EJ Seneca | Updates

Whispers Between the Oaks at Myrtles planation

EJ Seneca — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cadeau de Lumière – Louisiana History and Humidity Episode 7

October 18, 2025 | St. Francisville, Louisiana – The Myrtles Plantation | 58°F just after sunrise on a cool Saturday morning, October light spilling like pale honey across the lawn, long shadows stretching from the ancient oaks | Coffee steaming in my hand, the only warm thing in a place that remembers colder stories

They say the Myrtles is the most haunted house in America. I don’t know about most. But on a crisp October morning, when the light is low and golden and the shadows are still deciding whether to stay or go, it is plenty.

The Myrtles Plantation

I arrived before the first tour bus, before the gift shop unlocked its doors, before the stories had guides to tell them. The gate was open for early photographers (a small mercy), and the grounds were mine for one few moments. The air carried that particular Louisiana chill that sneaks up in late October—sharp enough to remind you winter is coming, gentle enough to let the ghosts keep their secrets a little longer.

The oaks met me first. They are not trees. They are witnesses. Trunks thick as wagon wheels, limbs twisted into impossible angles, bark scarred and knotted like skin that has carried too many years. Spanish moss drips from every branch in gray curtains, catching the sunrise and throwing it back in shards. In that low, slanted light the moss looks less like decoration and more like mourning veils hung for funerals that never quite ended.

I walked the gravel path between them and felt watched. Not by anything I could see. By everything I couldn’t. The house rose ahead, white columns glowing, windows dark. Legend says Chloe still walks the gallery with her ear to the floorboards, listening for the children who never grew up. They say the mirror in the foyer holds faces that don’t belong to the living. They say if you stand on the staircase at the right moment you can hear poison being stirred in a cup that was emptied two centuries ago. I don’t know if I believe all the stories. But I believe the oaks do. They were here when Sara Woodruff died of grief or poison or both. They were here when the children played their last game of hide-and-seek among the roots. They were here when Chloe’s shadow fell across the porch rail and never quite left.

It is as if past lives are watching your every move

On this October morning the light did something cruel and beautiful: it painted every scar on those ancient trunks in sharp relief, turned every drape of moss into a shroud, made every shadow stretch long and deliberate across the grass like fingers reaching for something just out of grasp.

I shot freehand, no tripod allowed before tours, leaning the lens against the fence when I needed steady. 24–105 mm, f/8, shutter dancing between 1/200 and 1/500 to freeze the moss mid-sway. The sun climbed slow, pouring gold between the columns, and for one perfect minute the whole plantation looked like it was holding its breath the way it must have the morning everything went wrong.

Click. Click. Click.

I caught the house framed by an oak whose lowest limb curves like a question mark. I caught the gallery where Chloe is said to appear, shadows pooling on the floorboards like spilled ink. I caught the mirror through an open window—dark glass reflecting nothing but sky and the faint outline of my own silhouette, as if the house wanted me to know it sees me too.

Lovely wrap around porch

The Myrtles doesn’t need fog to be haunted. It just needs October light and these oaks that have never forgotten how to listen. When the first tourists arrived, the spell broke. Cameras flashed. Children laughed. The oaks went back to being scenery. But I had already stolen what I came for: one moment when the morning belonged to the ones who never left, and the light was kind enough to show their outlines.

Some places keep their ghosts in the walls. The Myrtles keeps them in the trees. And on a cool October morning, the oaks are happy to remind you they were here first.

This is Cadeau de Lumière – Louisiana Weekends. Every Saturday (or close to it) I’ll chase the light within an hour of home. No ten-hour drives, no national park crowds. Just backroads, refuges, plantations, and whatever the morning decides to give.

Because light is the original Cajun gift. And I intend to unwrap every one I can find.

🌳👻📸

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Lexington, Mass | Author's Note | Book 1

EJ Seneca — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I did not want the first book to live the world of the government. The Ophiuchus Signal starts in a house. Kitchen, study, a backyard instrument that does not look like a movie. That was the point. Discovery does not always arrive at an observatory. Sometimes it sits in public archives while a man drinks coffee and a family keeps ordinary hours. The setting is a residence because the story is a household that has to decide what to do once the sky answers. Video is the why. Book is out now.

Embedded Youtube video removed, see original post to watch.

Amazon: https://amazon.com/dp/B0HHGXJRK9

#TheOphiuchusSignal #ChildrenOfOphiuchus #ScienceFiction #IndieAuthor #Kindle #KindleUnlimited

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Treebeard: The Ancient Cottonwood Holding the Mississippi Levee Together

EJ Seneca — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Sept 15, 2024 | Baton Rouge, Louisiana (Mississippi River levee near LSU) | 88°F, humid but falling, golden afternoon light, faint breeze off the water | First real hint of autumn

There is an old cottonwood I have quietly named Treebeard.

