Author Series: Dean Petersen

This is the first part of a continuing series where local authors from my community get a chance to talk about projects they’re working on, their writing process, struggles they face, and advice they have for other authors. Up first, is a post written by Dean Petersen who writes paranormal mysteries. Here you’ll find his origin story for In the Shadow of the Ratliff Hotel, which he’s releasing chapter by chapter. Enjoy!

By Dean Petersen:

I first started to write In the Shadow of the Ratliff Hotel when I was stationed in Germany. I found a DVD at the library featuring three young guys doing a paranormal investigation in a ghost town in Nevada. Seeing something so western and so remote reminded me of South Pass City in Wyoming, and it made me wish, not for the first time, that I was back home. Memories of everything about Wyoming came back into my brain from the smell of rain on sagebrush, to the heavy silence you feel in some of its ghost towns and abandoned places. I wanted to go back so bad that I started writing a story about two Iraq War Veterans who set up residence in a ghost town in The Wind River Mountains.

Every morning, after doing physical training, while waiting for the duty day to start, I’d write another chapter about Sergeant John Carson and Specialist Grady attempting to overcome their PTSD in the lonely quiet of an abandoned town called Ratliff where they eventually begin to interact with the ghosts of people who lived there during a gold rush. I did my best in the army, but I was never one of the guys who loved it. Writing every morning was a way to remind me of the place I’d left behind and renew the hope that I would make it back there again one day. In the same way that the two main characters in my story were finding solace in Ratliff, I was doing my best each morning to go there in my mind for a while before dealing with another day of army BS. While mentally returning to Wyoming each morning, I wrote about the things I really missed from home and tried to depict those sights for my two main characters to experience for the first time so that I could relive them myself. Things like violent Rocky Mountain thunderstorms or watching the setting sun turning cattails along a creek to gold. I tend to write about places I’ve been that really get at my core and won’t go away until I’ve committed what I feel and see to a Google doc. Whenever I feel that exciting, compulsive, tug of inspiration, I start writing right away so I don’t get left behind on the platform, hoping that rollercoaster of vivid memories and ideas returns.

Like Carson and Grady, whose obsession with Ratliff eventually gives them a chance at redemption by trying to save one of the town’s former residents from being forced into a brothel, my salvation has been making it back home and sharing the story I compulsively clung to during those years overseas.

People ask why I write about dark stuff. I really don’t know. I just know I can’t quit. If no one would ever read or listen to my stories again, I’d still keep writing anyway. Writing is no longer a hobby, but an obsession and often a form of therapy and medication too. I think most of my best work involves imagining the worst things that can happen, or that have happened, and then finding a way for my characters to overcome it.

In the Shadow of the Ratliff Hotel is available as a free audiobook. I hope you’ll check it out.

In the Shadow of the Ratliff Hotel link: https://keystrokesamidthecobwebs.podbean.com/e/in-the-shadow-of-the-ratliff-hotel-chapter-1/