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.

Remember The Moon began in a coffee shop when a psychic found me and approached me based on a vision she’d been given from my dead husband to go to that coffee shop and find me. When she walked in, she said she immediately recognized me from his vision and approached me.

Still safely encased in my many years of magical grief thinking, I thought nothing of sitting down beside her and hearing what she had to say. This, despite a strange episode only weeks before when a woman had emailed me telling me that my husband had returned from the dead in the form of a puppy that she wanted me to have. The puppy incident did not end well.

Basically, I had become a psychic/afterlife target practice, but I just sort of rolled along with it all. Little did I know at the time that it would eventually coalesce into a fictional novel.

All this to say that after the divine coffee shop meeting, I more or less commandeered Lisa Fox for many hours of readings, but rather than the…

Abigail Carter

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

Recommended from Medium

Lists

See more recommendations