He stands alone on the cutbank where the river keeps trying to steal the land, roots like Entish fingers dug deep into the red clay, refusing to yield. Half the trunk is lightning-hollowed, one enormous limb open to the sky like a pipe organ, yet every April he still sheets out green louder than any tree his age has a right to. By June he snows cotton; by October he burns gold so fierce the eagles use him as a torch to find their way home.

On days when the wind moves down the river just right, that hollow limb sings: low, slow, resonant. Hoom-hom, if you speak the old tongue and have had enough coffee. You would think he is speaking to you.

Some evenings when the light slants low and the cicadas quiet down, I half expect to look up and find only a raw scar in the earth, great root prints marching downstream on whatever ancient errand the river finally convinced him to run.

He is always still there.

If you ever walk the levee path just south of the LSU lakes, look for the grandfather leaning far out over the channel, eagle in his hair, sky in his heart. Speak slowly. He is never in a hurry.

Hold fast, old friend. Some of us still need shepherds.

🌿🦅

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Academic to fiction writing: my hard journey so far.

EJ Seneca — Wed, 9 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cadeau de Lumière – Louisiana Weekends | Episode 20 – When life forces a change, embrace it.

After years of graduate school, a Ph.D., and a few published articles, I expected fiction to be easier than it was. Not because I thought I was a good writer. Because academic writing had already taught me how to work. You design the study. You run the work. You strip the page down to what the data will support. Descriptors come out. Mood comes out. Just the facts.

That training is useful until you sit down to write a novel. My professional life is tilting from academic work toward administration. That is fine. It also leaves a hole. I liked the projects. I liked writing the results. One of the better summers I have had was being asked to write a chapter for a professional book on learning. Those invitations will be fewer. Photography, home research, and this blog became the outlets. Fiction was the one I had never taken seriously.

It was not a lack of imagination. We all make stories. Mine just tend toward the obscure and the ordinary. What I want to write about, a majority of readers may find slow. Academic training pushes that further. Distill. Remove flavor that distracts from the thesis. When I sat down to start The Ophiuchus Signal, I could write the essentials of the story and almost none of the flavor. The first draft read like a paper.

I like work that lets the mundane sit next to the large event. Terry Mancour does that in the Spellmonger books: feudal life is not only banners and magic, it is also the ordinary problem of living. Some readers will call that padding. I think it is layer. I wanted that kind of room in my own pages and did not know how to put it there.

The story itself had been riding with me for about a number of years. My commute is forty minutes in the morning and an hour and twenty in the afternoon. That time usually goes to audiobooks and to thinking. Characters and events arrived in pieces, I ride with my same recorder that I used in graduate school to capture thoughts. I kept wondering whether they would ever get onto paper. The change in my job made the question practical. If the academic writing was going to disappear due to circumstance, then I needed another place to put the same habit of attention.

My problem was not writing, it was unlearning habits that have been trained into my prose over the past 20 years of professional life. The problem was description. I could see the rooms. I could not get them onto the page. The method that finally worked was backwards from how I had been trained. I wrote what I saw in my head the way I would have written a methods section: bare, complete, no atmosphere. I gave that paragraph to Grok’s image tools and asked for a still. I revised the prompt until the picture matched the room I had been carrying. Then I wrote from the picture, not from the idea of a room. A chair. A fire. Two cups. I did not use every detail in the prose. I used enough to stop explaining the house and start putting a person in it.

Brooks residence, living room, Lexington, 2176

That is how I am untraining all those years of abstraction. I also do not think of myself as a strong first-draft writer. I think I am a decent rewriter. Next I had to leverage the academic process for the components of the story. Instead of trying to put in all layers at once, I decided to break the layers down into sections and run through each novel to input those layers. I thought of it as making a gumbo on the page.

Dialogue is the roux. It is the base of what happens. Rooms and locations are the holy trinity. What I call emotive, the human weight in the scene, are the protein. With out it you have plain broth. The events and actions are the spice. For each step, I had to just, get it into the pot.

I do not stop for spelling or grammer. I do not stop if what I am writing does not fit the time an location. I write. I write what comes to mind for each layer. Do not garnish while it is still raw. Then let it simmer. Stir when it needs stirring. Time, care, and process do the rest.

Children of Ophiuchus trilogy came out of that pot. Not from a sudden gift for fiction. From a commute, a job that was changing shape, and a decision to put back the things graduate school had taught me to take out.

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Schedule for the Children of Ophiuchus Trilogy

EJ Seneca — Wed, 9 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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