I’m thinking about rolling into therapy Tuesday in my Macho Man Randy Savage costume not only because it’s Halloween week but, more importantly, because I channel so much cathartic rage when I wear it. ⭐️

This week my therapist pointed out that for the first time in nearly three years I said I was more concerned about being heard than worrying how someone else would feel hearing my words. And then two days later I went to an Ohio Valley Wrestling match. These things are related, I feel.

Today my therapist told me “you don’t need to give a predator any grace,” and I’m just sending this reminder out into the ether for anyone who could benefit from this reminder as well.

I may have whisper-screamed “it’s fucking broken,” after a particularly lengthy battle with a stapler today at the library’s reference desk. One workstudy student found it quite amusing, so all is not lost.

112,152 words and all of them about haunted libraries. Deadline achieved. And now…Motivational Michael Sheen is replaced by Congratulatory Michael Sheen. Here’s to book three 👻 📚 🥂

I should really consider dedicating this book to all the Pedro Pascal reels that have been getting me through it. 📕 ✍🏻 🔥

Fellow millennials, “Where in the world *is* Carmen Sandiego?” Well. She just might be haunting a library in Scotland based on the account I’m annotating tonight for my upcoming “Haunted Libraries Around the World.”

Annotating a story about a strange experience from a Latvian library tonight 👻 🐈‍⬛ 💫 📚

Annotating a story about a haunted library in Oldham, England and its ghost named Mary and pausing to have a very Cancerian cry-sesh because I think Mary is just the personified ghost of loneliness, the most pervasive and familiar ghost of them all.

My day so far: 1. Writing about haunted libraries. 2. Coffee break. 3. Phone interview with a haunted library. 4. Cry a little about how nice that phone call was. 5. Text reminder to friend about haunted bone. 6. Ooh, Reese’s. 7. Resume writing.

10 days until book deadline. Time is made up anyway but it will especially cease to mean anything to me til July 31. Therefore if you see me baking a lasagna at 4am or enjoying a 🍺 at 9am, or even just, ya know, randomly crying, don’t be alarmed. I’m living on #AuthorTime

I just sent a 17 minute Marco to a friend in which a solid 14 minutes I spend lamenting the fact that the nearby gas station replaced their hand-painted, misspelled, off-center “clearance” sign with a perfectly spelled and centered machine-produced clearance sign. Whimsy is dead.

It’s 11pm and I’m just casually writing an entry for my upcoming book that features a funeral held in a university library in Virginia. 👻 👀 📚

Me to the cashier at the ice cream shop: “Can I pay with my HSA card? Cause this strawberry shortcake sundae is for healing my inner child.”

“I enjoyed Beecher. I like the man, I like his writing. He’s real. He cuts and he is solid. He’s a fraction of yourself.” Rhea White to Marg Anderson, July 25 195?

“She loves deep, winding conversations that go up and down, especially in the dead of night when everyone should be sleeping. She has forgotten the way conversations, really good ones, can change her-shape shift her like a tree. Sometimes leave her bare, sometimes leave her fuller.”

Saddle up, Sheenie - we’re in the home stretch ✍🏻 📝 💫 #MotivationalMichaelSheen #iykyk #SaddleUpSheenie

It is 5am. I have been writing since yesterday afternoon. I have not gone to sleep. I have entered an altered state of consciousness I think. I hope I see a ghost. How utterly fitting would that be? If that happens, this is the only way I’ll ever write again. 📖 👻 🌀

Anyone else ever just get the biggest urge for a beer, a dimly lit corner of a bar that offers primo people-watching, and conversations about the subjective beauty of the weird and paranormal?

My brain is so fried between writing my dossier *and* finishing my third book that yesterday (in a convo with a colleague) I said ‘capitalization’ when I really meant ‘capitalism.’ …I don’t even have a witticism with which to end this post. 😂 🫠

“It is so good to be alone and free at the house - to know that simply no one can come and interrupt me. Not that I’m doing anything. I’m simply private, by myself, with myself, inviolable. And I’m treasuring every moment. 1/2

“Between the polarity of the alert, conscious mind and the depths of the unconscious is the dynamic, fertile continuum of transliminal mind - mind across the threshold - vacillating between outer situation and inner need.” Margaret Anderson, Journal of Parapsychology, 1962

‘Seven’ is absolutely the background music that plays in my mind when I read the letters Rhea White wrote to Margaret Anderson in the 1950s: 🎶 passed down like folk songs, the love lasts so long 🎶

“Of all modern [human’s] traditions and beliefs, our acceptance of ghosts is perhaps the most strongly rooted.” - Jane C. Beck, Folklore, 1970.

