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I’m thrilled to welcome Carly to discuss her new book, THE GHOSTS OF NAMELESS ISLAND (Andrews McMeel Kids 7/23/24). I recently met Carly at ALA and fell in love with her and her hilarious/spine-tingling middle-grade novel.

I am delighted to say we share the same publisher, and our ghost stories release on the same day, which makes me feel even more of a kinship with her. (HART & SOULS)

So . . . If you’re in the mood for a spooky summer, we’ve got you covered!

Now it’s my pleasure to introduce you to the fabulous Carly Anne West . . .

Lisa: Tell us about THE GHOSTS OF NAMELESS ISLAND 

Carly: GHOSTS follows Gus Greenburg, a kid with an unlikely (and unwelcome) gift—he can see ghosts. While this didn’t used to be the biggest deal in the world, it’s become a bigger deal now that Gus and his mom have moved to Nameless Island and into the infamous Rotham Manor, an old mansion replete with ghosts ready to haunt the heck out of Gus. And these ghosts play by a different set of rules than the others; they can hurt Gus. Now, Gus must find out what happened to the ghosts and discover their identities before they can pass on to the next realm and leave him alone. Fortunately, he’ll have some help ghostbusting with his new friends, Tavi and Miles.

Lisa: How did you come up with the idea? 

Carly: I’ve always felt that the most potent hauntings come from unfinished business, and Gus is dealing with a great deal of unfinished business with a missing father in his life, so it made sense to me that he would be parsing out mysteries about people whose lives ended perhaps before they expected them to, and I really liked the idea of a kid who was dealing with his own anxieties helping ghosts that were experiencing their own sort of turmoil. And it takes place in the Pacific Northwest; having lived there, I know it’s an area rife with haunted stories.

Lisa: Did you base characters on people you know? If yes, spill the beans!

Carly: I mean, don’t all writers create their characters out of composites of people they’ve known in their lives?  No one character is anyone specific, but there are certainly aspects of the characters that have special qualities similar to important people in my life. We’ll find in the second book that Gus is an artist; so is one of my kids. We’ll find out later Tavi is a soccer player like my other kiddo. Miles is Korean-American; I live in Korea. So there are elements of real-life in there, absolutely.

Lisa: How much of your real-life experiences play a role in the stories you tell?

Carly: Honestly, I think I write for middle grade and young adults because those times in my life (and so many people’s lives) were/are so difficult. It’s maybe a bit cathartic to write about a time when I felt so out of control; maybe controlling the narrative now is one way to take back some of the power I felt unable to possess back then. There are also plenty of emotions from that time period that cling to adulthood (frustratingly), so in a way, what I’m writing can feel timely, whether I want it to or not.

Lisa: Which books did you like to read when you were a kid? Do those books influence your writing?

Carly: I was a little late to the reading game. I was good at reading the required books, but when it came to reading for pleasure, I had a tough time finding what my niche was. I knew I liked scary stories, but once I’d burned through all the Christopher Pike options, I was stuck. I probably started reading Stephen King too young. Once I started down that road, I knew horror was my thing, and that absolutely influenced my writing. I knew I was attracted to scary stories, and the scarier the better. There was something delicious about the anticipation of a supernatural scare, that lingering suspense. Fear is such an ancient, lizard-brain sort of emotion. I love playing with notions that creaky and dormant.

Lisa: What advice would you give twelve-year-old, Carly?

Carly: Oh dear. That poor girl. She struggled. A lot. Twelve years old was not a good age. I would tell her that she is most definitely not the only one feeling the anxiety she is feeling, and that emotion isn’t alien but an actual clinical function she’ll be taught to deal with down the road. Same with the panic attacks. I’d tell her that the people who seem super important in this moment won’t mean so much in a year or two, and in fact, she won’t even remember their names. I’d tell her that her body is beautiful the way it is. I’d tell her she’s so much stronger than she thinks she is. She’ll be okay.

Lisa: Have you ever seen a ghost?

I’ve heard a ghost. It murmured in my right ear. I was unpacking books in our new apartment in Alameda, CA late one night. My husband was asleep in the bedroom, and all at once, all the sound emptied from the room, like a vacuum sucked every drop of air from the atmosphere. Then, I heard a very close murmuring against my ear. I whipped around thinking it was my husband sneaking up on me, but no one was there, and when I ran down the hall to catch him in the act, he was dead asleep. When I returned to the living room, the sound was back, the murmuring was gone, and all had returned to normal. The next morning, my husband was putting books away in the same spot, and he yells “What?” to me. I come around the corner, and he’s like, “you were mumbling, I couldn’t hear you.” He heard the same thing I heard, in the same spot. The murmurings happened right next to a closet in the living room. The entire time we lived in that apartment, our cats would never go in that closet. They would get close, then freeze, stare into an upper corner of the closet, lay their ears back, slowly slink away, and dart around the corner.

Lisa: If you could talk to a ghost, what would you say?

Carly: Well, to the one in Alameda, I said, “You were here first, so the place is yours. Please just let us stay in peace. I think we can live here together.” And we did for three years with almost no other incidents. Just a couple of spooky moments.

Lisa: I know you are a plotter . . . How do you outline an entire story? What is your secret? (asking for a friend)

Carly: So, I should probably qualify this. I’m a plotter, but only to an extent. I don’t start off that way. I typically start with an emotion, something I know I want my main character to be going through. From there, I often pick a setting, as the setting usually becomes something of a character in the story. Then I’ll just sort of see what sprouts with that emotion and that setting. I only really start plotting once I’m about a third of the way through writing scenes. That’s when I realize I need to start building out a sort of scaffolding to hold the story together. I’ll break out a giant sketchbook and make either a timeline or a scene-by-scene summary, but even then, there are holes and scribbles and a million and one changes. I rarely if ever write in sequence, and I almost never know how a story is going to end. My characters almost always surprise me.

Lisa: Last, but most important . . . What happens next with Gus?

Carly: HA! He’s going to surprise me, too! But I at least know where he’s headed in Book 2. You can expect more ghosts than you bargained for in the first book, some friend drama that Gus didn’t sign up for, noxious dogs, therapy speed-dating, intrepid librarians, bootlegging, Cat-wrangling, and so much more.

Lisa: Thank you so much for chatting with me today. I’ve got goosebumps from your ghost story. So creepy! I once lived with a ghost that occasionally turned all the lights on in my house after I went to bed. I just assumed she didn’t like the dark. 

Spooky . . . 

And dear reader, if you have a ghost story, please share in the comments. We’d love to hear your chilling tale. 

Happy haunting! 

All About Carly Anne West

Carly is the author of the YA novels The Murmurings and The Bargaining and the Hello Neighbor middle grade series of novels. She is also a collaborator on the Fazbear Frights novels with Five Nights at Freddy’s. Carly Anne lives in Seoul, Korea with her husband, two kids, a very small cat, and a very large dog. Visit her at carlyannewest.com, on Twitter @carlyannewest1, on Insta @carlyannewest, and on FB at carlyannewest.