Little Choices Can Change Our Stories In Big Ways, a guest post by Ginny Myers Sain

Lizzie Borden is looking over my shoulder. She’s holding a sharpened weapon and grinning at me while I write this. And I can almost hear her humming that tune. You know the one. Lizzie Borden took an axe…

My friends tell me she’s creepy. They don’t know how I can live with her in the house, but I love bobble-head Liz. I bought her on a trip to the Lizzie Borden House Bed and Breakfast in Fall River, Massachusetts, and I count her as one of my favorite possessions.

I like dark stories. Crumbling manors. Deep woods. Foggy lakes. The more haunted and atmospheric, the better. Ghosts. Monsters. Serial killers. Give me all the creepy things that go bump in the night.  And if those dark stories have just a little bit of truth to them, and if they’re mysterious or unsolved or unexplained—like Lizzie’s story—that’s even better.

I often get asked what led me to write DARK AND SHALLOW LIES, my debut novel that’s out this fall. It’s a dark, twisty story, and people seem to want to know where it came from. I know some authors can point to one single moment that shaped them into the writer they would become, but I can’t narrow it down quite that far. I can, however, identify three things in my life that seem completely unrelated but eventually led to a book. It’s funny now, looking back on those three very random and totally unconnected things and realizing how they led me to a reality where I’m a real-live author typing this guest post two-weeks before my debut novel makes its way into the world. And it’s especially weird to realize that, without any one of these events, I might have written a completely different story.

First, when I was six years old, I got the best birthday present I’ve ever received: The Weebles Haunted House. There is no way to explain how cool this thing was. It was so intricately detailed in all its haunted plastic glory. It came with a Weeble ghost. It made real haunted house sounds, whatever those are. And I was hooked. From that moment on, I was a lover of the macabre.

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I grew up in a really happy home. I had a lovely childhood with great parents, a younger brother and sister, and lots of friends in small-town Oklahoma. It was always bright. Always sunny. So I had to invent my own darkness. When the county fair came around every fall, I’d wait in line for the spook house over and over while my friends were riding the Scrambler. But the fair was only once a year, so stories were the most readily accessible way to feed my desire for fear. I became obsessed with The Ghost Belonged to Me by Richard Peck and The Ghost Next Door by Wylly Folk St. John.  Then I read everything I could get by Lois Duncan. Stranger with My Face and Down a Dark Hall were my favorites. I devoured stories by Shirley Jackson and Daphne Du Maurier and gothic mysteries by Victoria Holt. I was not a dark kid at all, but those scary stories scratched some deep itch I had. And it all started with that Weebles Haunted House.

Years later, in my freshman year of college, I met a two boys at the President’s picnic on the very first day that I arrived on campus. They were both cute. Both theatre majors, like me. Both were talented and funny. I went out with each of them over those first few weeks of school. One took me to a carnival and bought me ferris wheel rides and won me a stuffed frog. The other took me to dinner in the nearest big town and we tried Thai food for the first time together. It was all very magical, and I liked them each for different reasons. But, eventually, I had to choose. I chose the boy who introduced me to Thai food, and we dated for most of my four years of college.

His family was from south Louisiana, and it was with him that I first traveled down to that part of the country. For a girl from the dry and dusty plains of Oklahoma, it was like traveling to another planet. On that first trip down to the bayou, I tasted crawfish at a place where you ate it right off a table that had been covered in butcher paper. (It was to die for!) I danced to live Zydeco until I almost passed out in a stifling hot bar that was strung up with Christmas lights. And most important, I saw my first alligator crossing the road right in front of our car.  I was in love. Yes, with the boy. For sure. And that was a first, too. But I was also head-over-heels in love with Cajun Country. In the end, that was the love affair that lasted. The boy and I broke up my senior year, and I haven’t seen him since. But the state of Louisiana, the city of New Orleans, Zydeco, crawfish, and alligators…those things still call to me. I tell people all that time that I’m from Oklahoma, but it’s the landscape of the swamps and bayous that is truly the landscape of my heart.