Me on random marcos to my friends after outlining some new connection between libraries and ghosts: “idk, sometimes I get too philosophical and I hurt my brain - you ever do that?”

The process of writing this book has enhanced and solidified my belief that libraries are: A. Inherently haunted by nature. B. Tricksters. C. Creating thoughtforms daily.

Thick thighs, spooky vibes ✌🏻 👻 💫

“Wow, what a portrait in girlhood,” I said to my therapist as I used a Chipotle napkin to dry my tears during today’s session. 💫 🌯 😭 🌀

I often say ‘I’m with the ghosts again’ when my mind wanders off at various points thru the day or when the anxiety hits and my mind is well, somewhere else. But I’m often ‘with the ghosts again’ at 2am when the world softens and stills and I can sense them even nearer than they usually are.

Y’all I continue to implore you to use your libraries now more than ever and to call, email, etc. your reps to outcry the targets placed on libraries and library workers

Texted a friend to inform her that I will be DD for an upcoming ladies day excursion and then texted her back shortly to clarify: “and by DD I mean David Duchovny.”

I dared to do yard work a few days ago and alas, I once again have poison ivy. Y’all got any tried and true remedies? 🫠 🌱 tbh tho each time I get poison ivy I kinda just hope it’s my villainous origin story

Not me sitting in the therapist’s waiting room romanticizing a meet cute. “Omg but what if we met in the therapist’s waiting room and kissed?” Why must my Cancerian brain romanticize everything? 🫠

Look. We all have our writing motivation strategies, ok? Judgmental Michael Sheen just works for me. 😉

Just a portrait of the tired author with her stack of emotional support articles stained slightly from Diet Coke…and tears. 😂 🥤 📄 👻

In the 1950s Rhea White wrote to Margaret Anderson and said, “Buddy, did you breathe me into being? I love you.” And I think about this quote often, especially when thinking of the women in my life who support, cheer, and check-in on me. I got so much ♥️ for you, thanks for breathing me into being.

From my upcoming haunted libraries book: “sightings of smiling apparitions and sounds of disembodied humming certainly paint a cozy picture of this library, and I find myself disappearing into the stories of who these people were and what the library meant to them.” re: Indiana State Library 👻

Being a weirdo intellectual means you sometimes find yourself thinking things like “I bet Louisa and JB Rhine would have loved and danced to Taylor Swift’s The Great War.” Anyway, I’m with the ghosts again. 👻 ✌🏻

From the Perth Amboy News - October 30, 1920. May 2025 be the resurgence of the Exhibition of Stones 💫

I realize this is utterly Cancerian of me, but I hope not a day goes by where I don’t shed at least one happy tear out of gratitude for the amazing friends in my life 💫

Watching the sunrise from the doors of the library is 10/10 ☀️

Today’s reading and writing inspo 💫

Women and ghosts save me from myself a little bit every day. 💕 📚 👻

“Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wallflowers, need ruin to make them grow.” ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun

Louisa Rhine’s journal, July 1919: “It’s still true. I stayed awake all night so it’s not to lose it. I couldn’t sleep so I didn’t try. As many times as pain has kept me wakeful, it would be a shame if pleasure couldn’t.”

Book featured: Parapsychology: New Sources of Information, 1973-1989 by Rhea A. White 💫

“I meant to say above that part of my tiredness may be the radical turn I am taking. I love the ideas I am getting and I feel very good about them, but the thought of getting up and saying them to establishment parapsychologists is enough to wither one’s soul! It is not easy…. 1/2

Thought I'd share the presentation I made for the lovely liminal librarians at Let's Ghost a while back for their PowerPoint party. It's about spooky things u may not know about Practical Magic. drive.google.com/file/d/1zC15...

Girl (author) dinner

“By the 10th time, we may hardly give a thought to the way what we say will be received. We simply will be concerned with speaking, as honestly as we can, about the exceptional reality we have experienced. And belief fosters belief, just as doubt fosters doubt.”