Dead Girls Are What?

Dead Girls Are Easy. It’s the title of my upcoming novel, a quirky look at life and death from the standpoint of a hip young woman named Nicki Styx. Poor Nicki just wanted to earn a living with her vintage clothing store in Little Five Points, Georgia, and maybe have a little fun on the side. One near death experience later, and Nicki’s life is changed forever by the ability to see and hear spirits. It’s dark humor with a Southern slant - the angst of a young woman on the edge, a healthy dash of sex and voodoo, a touch of spookiness.

At any rate, the final draft is now done, and I’m shipping the manuscript to the publisher next week. While I’m wildly excited (who wouldn’t be?), I find myself thinking about how best to get past this dreaded question with my friends and neighbors: “Dead girls are what?”

“It’s just a title”, I’ll say. “The book is about this young woman who sees spirits… um… she used to be a Goth but now she owns a vintage clothing store… it’s funny, really… ah, not that I mean death is funny but…” and so I’ll blather while they look at me politely, eyebrows raised.

You see that explanation up there in the first paragraph? It took me almost half an hour to write it. I had time to work the words into just the right arrangement until it expressed exactly what I was trying to say. Try spouting that off the top of your head when you’re looking into the face of my shocked 89 year old mother-in-law, the neighbor who thinks I’m just a stay-at-home mom, or the woman I met in Sunday school class.

All I’m saying is that by sending off this final draft of the manuscript, it’s really hit me.

Dead Girls Are Easy is about an unwilling psychic who can see the dead, but the underlying theme is about good and evil, and the choices ordinary people make under extraordinary circumstances. It’s also about love and laughter, and reminder to enjoy life while we have it.

Now I just have to find a simple way of communicating that without sounding like I’m reading from a script.