Susan Squires-Guest Post at The Reading Cafe

HE’S A MAGIC MAN is the second in my CHILDREN Of MERLIN series, and I could hardly wait to write Drew’s story. She’s very sure of the Tremaine destiny. Why wouldn’t she be? Her parents and her older brother came into their magic powers when they found one who shared Merlin’s magic gene and fell in love.

Characters who are sure of themselves are fun. The author has to shake their confidence, or there is no story. So I got to torture poor Drew before she got her happy ending. She gets her power when she sees a gorgeous guy on a TV show, so she chases off to the Florida Keys to find him. Things are going great. But Michael turns out to be an alcoholic still in love with his saintly dead wife. Uh, oh.

Drew thinks she can fix things, including Michael, as usual. But that turns out to be more difficult than she imagined. Along the way she encounters the mysterious adversaries of the Tremaines, the Clan. They’re looking for a lost artifact from Merlin that will intensify their power. Michael is a Finder. And they promise him the one thing he can’t refuse if he’ll join forces with them. They’ll bring his dead wife back to life.

The writing of this book was both a joy and a trial. I had never been to the Florida Keys or to the Caribbean, where much of the book takes place. Coincidentally, we were remodeling our house and had to be out for a few weeks during demolition. So we went to the Florida Keys to research locations, and eat great fish. And we hit some Caribbean islands. Of course we didn’t find an uncharted island with Merlin’s treasure on it. But our visit to Falmouth Harbor on Antigua and El Yunque Rainforest Park near San Juan in Puerto Rico gave me some great ideas for settings.

When I returned, all I had to do was finish the book in the chaos of remodeling our house. My study had turned into the storage point for our freezer, various and sundry pieces of contractor’s equipment and lots of dust, so I worked at the local library. When the scaffolding came out of the back yard in July, I worked at the table under an umbrella with my laptop plugged into the outlet with the refrigerator. Yes, our refrigerator was on the patio. Our “kitchen” was the dresser in our upstairs bedroom with a microwave, a hot plate and an electric wok on it. We were doing dishes in the only bathroom’s sink. Even now it’s hard to believe we survived.

As I finished my first draft, I had a final dark moment. My hard drive crashed. I realized I hadn’t been good about using the external drive to back up recently. But I used a cloud backup service religiously. Who would have thought the failing hard drive had left only a corrupted file on the cloud service? I lost 45 pages of the ending.

But, like Drew, I persevered. I re-created those last pages, and pushed through to finish HE’S A MAGIC MAN. The remodel is done, the marriage in tact. Life is good.

I hope you think the effort was worth it.

Susan

LINKS TO ORDER He’s A Magic Man:
Amazon Kindle
B&N Nook