The Story Behind the Story: What Inspired The Dead of the Day

Sometimes, a story grows out of a nightmare.

Other times, it starts with something quiet.

This one started on a dairy farm in Ripley, Oklahoma.

I loved my grandfathers. Mom’s dad encouraged my love of Westerns, teaching me to make a lasso and giving me a stack of ancient Old West magazines. Dad’s dad ran a farm and that was some kind of paradise for a young boy growing up in a small city.

Years after they were both gone, truths came out about both of these men. Devastating truths that completely altered the way I think about them.

My paternal grandfather has influenced a few characters in my previous fiction, most notable Harley in Little Graveyard on the Prairie. Now, this new version of him was the inspiration for Enoch in The Dead of the Day. Enoch isn’t a good guy.

Now, to be clear, Enoch is not my grandfather. Enoch is guilty of worse things than my grandfather did, but some of the things recounted in this story are part of my family history.

Authors write for many different reasons. Working out my thoughts and deciding how to process traumatic events has always been an important part of my writing process. In this case, it was me trying to make sense of things I’d learned about my grandfathers.

Like Enoch, my grandfather owned a battered and very worn Bible. But he hardly lived a Christian life. He could quote scripture, but he couldn’t live it.

In the end, he spent his final years in a nursing home, a victim of Alzheimer’s Disease, thinking he was still building dams. With the new information I have about him, I began to wonder if, as his end neared, he was able to consider the sins of his life and, if so, would he have repented like his Pentecostal preachers would have told him to do.

I don’t know the answers. But I know what my dad told me about when Granddad passed. And that’s part of this story, too. Well, some of it. The book is a bit more dramatic.

The Dead of the Day is a small book, but it came from big questions.
Questions about sin, memory, family, and whether it’s ever too late to be forgiven.

I don’t pretend to have the answers. I just told the story that came knocking.

Maybe, if it unsettles you a little—or makes you think about the people we leave behind when they start to fade—then it did its job.

Dead of the Day is available to pre-order now at Amazon. It’s a story about ghosts, yes—but mostly the kind we carry inside us.

Question for you:
Have you ever been inspired by something completely ordinary that turned eerie in hindsight? A face, a place, a moment?

Tell me about it in the comments. I’d love to know what kind of stories are haunting you.