Locally based writer turns to thriller stories

Azita Crerar

Thriller novels can be more than just scary tales intended to give readers goose bumps, especially when they carry underlying educational messages. A local writer, whose latest horror story is now available on Amazon’s Kindle, hopes to enlighten readers with stories set in town and written in English.
Located in different well-known destinations across the region, “Ghostly Whispers: thirteen ghost stories set in Macao,” is Azita Crerar’s first attempt to bring a combination of chills, chuckles and her own beliefs to her readers through historical and contemporary scenarios. “When somebody’s reading the story, they can be entertained and at the same time learn something about Macau,” said the 41-year-old Canadian mother of three. “Some of these stories have a moral. I have this story where a young man gets lost in a forest in Coloane, and he’s on a hike, and he gets separated from his group. He sees some ghost babies, aborted babies, so this is a story about abortion, something that I don’t agree with, and I thought: ‘How can I pass this message along,’ so I put it in a ghost story.”
It was not until four years ago that the former English teacher of a local international school found herself intrigued by her new living environment, despite having lived in the region for 16 years. Her curiosity for this historically abundant city came with writing ideas for minors.
“When I became interested in Macau history a number of years ago, I also started writing children’s stories about Macau,” she said.
The writer’s long-term penchant for writing grew throughout her girlhood, when she once believed that she could be as famous as Agatha Christie, an English novelist who is world-famous for her detective stories. Although her goal has yet to be realized, Crerar’s passion has never waned, despite occasional hiatuses because of work and family.
“I wrote before I taught, I wrote while I taught and I wrote after I taught,” said the prolific writer, who has already released three other tomes.
It did not take long for the 169-page ghostly storybook to develop from preliminary ideas into words, Crerar revealed, especially since the concepts came into her mind long ago. Proofreading of the stories, instead, was comparatively more time-consuming.
“Some of them remained as vague ideas in my head for quite a while. But once I decided to write the story, I thought: ‘Ok, I am going to write thirteen because thirteen is a superstitious number, and this is going to be about that.’ Once I sat down to write each one, I think each one was written in a few days,” she said.
To make every single detail about the past in the tales as historically accurate as possible, the scrupulous Canadian writer even consulted her local husband in order to give her characters “old-fashioned enough” names.
Speaking of the salient changes over the past twenty years since she started to dabble in story writing, Crerar said that the digital era has evolved to require a lot of background research into the setting of the stories.
“Many things have changed over time — the writing and publishing world has also changed, I don’t know if it has become easier or harder, or remained the same. At that time, there was no Internet, you had to go to the library to do all your research and open up a book,” she said, citing a previous experience where she needed to flick through books to ensure whether the doorbell appearing in her story had already been invented in that age.
Inside Crerar’s home, there has always been an inundated bookshelf for her kids, so full that the writer had to give away some of the books. In the quest to foster reading habits in children, she reckons that parenting plays a very important role. Staff reporter