For your reading pleasure, we'll be featuring each author with a story of her choice for the next few weeks. Some will include interviews, and all will include excerpts. Today's featured author is Muffy Wilson.
1. When did you start writing?
I wrote from my teens, I guess. I majored in English in high school and college. When I got into the workplace, much of what I did required that I write proposals, proformas, tutorials, presentations and all sorts of marketing guides and brochures. Those were some of the most enjoyable aspects of all my jobs as I rose through my career. As I rose in management, I exercised my creative writing with reviews and appraisals. I really didn’t start writing fiction until 2010 when an old high school boyfriend came back into my life and “inspired” me. It has been a love/hate relationship ever since! Love in that I love my readers and fans that enjoy my work and encourage me and hate in that so much time for us Indys is required marketing all our hard work. Now, I know a lot about marketing and have done it all my life, but it requires time, and that time is taken away from what I love most about what I do—writing.
2. What makes your stories unique?
I would like to think that my love stories reflect life. That they are believable and intriguing. Life’s complicated, messy, fun, loud, intricate, exasperating, multi-layered and a lot going on. One day you’re up the next day, you aren’t. The thing about writing is it is a way to get away but it is still familiar ground. That’s why we identify with, or fall in love with, or hate the protagonist or antagonist. I want my stories, whether they are romance or paranormal, to ring true to a reader, to draw them in and captivate them until the very last page. My work has often been compared to Anne Rice and the Bronte Sisters, so it tends to the floral and descriptive. It is like stringing word after word together like pearls and when done, you have an elegant piece of jewelry. It is painstaking and requires thoughtful deliberation. But that, for me, is the fun. I want you to feel the sun on your face, the glint of broken glass in the window as it streams across the room to your face and warms you. It isn’t enough that it is light and warm out. So for me? I want my readers to experience my writing. And I hope they do.
3. Is there a common thread that runs through your books?
No, not per se. I try not to write cliff hangers, that the story resolves, but in the two-book series, I want my readers to be satisfied, but curious about what happens in the nest book without being frustrated with the first book. That said, all my books are about love for example, in The Para-Portage of Emily, love spans a century and a seafaring ghost is unsettled in the afterlife, returning night after night to reunite with the wife he lost in childbirth. It is a gripping tale and complicated with riveting twists and unsurprising turns written in a style that would be common in the time but set in contemporary surroundings. Other of my works are fully contemporary provocative love stories.
4. If money was of no concern, what would you envision as your perfect lifestyle? (where would you live, what would you do all day, etc.)
Fortunately for me, I am living my life in the manner and style that suits me. I am comfortable, loved and have a new wee pup, Buddy. He is a pure white 2 year old Havanese we rescued with a brown nose and amber eyes. It is so much fun having him with us. He is so sweet and loveable. We miss our wee Burt, but I know Burt would want us to honor his memory by giving another homeless pup the life that Burt enjoyed. So, I am very happy right where I am doing what I am doing with the people I love around me.
5. Besides writing, what things are you most passionate about?
I love to cook and I used to love to travel, but not so much anymore. I have really become a home body, working writing and helping other authors promote and market their own work. I enjoy my friends both in the flesh and online. I have met some wonderful people in my travels. My father was in the Air Force and we lived everywhere between Alaska and France. I came of age in France nearly driving my parents to the brink! And language. I speak French and Spanish is my next personal improvement project, when I get caught up with all my writing projects.
6. Not limited to writing, what do you believe to be some of your greatest accomplishments so far?
In my writing, I have made the USA Today Bestsellers List three times for my work, Amazon and International Bestseller a few more times and awards for my work. It has made me very proud and humbled. Yes, there’s a but…
I consider myself a work in progress no matter how old I get. I hope I am a better person, day by day. I hope I have become more generous, more loving and forgiving, of myself and others. I hate confrontation, but being an ambitious woman in the 70’s there was a lot of confrontation. In my “real Life” I rose, without a college degree, to become the youngest, Midwest Regional Director for IBM in the Real Estate and Construction Division in Chicago. That’s a mouthful! Anyway, I was 36 when I was promoted to that position and transferred from San Francisco. Married for less than a year, my husband and his 14-year-old son followed me and we started a new life together. It was exhilarating, hard, long hours and huge rewards. But my crowning accomplishment was become Vince Jr’s mom. If God took me tomorrow, I would be satisfied that He had allowed me to be the mother to what became a fine young man of whom I am so proud.
7. Name a few of your favorites
Red is my favorite color, it’s passionate. I love the music of The Little Sparrow, Edith Piaf/ She is passionate, too! I’ve always loved The Good Wife on television but I am obsessed with Investigation Discovery. I get hooked on all the stories of swamp murders, cold cases and the endless pursuit of good over evil. I love golf, Manhattans, dinner at home and the company of my husband of 32 years. Each year is an amazement to me and a joy beyond my expectations.
Was it fate, design, or—perhaps—black magic? Who’s to say?
Was it love at first sight? Perhaps. Many thought it might have been the work of the unscrupulous Sea Witch, Hermione, long a bitter and banished King’s Court Matron. So, was it the crafty wiles of Hermione, scheming to seek her sordid revenge or was it a simple matter of serendipity? All we know for a certainty is that two young royals, one landed and one not, met during a raging storm as fierce and intense as the love they would none too soon escape. Was it fate, design, or—perhaps—black magic? Who’s to say? What we do know is that it was sensuous, erotic, insatiable as they fought to extinguish the passions that flamed their heat by indulging in every desire that swept them into one another’s arms. Their shared hungers fanned an appetite no amount of indulgence could satisfy. After all, it happened…Once upon a time…
The sea was viciously dark against the waves as they uncurled in a white so brilliant and speckled with iridescence, they resembled the most valuable of pearls. The white rolling waves crashed down upon the swells of the ocean with a loud and resounding smash, then danced quickly across one to another until the wave expired, only to be followed by another and another, then another. It seemed, as she rode the waves cautiously, that the waves were building strength, that the sound of them crashing onto the swells was getting louder, building to a fevered pitch bringing with it a foreboding of disaster. Her fear for their safety was mounting and upper most in her pounding chest was her search, rising with panic, for the young elegant man. At once, a wave curled over the ship, sending men into the sea and causing Saira to lose sight of her prince.
The violent seas were perilous even to the princess herself, so as she looked for him quickly, but deliberately, she was careful of waves tossing debris, trunks, ropes, planks, harpoons and other tools, and bodies in tumbling masses to her front. When the center mast broke, the furious wind brought it down on the middle deck splitting the ship nearly in two, pitching everything into the gaping darkness of ocean.
Frantically, the little princess searched the shifting wreckage for her prince. She knew not his name so could not call out to him, not that he would have heard her over the resounding force of the ferocious seas. She felt something, or someone, hit against her tailfin and when she spun to check, it was the disappearing outstretched hand of a sailor. She could not save him, the dark grasp of the sea pulled him away from her so quickly. When she finally spied the prince, his eyes were closed. His arms and legs dangled from his limp and tossing body, now weaken by his fight for survival. He appeared lifeless and sent Saira into a heightened fear as his body could not bear his weightless life and he drifted slowly to the waiting onyx depths below.
Thank you so much for visiting with me today. I look forward to hearing from you. You’ll see all of my contact information below and various ways of staying in touch. In the meantime, blessings from Southwest Florida, otherwise known as Paradise.
