How Conversations with a Psychic Shaped My Novel

Abigail Carter
6 min readMay 13, 2021

Book ideas come from all kinds of places

Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash

My novel, Remember the Moon began from a seed of an idea I had about a dead man’s conversation with his alive wife through a psychic.

My life, basically. Or my dead husband’s, whichever way you want to think about it.

I thought it would be funny to have the psychic talking in cryptic symbols — roses, rings, colors that are meant to contain profound messages to us living, while the dead husband is up there pulling out his (proverbial) hair because all he wants is for the psychic to speak clearly so he can tell his wife something important like “buy Apple stock.”

Instead, the wife gets “did your husband like apples?” and the wife exclaims “Yes, they were his favorite fruit!” and is deliriously happy.

Not that I wanted to make fun of psychics, it’s just that in all my experience of trying to speak to my dead husband through one, I always thought he would be frustrated at the lack of complexity and detail of what was being conveyed.

My husband, Arron was a man who thrived on words and loved twisting them into knots, saying them backward, reading mirrored words as easily and as quickly as most people read the regular way.

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Abigail Carter

Writing about widowhood, parenting, life, grief, art, writing and publishing. #singlemom #author #memoirist #writer #widow #9/11widow #artist