Nancy Tandon: Hello. My name is Nancy Tandon, and I am a middle grade author of the forthcoming The Ghost of Spruce Point. The inspiration for this story came from summers with my kids on the coast of Maine where my parents live. It's very secluded where they are and rocky, and there's weather like wind and rain, and it's not your typical beach vacation. My family has just fallen in love with this area of Maine. It's just beautiful. It smells amazing. It smells like pine trees and salt air.

And then one day I saw a news story about children who had a very specific skin condition where they are allergic to the sun and they showed these kids at their summer camp which occurred at night. Those two things, the setting of the coast of Maine and a child who could only come out at night, it was not hard to twist my arm to go and spend additional time up in Maine.

I asked around for people living up there. Of course, I fictionalized everything and there will be some Mainers who read this and think like, "There's no way... You would never go over a bridge that direction at that time of night," or something like that but people did give me feedback on little dialectical things. One thing that was really fun when I was choosing names, especially last names, I would go to where my parents live in this small town in Maine. My parents still had a paper phone book and I would go and look in the phone book and look for a last name that had a large chunk and I'd think, "Okay, a lot of people from this area might have this last name." So that's one piece of authenticity that was fun to put in there.

To my readers of The Ghost of Spruce Point I would like to encourage you to go out into the woods with your friends. Put on your bug spray; watch for ticks. But spend time outside and get together with friends, leave your phones behind, and discover things and invent things and make some new friends. Make up new friends and just enjoy your time that you can be the age you are, alone with your thoughts and your friends' thoughts, and have fun. Play outside. Play outside. Of course, take a good book with you.

This is from Chapter One of The Ghost of Spruce Point.

Anchors Away.

The blood red moon casts an eerie glow over the bay. Fog lifts off the ocean and swirls around us as the lapping splash of the incoming tide sways the thick wooden posts of the dock beneath me. If there is a perfect time and place for a ghost story, I'm sitting smack-dab in the middle of it.

"Tell it again, Dad, please tell it."

Dad steps back from the telescope and sits next to me, our legs dangling above the dark, churning water. He tightens the hood of his parka against the late May chill and takes a big sniff of the air. I do the same. If one of the fancy tourist shops in Bar Harbor ever made a candle called Spruce Point it would smell like this, briny ocean layered with a heavy scent of pine.

"You know every detail of this story," Dad says, knocking his shoulder against mine. "You should tell it to me."

"You tell it better," I say, "and Leelee's not here so don't leave out any of the scary parts."