Just a few days before my retirement from the Library at California State University, Sacramento, I was walking across campus to my final meeting of the Campus Minorities Committee, and I experienced the most curious feeling. I felt like a ghost. All the students and faculty were walking about me, in between classes, and no one seemed to be able to see me. It was rather nice, actually.
And the first words of a story came to me. "I felt like a ghost today." When I arrived at the classroom for the meeting, nobody was yet there, and so I sat down to make some notes without knowing at all where the words would take me. That single page of notes became the seed for A Ghost in Silence.
I finished the story when I got home that night, and I was mightily pleased by it. It came flushing out of me and seemed honest and needed and new. Since I had worked as a juror for the Once Upon a World Book Award, I was pretty sure that it was unique to the world of children's literature.
That was quite a while ago now, and I don't quite remember exactly what happened, or exactly in what sequence, but I know that I submitted it to an editor with whom I had recently worked. She appeared to like it but wanted it written for a slightly older audience, and she asked me to expand it into a chapter book, with more focus on the narrator's school life and family life. I had some ideas immediately and set to work, although I really liked the brevity of the original, too, and still felt it had a place in the lives of, say, fifth graders.
But I was also pleased with my new inventions. And meanwhile I had been in touch with illustrator Dave Rauscher and asked him to do some illustrations that would appear to be drawn by a 10-year-old boy. Dave had some good ideas, I felt, and he went to work fairly quickly at first as I was expanding the book to a chapter book. Dave and I laugh now that when I originally proposed the project to him I had thought maybe it would involve a dozen or so pictures. By the time we finished, well, I can't even count them now since some of them are in pieces, but I suppose there are ten times that first estimate. Ha!
Part of the reason there are so many more pictures is that Dave's pictures were really too good. Very very few 10-year-olds would be able to draw that professionally, even though Dave did make some very rough drawings, too. And so I came up with the idea for Dillon's being a cartoonist, and that he had already made several comic books with his superhero PantherBoy. I also invented Chazz's involvement with Dillon in Dillon's artwork, that Chazz allows Dillon to use his laptop and his art programs, and that Chazz provides Dillon with a lot of ideas, both about drawing and about writing. I was super pleased with this invention because it goes a long way toward explaining why Dillon would love Chazz so much. What 10-year-old wouldn't want a big brother who took such an active interest in his art?So it occurred to me that some people might be interested in reading the original little story of A Ghost in Silence only a little more than 3500 words, a little more than ten typed pages.
Copyright © 2009 Robert Locke
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