"ghosts." must die!

Currently, all five published books are available in some form on amazon.com ... it's a start.

While I have a general idea for "ghosts." I don't have a real solid concept for it.  There's no need for another guide to the towns themselves.  I would just be parroting information from other, better books.

I also do not have a great deal of photographs from my earliest trips, or journals of the visits, but rather general stories of the visits.  I have far more photography and therefore, far more story from the most recent excursions to these places.

And still, this is not a necessary book either... like the two travel books I've put out there, one is not going to pick it up if it just doesn't appeal to an interest one already has.  The ghost town book would be something for about 3 people I know, and would collect e-dust otherwise.  These things are a lot of work, and it is admittedly disappointing that my own excitement about them rarely translates to excitement for the reader base.  Vanity projects are often misleading like that for the author.  It's no fault of the readership.

In the case of ghost towns, the image of them vs. the reality often does not match up in the minds of the reader.  Some of them are just vague piles of rubble, devoid of any of the character that their written history might suggest.  Hell Street in Canyon Diablo, AZ, is largely a pile of rotten wood, rusty flattened cans, and crumbled/collapsed foundations quickly being picked clean by souvenir hunters and washed away by the sun and rain.  Ask someone who's read the stories, and you can try to imagine "Bill Duckin" and his fatal mistake one Sunday morning facing down a robber.  Or B.S. Mary with birdshot in her ample behind, delivered by the blazing barrels of a shotgun wielded by Clabberfoot Annie.  Or Keno Harry cut down by a bullet for the deed to his poker flat.  Or, twenty five years later, in the abandoned, forgotten graveyard south of the tracks, how a bunch of drunken cowboys dug up John Shaw's body, stiff in rigor mortis, and gave him the whiskey shot he paid for a couple nights before and didn't get - because he decided in the spur of the moment to rob the saloon instead, and lost in a gunfight with the sheriff over the affair at Canyon Diablo.  None of this is evident in the broken down ruins.  They're disappearing, and fast.

All of this information is told elsewhere, and in better words.  So, do I just approach it as a photo book?  I don't think so, for a couple reasons.

1) My photography is really not good enough to stand on its own this way.

2) Pictures of ruins without context?  Pretty things to see, yet meaningless.

So, for me to do this at all, I need to have both stories and pictures to tie to them.  Some of the townsites I have visited don't have compelling stories (at least none I have found to date) - such as Cerbat; Mineral Park (aside from the Midnight Raid bit); Harrisburg; Carrara; Walker; etc.  Interesting ruins, in their ways, without unusual stories to tell.  I have nice pictures of many of them, and that's all.  And historic picture use is generally out, as a profitless enterprise like this can't afford the use fees likely in such reproduction.


I think the ghost town book is a no-go, as the work involved vs. the returns is not promising, and the product itself will not be a unique addition to the collection of literature already available from more interesting writers and photographers.  If I come up with a viable concept, I may revisit the idea in the future.