Mike Kimball, a successful novelist, recently decided to branch out into writing for the theater. Most people take years to perfect the art. But for Kimball, his first effort, the play “The Ghosts of Ocean House,” won the F. Gary Newton Award at the Players’ Ring and has been nominated for the Edgar Allen Poe Award, a prestigious honor given by the Mystery Writers of America to authors of otherworldly creations. Previous winners include Mary Higgins Clark, Ian Rankin and Anne Rule, to shed some light on whose company he may be joining.

This isn’t Kimball’s first venture into the phantasmal world.

“In the early 1980s, I published a short story in Yankee Magazine, about my house in Whitefield. It was called ‘Why I Do Not Believe in Ghosts.’ After that I was Yankee’s weird freelancer—I wrote about UFO sightings in Maine, I interviewed a man who tape-recorded ghosts’ voices,” he says.

He began writing after dedicating his youth to music. “I began writing in the early ’80s to supplement my music teacher income—and, incredibly, I was lucky enough to sell the first thing I ever wrote. That made the decision for me.”

As all good writers, he writes with diligence, but as time goes by he finds it dwindling slightly. “I used to spend 7 hours and claim I spent 8. Then I claimed I spent 7 hours, but probably wrote for only 6. These days I claim 6. Who knows?

Sometimes when I’m fired up, I’ll jump out of bed at 3 in the morning and start writing and still be writing at the end of the day. Sometimes I’ll be on my way to bed and stop in my office, and before you know it, it’s 2 o’clock.”

And while he’s done well by his novels, he’s in no hurry to give up his new passion, playwriting.

“If a publisher offered me a contract for ‘Ocean House,’ I’d take it, but I won’t go looking for it,” he offers. “But I love writing plays, so that’s where I’ll stay—for now.”

The winners of the “Edgars” will be announced at the 2007 Edgar Symposium and Banquet, which takes place April 25 and 26 in New York.