Dealing with ghosts

I grew up in a wonderful neighborhood. The kind where kids fled into the street after school to play. We lived on the water. And exploring the rocky jetties and shell hunting on the beach passed the time and and fueled our imagination.

We lived on the Long Island Sound, on a peninsula. If you looked out across the water, you could see the coastline of the New York Connecticut border area. And smack in the middle of the water was a lighthouse. There were many stories about the lighthouse and it's origins. As kids we made up a few more. 

We knew they referred to the little island with the lighthouse as execution rocks. In our innocence, we thought they executed pirates there. They didn't.

Execution Rocks Courtesy US Coast Guard

Growing up is never easy. Growing up and discovering the things you took so much pleasure in were evil to their very core? That's tough. Reconciling joy and despair takes a maturity personally I may never achieve. And once I learned the true history of the horrors of the picturesque beacon, it haunted me. 

I've wanted to write about it for a long time. But I'm not a historian, I'm a storyteller.

And my next book will allow me to weave a tale featuring several variations of the the little house of horrors lighthouse at execution rocks. I need to tell them in a way that you, the reader, can accept, own and reconcile. That's my task. Help you understand that while evil comes and goes, our better selves must rise above it. Even today, google Execution Rocks and you'll find different versions of the horrors that occurred there. Some have been "purified" to remove any stain on the settlers of Long Island. Others make heroes out of enemies. Ultimately, there may be a grain of truth in every version.

So stay tuned for the story of two people haunted by a shared childhood vision, while a third tries to erase the past. 

What About Luce: Coming Fall 2020.