And then, years, after that, I was traveling across Florida with my teenage son. We love to take road trips together, and we’ve seen a lot of the United States by car, but Florida is one of our favorite places to visit. On this particular trip, we decided to head up north of Orlando, where we were staying, for a trip to Blue Springs State Park. We had heard that in the winter months, hundreds of manatees came in from the river to seek the warmer waters of the spring. We don’t have manatees in Oklahoma, so we wanted to see them. I think we counted over three hundred of them that morning.

When we’d seen all the manatees we could see, we still had a half-day to kill. I dug our Florida guidebook out of the glove box, searching for anything else in the area that might be interesting, before we hopped on the highway and headed back down to the theme parks and miniature golf courses of Orlando. That’s how I stumbled upon the tiny little town of Cassadaga.

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Cassadaga, Florida, calls itself the “Psychic Capital of the World,” and that sounded like a pretty interesting stop on the way home. Plus it was only fifteen minutes from Blue Springs State Park, so off we went.

Cassadaga’s town square is lined with fortune tellers, astrologists, palm readers, and all sorts of interesting little shops. You can make an appointment with pretty much any kind of spiritualist or mystic to help you find what you might be looking for. There’s a sprawling old hotel, which is supposed to be haunted, and a lovely little park. I was standing on the front porch of the bookstore right in the middle of town when and a question popped into my head. “How do you keep a secret in a town full of psychics?” And that question became a story. Now the story is becoming a book.

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Several times over the past whirlwind of a year, it’s hit me that, if just one of those three things had happened differently, DARK AND SHALLOW LIES probably wouldn’t exist.

What if my parents had gotten me the Weeble circus that year, instead of the haunted house? I might not have become fascinated with the dark stories that fueled my imagination as a child and now fuel my passion for writing as an adult.

What if I’d chosen the other boy? He was from Oklahoma, like me. If I’d spent those years with him, I might never have tasted crawfish or fallen in love with the way the bayou sounds at night or developed an alligator obsession that still exists to this day.

And what if my son and I had seen the manatees at Blue Springs State Park, and then gotten on I-4 and headed back to our Orlando hotel, never knowing that I’d just passed the exit where I could have found the inspiration for my debut novel?

DARK AND SHALLOW LIES is a story about psychics, but, for most of us, there’s no way to know what the future holds. Life is full of so many little choices, and it’s both terrifying and wonderful to think that something like choosing to pull a guide book out of the glove box could totally change your destiny. Honey, the grandmother in my book, would probably say it’s fate. I’m not sure I believe that, but I do believe that our stories mostly come to us in the smallest moments of our lives, not the biggest. It’s how we stitch those tiny moments together, day after day and year after year that makes each journey so unique.

Meet the author

Ginny Myers Sain lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and has spent the past twenty years working closely with teens as a director and acting instructor in a program designed for high school students seriously intent on pursuing a career in the professional theatre. Having grown up in deeply rural America, she is interested in telling stories about resilient kids who come of age in remote settings. Dark and Shallow Lies is her debut novel. Follow her on Twitter @stageandpage and on Instagram @ginnymyerssain, or find her on her website at ginnymyerssain.com.

About Dark and Shallow Lies

A teen girl disappears from her small town deep in the bayou, where magic festers beneath the surface of the swamp like water rot, in this chilling debut supernatural thriller for fans of Natasha Preston, Karen McManus, and Rory Power.

La Cachette, Louisiana, is the worst place to be if you have something to hide.

This tiny town, where seventeen-year-old Grey spends her summers, is the self-proclaimed Psychic Capital of the World—and the place where Elora Pellerin, Grey’s best friend, disappeared six months earlier.

Grey can’t believe that Elora vanished into thin air any more than she can believe that nobody in a town full of psychics knows what happened. But as she digs into the night that Elora went missing, she begins to realize that everybody in town is hiding something—her grandmother Honey; her childhood crush Hart; and even her late mother, whose secrets continue to call to Grey from beyond the grave.

When a mysterious stranger emerges from the bayou—a stormy-eyed boy with links to Elora and the town’s bloody history—Grey realizes that La Cachette’s past is far more present and dangerous than she’d ever understood. Suddenly, she doesn’t know who she can trust. In a town where secrets lurk just below the surface, and where a murderer is on the loose, nobody can be presumed innocent—and La Cachette’s dark and shallow lies may just rip the town apart.

ISBN-13: 9780593403969
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Publication date: 09/07/2021
Age Range: 14 – 17 Years

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