The Ghost Sitter

For fifty years, ten-year-old Susie has waited for her parents and sister to come back. Each new family who moves into her home seems not to notice her, except for the young children. Susie likes children. She even likes baby-sitting, but can she baby-sit forever? Why can't she get anyone else's attention?

Charlotte is looking forward to a great summer in her new home, despite her many baby-sitting duties. But someone else seems to be helping her watch her little brother. Someone only he can see. Gradually Charlotte realizes her all-too-normal house is haunted-by the ghost of a girl who doesn't or won't realize that she's dead.

Set around the Fourth of July, this story offers two perspectives-one of the living and one of the dead-in a wholly entertaining and thought-provoking way.

I am an Air Force brat, born in the long-defunct base at Harlingen. My childhood was spent reading and taking long car trips, as we moved from Texas to Alaska (where I lived through the great Anchorage quake of 1964), Alaska to Iowa (while my father was in Nam), Iowa to Maryland, Maryland back to Texas -- San Angelo, to be precise. I came to San Antonio to attend two universities, from neither of which I graduated. By that time, I was a full-fledged Texan again. In 1987 I married Michael D. Griffin, A.K.A. Damon. We live in a 90-year-old house just north of downtown San Antonio.

I sold my first short story in 1986, and my first book. The audience I aim for, generally, is myself at age ten. I have known seven year olds who read my books with pleasure, and fourteen year olds who found them too hard. Children demand better books than adults do, so I try to answer the demand. The Ghost Sitter is my attempt at a realistic ghost story. In real life (I read true ghost stories extensively), ghosts seldom understand that they're dead, and haunt all sorts of places, even suburban tract homes, not just Gothic mansions.

Readers who want to know me any better than this can check out our webpage.