Annapolis resident Janice E.C. Coleman was at a popular Ellicott City ghost tour with her family on an October evening nearly four years ago.
During the tour, Coleman looked up at a window hoping to see something. She didn’t. But at that same moment, while she silently harbored hopes to see some sort of paranormal activity and the excitement of seeing the unseeable built up, she also had a thought — ‘What if I write a book?’
“I’ve been an avid reader since a young age and I love writing,” she said. “I have read a lot of books and never did I read one where the main character was a ghost tour guide.”
And so began her long afternoons writing at the Old Fox Books & Coffeehouse on Maryland Avenue and endless nights of just sitting in front of her computer while listening to rock — The Dammed being one of her favorite bands — and writing pages and pages of “Night Walker.”
“Night Walker” tells the tale of two people who are faced with mystery, paranormality, adventure, doubt and love.
Coleman is a mother, wife, business owner, karate and kickboxing instructor, personal trainer, self-proclaimed music snob and a first-time novelist with a love for the paranormal and devotion for anything Halloween.
When she started writing her book, Coleman was watching a lot of British TV shows, noting “Sherlock Holmes” as one of her top choices. And though she had never been to London, she had always been fascinated by the popular city’s culture and people. This inspired her to base the setting of her book between Eastport, Annapolis and London.
“I researched a lot of London through tour books,” she said. “My husband read the book when I finished it and told me it needed to be embellished a lot.”
Wanting to add more details, color and accuracy to the storyline, Coleman booked a trip to London to immerse herself in British culture and experience firsthand what she wrote about her characters. She started by using Google Maps to pin down exact locations and visiting these in person to be able to depict them as precisely and as vividly as possible. Of course, she also attended ghost tours.
“I got on the tube, visited Camden Market and read the road signs of which way to look before crossing the street,” she chuckled. “My family and I did two ghost tours but it was during civil twilight, which I didn’t realize I had written in the book that it got darker much earlier. So I did research on weather and sunset times and started to rewrite the book.”
The book’s protagonist is 28-year-old Anna Pearson, an American punk rocker turned career woman that — very similar to Coleman — is drawn to scary things. After moving to London from Eastport, Anna attends a ghost tour, where she meets Tom Hall, your typical attractive yet enigmatic British gentleman. Tom, intrigued by Anna, asks her to tea.
It’s when they meet that their adventure through Tom’s dark past and Anna’s odd premonitions takes off, paired with a media frenzy related to violent crimes plaguing the streets of London that adds to the mystery and dark edge of the book.
Writing, Coleman explained, is a way for her to escape from her daily routine and be able to create freely. In listening to her rock music playlist — which she uploaded to her website for readers to access — staying up late until the wee hours of the night to write and attending more ghost tours, Coleman got lost in her own reality only to find her true passion and what makes her tick.
“I feel like my characters are real,” she said, adding that she still thinks of them often and in a way feels attached to them. Her eagerness to create more and reconnect with her characters have kept Coleman busy thinking about what’s next, especially as Halloween approaches.
“I want to turn this into a sequel,” she said. “It’ll probably take me some time, but writing my first book was such a neat experience. I would write a sentence and it would spark another idea. I had never experienced that until I started writing and I’m excited about doing this again.”
In the meantime, while she garners more inspiration during her favorite month of the year and finds a way to revive her characters in a new adventure, Coleman will keep busy book signing at Artfarm on Oct. 24, and at the Sea Witch Festival in Rehoboth, Delaware, just a few days later on Oct. 26 and 27.
