Nichole Craig’s family has always had a thing for the supernatural. When she was in tenth grade, her parents took her on a trip to St. Augustine’s in Florida, a location known for its ghost tours. It has always been a fun aspect of growing up, though Craig herself is still on the fence about how seriously she takes such stories. “I’m kind of on the edge of whether it’s real or not. But I do have my own experiences that make me question. I love going out and doing that kind of stuff.” Craig said.
Craig has lived in Bowling Green since she was in eighth grade, about 13 years now. Both her family’s passions for the spooky and her hometown’s support of the arts have helped inform her own path as a writer. Her first book, The Blood Scroll, was released this past March. “It’s a paranormal book,” Craig said. “I wanted to use ‘real’-life hauntings. I’ve used the Wood County Historical Museum, it’s my favorite haunting.”
Ghost hunting
The book began as a short story years ago, as part of a challenge on a Facebook group for writers that Craig belonged to. “The theme was ‘revenge,’ and I knew that everybody would be doing something romantic with revenge. So I wanted to go a different route,” she said.
The kernel of an idea in that story grew into a full book focused on a ghost hunter named Amara Black. The character travels around the country clearing pesky poltergeists out of houses, only to end up in police custody. Putting the story together was a laborious process. Craig explains, “I am such a procrastinator, and I do have issues with under-writing, too. I have trouble with explaining what I mean when I’m writing. Because I know what I mean, it just doesn’t always come across the way it does in my mind. So that was the hardest part.”
Getting The Blood Scroll written was the hard part. Finding a publisher came relatively easily, to Craig’s surprise. Only a month after beginning her search, Craig found a partner in Irish Horse Productions out of Novi, MI. “They have been great. I talk to them all the time, still. And as soon as I got accepted by the publisher, it was real quick. Took about five months for them to edit and get the cover done and everything.”
Sharing her world
Craig has been thrilled at how readers have taken to the world she spent such a long time creating. It’s a bit unusual, though, to spend so much time with characters in your own mind, only to learn that others now share them. “It’s just so crazy to me, because this has been my own story, my own thing. Nobody else has really read [it], and then all of a sudden I have other people talking about Amara and my characters and my love interests. And I’m like, how do you know this? But then, I guess it’s public now,” she said.
She’s currently working on a new book, The Shadow Runners. Nothing paranormal about this one, as it has much more of an action focus. “It’s actually the first book I wrote, I just never finished it,” Craig said.
Above all, Craig hopes that her tale of success can serve as an inspiration to her fellow writers. If you want to create a story, do it. If you want to find a publisher, start looking. “If you write a book, you can get it out there.”
The Blood Scroll is available on Amazon via Kindle Unlimited or in paperback.
