LELAND -- Kathie Decker comes from a long line of storytellers. So when she lost her job through downsizing at age 51 and had a hard time finding a new position, she decided to try her hand at putting some of those stories on paper.

"My aunt gave me an old manuscript of my grandmother's and said, 'Here, rewrite this,'" she said.

Her grandmother's manuscript was several hundred typed pages, collected in a file folder, telling a ghost story. While Decker wasn't interested in resurrecting the story, she did find a story line that appealed to her and she developed her own story from that kernel.

"I read a couple passages and one passage in the old manuscript was about a rose," she said. "That clarified the whole book for me. É

"I have an open mind about that kind of thing," she said of the supernatural. "I come from a long line of storytellers. (Ghost stories) were part of the stories my grandmother told me when I was small. And I told to my own kids. It was always part of my imagination. But I've never encountered a ghost."

Before Decker began the writing process, she decided to test the market waters. She sent queries to three publishers, and one of them, Publish America, agreed to take the book.

Publish America is an online publishing house that pays authors for their books, then sells them online through print on-demand services. Authors take on the job of marketing the book themselves.

But before Decker could even think about marketing, she had a bigger task at hand -- getting the tale on paper.

"It took four months," she said of the writing process. "I was so familiar with the characters. They had been jelling in the back of my mind. It only took a prod É It was challenging, very challenging."

The result is "Restless Spirit," a ghostly tale that includes mystery and romance in a small town, which Decker said loosely is based on Sheridan and Leland. Decker can trace her family back four generations in Leland and her husband can trace his family back seven generations.

"I've lived in DeKalb and Sycamore. There were eight months in Kansas City that I'd rather forget, but I always came back," she said.

It was an easy choice to recreate a town based on the place she grew up.

"It is easier to write about the familiar," she said. "There are so many stories and personalities and characters."

Not that Decker based her characters on specific people, deliberately avoiding assigning people she knew parts in her drama. She did, however, draw on traits of specific people and real historic events as the inspiration for aspects of her book.

"They are inspired by real people, but they are much better," she said of her list of characters. "I wish I knew some of these people."

Decker is married with three grown children and nine grandchildren. Her daughter, a reporter for the DeKalb County Chronicle, edited the story for publication. Decker said she set herself a tight schedule and usually wrote six to seven hours each day.

"(My husband) was very supportive," she said. "He loves that I write. He says he could never do something like that. It always surprises me when people tell me that writing is something they couldn't do."

Decker herself is a big fan of the mystery genre, naming Martha Grimes and Janet Evanovich among her favorites.

"I do like the genre," she said. "I'm not sure I'll ever be as successful at it as they are, but I'm anxious to try it."

Decker said she enjoys the creative aspect of writing and plans to write two more ghost stories that also will center around a flower, in keeping with the theme of "Restless Spirit." She also has some other ideas brewing.

"Writing is a lot like painting or drawing. Things have to make sense. It all has to work together," she said. "You can be creative within a structure and you can fix things that you can't fix in real life. You write your own ending."