I published my first short story, "Frozen Charlotte" on Kindle only.

Right after I graduated from college, I traveled up to Washington State where my family lives and spent the winters there. Winters in Washington State offer a lot of writing time. Even when I didn't feel like writing, the four or five hours of daylight over the forest-lined lake house ten miles from the nearest town, blanketed under up to three feet of snow, pretty much forced me to sit at my laptop to write, or suffer from cabin fever the likes of a Stephen King novel. For an autumn and summer guy like myself, where winters are unbearable and the springtime allergies could send me to the emergency room, I had more time to write than I cared for.

It was while researching obscure urban legends and "true" stories of foreign origins that I came upon many unusual tales, like the coastal Japanese village nestled at the edge of a forest and hugged between two mountains that only appears once every generation to lure guilty souls (which served as inspiration for my novel, "Nightmare Eve") that I came upon the sad tale of Frozen Charlotte.

Frozen Charlotte was said to be the ghost of a woman trapped under a lake, or possible a river, of ice who lures people to their death. The story was itself creepy, but I was more interested on who Charlotte was when she was alive and the social issues of that era that prompted her to run away, leaving her friends and family behind. Although it was a ghost story meant to scare people away from the dangers of thin ice and undercurrents, her story, to me, was heartbreaking. Who was Charlotte and did she even exist?

Whether this is a true story or just a legend passed down by generations, in my story she is very much alive and I hope her tragic tale lives on.