. It was familiar. I lived in this creepy ornate home. I heard the footfalls and voices, saw the shadows. And it was the not knowing when or where that created horror.

It was then that I realized atmosphere was everything. Musical scoring and lighting amped it up. I was already thinking like a moviemaker. The films I loved the most had a common element - they didn't show everything. My mind had to fill in the blanks. The slasher flicks were missing the mark because they were like horror porn, it was in your face, raw, and you were shown everything.

In college, I focused myself on communications and English and my focus was on literature to film and scriptwriting. 

Even though my married life took me on a career path that allowed for no creativity, I watched horror movies, I read horror books, I took up oil painting. I even started writing and submitting manuscripts hoping to refine my writing skills. I continued to adore Halloween and decorating, costumes, and movie watching. 

I was doing some ghost hunting to answer my own questions about things from my childhood estate. I loved wandering abandoned places and photographing them, sitting in a graveyard after dark, staying in a haunted historic hotel. It was familiar. I was comfortable in it as it reminded me of my childhood home and the familiar smells and feelings it elicited. I had lost nearly all my large family over my lifetime because I was the youngest by far. It gave me a perspective on death and the haunted house of my childhood gave me perspective on the place where the worlds "rub." Being an artist and photographer, I couldn't help noting the littlest of things and their impact. 

I live to make audiences stop and notice.

By 2008, I underwent surgery on my Achilles and was immobile for a time. I do not handle being still, so I was upset. My son suggested I blog. I didn't even know what that was. He suggested doing something having to do with my ghost hunting interests. After a bit of nudging, i looked into it and launched this blog. 

This blogging thing got in my blood. I was researching and writing about all the subjects I was curious about. Hiking in the Sierras in my 20s, I saw a Bigfoot. It became another puzzle to answer. I expanded the subjects I wrote about and decided to do creative writing again and entered a "Ghost Adventures" writing contest and won. It dawned on me, I should get back to writing books. Life was busy enough with my job, family duties, and blogging, so I told myself, "some day I'll have the time."

That some day came in 2010 when I divorced my husband and moved out. On my own, I felt free to play horror movies, decorate with creepy dolls and promote the blog with my sidekick ventriloquist doll, Dale. (BTW Dale moved to Florida and can be found on Facebook as "Dale the Doll.")

It was during this time, I saw a meetup group for filmmaking. I had originally taken acting hoping to get into filmmaking, writing, set design, costuming, even acting. I knew there was something about that medium that sang to me as a storyteller. So, I joined the meetup and eventually acted and wrote short films. That connection with the meetup leader who had a production company, led to opportunities to write for films, just years later. 

When I see it in retrospect, along the way I was collecting "breadcrumbs" of interests and focuses that would make this destiny almost inevitable. 

Some horror authors are drawn to adrenalin rush of terror. Others like to focus on death and the tragedy of being alive and suffering. Others are romantics who love mood and atmosphere that create mystery. Others are into the psychology of dealing with the unknown. We are all influenced in different ways for different reasons. 

So how can I be a compassionate and playful adult, a nerdy curious intelligence, and the creator of dark themes?  

Like any well-written story, that life I described above had an obvious conclusion - the writer who is writing this post.