So, tonight I was chatting with my wife over a lovely dinner of t-bone steaks and red wine, and I mentioned to her in an affectedly offhand way that I’d been asked to guest post on a blog.

“What about?” she asked.

“Well, the idea was to look at how a complete skeptic can write fiction about the paranormal,” I responded.

She looked at me with one eyebrow raised.  “And what are you going to say?” she asked.  “How does a skeptic write paranormal fiction?”

“Well,” I said, and I slipped into the supercilious tone that I sometimes use when answering questions in my biology classes, and which undoubtedly annoys the absolute hell out of my students, “I think that the main reason is that I am aware that my books are sorted into the ‘Fiction’ section on Amazon.”

“Are they?” she said, in a “You wanna watch that attitude, bub?” sort of way.   Then she frowned thoughtfully.  “But, you know, that doesn’t really explain anything.  Because let’s face it.  For a guy who doesn’t believe in all that stuff, you give every evidence of being obsessed by it.”

“I’m not obsessed,” I said, bristling a little.

“Oh?” she said sweetly.  “Would you mind telling me what poster you have on your classroom wall?”

I mumbled something inaudible into my wine glass.

“I am referring, of course,” she said, “to the one with the large picture of the UFO, that is captioned, ‘I Want To Believe.’”

Slam-dunk.  Buzzer sounds.  End of game.

 Dammit.  I hate it when she’s right.  Which, unfortunately, seems to be most of the time.

The problem, of course, is that if my glib one-liner won’t do as an answer, I’m thrown back to the original question: why would a guy who is a 26-year veteran science teacher, who teaches (amongst other things) a Critical Thinking class, who writes daily on a blog that has as its prime purpose poking fun at weird, counterfactual beliefs, write a short story about a guy whose life is in danger because he just had wild sex with a vampiric ghost he met while exploring an abandoned house?

Oh, and that’s just the last thing I wrote.  Here’s a brief sampling of other topics from my fiction:

• A woman who, like most of us, sees things out of the corner of her eyes.  However, unlike most of us, the things she sees are real.  And dangerous.  (“Periphery”)
• A college student who finds that reality changes every time his back is turned.  (“House of Mirrors”)
• A guy who gets possessed by the ghost of his great-great-grandmother.  (“The Conduit”)
• Two high school students who discover that they can read each other’s minds.  (“Shadowboxing”)
• Ten people trapped in an apartment building during a hurricane.  With the monsters.  (“Convection”)
• A skeptical biologist who finds out that local children are being replaced by duplicates.  Oh, yeah, and then he runs into Slender Man.  (“Signal to Noise”)

So, anyway, you get the idea.  My wife’s use of the word “obsession” is actually pretty apt.  But the question is, why?  When the subject of the “I Want To Believe” poster came up, my wife asked me, “Do you really want to believe?”  And I said, “Hell yeah.”  Do you have any idea how cool it’d be if that stuff existed?  Bigfoot?  UFOs?  Psychic stuff?  Ghosts?  Man, it’d be awesome.  Of course, being (not to put too fine a point on it) a great big weenie, the first time I saw Bigfoot I’d probably piss my pants and then have a stroke.  But still.

 There’s the inevitable problem, of course, of the huge revision in my worldview that would have to take place if even one of those things turned out to be real.  For one thing, I can’t even begin to estimate the number of retractions I’d have to write in Skeptophilia.  (“I hereby apologize to all of the psychics and mediums I’ve insulted over the past four years…”)  But still, and in all seriousness:  isn’t that what being a skeptic means?  If you are honestly a skeptic – and not just a professional scoffer – you revise your opinion based upon the facts and evidence at hand, regardless of how uncomfortable that revision might be for your pride.  On some level, honest skeptics are always waiting for evidence, because they are never quite sure they have the complete picture.

Of course, in the meantime, the real reason I write all this stuff is: it’s fun.  How would I react if suddenly confronted with Slender Man?  How would I handle it if every time I turned around, everything had changed – and the only one who realized it was me?  It’s a rush creating a new world, a world whose rules are different from the ones science has uncovered.  It’s a blast to try to come up with a self-consistent scheme by which the universe could work… and then send some characters in to play inside it.

Or scream in terror.  Or get chased by monsters.  Or get eaten.  You know how it goes.  Not all universes result in a happy ending.  Which, now that I think of it, would also make a great caption for a poster.

(editor’s note: Gordon Bonnet is a writer, musician, teacher, and scuba diver, and currently lives in upstate New York. Also: he’s awesome. That’s not opinion, that’s scientifically proven. On the Electro-Badassery Scale, he registers at 35.7K volts of Awesome, which is why his hair sometimes does that thing at the top, and why when his socks land on the laundry pile they make that snap-sizzle noise. Author of Skeptophilia, as well as 15 delightful works of fiction, he blogs at, shockingly enough, Skeptophilia, where you can find his charming wit and big science-licious brains at work…)