Maggie Shayne's Blog: Maggie's Coffee House Blog, page 13

CoffeeHouse is Closed for the Weekend. Happy Easter!

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You Are Your Own Best Doctor

Goddesses Never Age, Thoughts on Chapter Three But read this even if you’re not reading the book! We humans do some pretty odd things with our health. I know someone who was so afraid of breast cancer that she underwent a double mastectomy, but didn’t quit smoking. I know people who are 100+ pounds overweight, […]

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Bookclub Discussion: Pleasure Prevents Cancer

Pleasure and happiness are the best things we can do for our health. In the book, GODDESSES NEVER AGE, which I’ve chosen to blog about here, Chapter Two focuses on the chemical Nitric Oxide (not Nitrous, which is a whole different thing) Nitric Oxide prevents stroke, and signals white blood cells to destroy tumors, and […]

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Maggie’s Bookclub: Goddesses Never Age, Ch. 1

Goddesses Never Age This week I re-read the Introduction and Chapter One of GODDESSES NEVER AGE and took notes. The things that really resonated with me are the things I’ll blog about here. I hope you will feel free to jump into this discussion on those topics, or throw in your own. The things that […]

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Maggie’s Bookclub: GODDESSES NEVER AGE

Hello friends! I had a realization the other day. I think it might have come because I’ve been getting a great influx of data. I can peek at the stats on my website and Facebook pages, and I ran a recent reader survey to get know my readers better. As I went through all this […]

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New Books, New Site, BIG WEEK!

Happy Final Week of February! We’ve got so much going on this month and next that my head is spinning! But first and foremost, I want to welcome you all to the brand spanking new MaggieShayne.com! And I want to give credit to my website guru Melissa Storm, and her company Novel Publicity. We now […]

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The Powerful Magic of Story, Part 3

And now the final installment in the weird experiences I had during the making of ETERNITY. If you missed the first two, those post are here: Part 1  Part 2

Okay, so there was this writers’ conference that I used to attend pretty regularly, held on the East Coast, and I can’t remember if it was in Boston or Connecticut. Boston, I think. A bunch of my writing gal-pals and I attended it several times. Early on, we caught wind of a psychic who was setting up in the conference hotel and taking appointments, and so we all booked one.

I’d been working very hard on ETERNITY, but it hadn’t yet been released. It was too early in the process to promote it. But I was filled with its mystical energy and walking on a cloud that kept me about six inches above the floor.

When I walked into the room for my appointment, the woman, whose name I have sadly forgotten, looked up at me and said, “Eternity. Why is the word ‘Eternity’ screaming in my head?”

I sat down, stunned, and told her about my book, and all the strange things that had happened to me during its creation.

She told me,

Eternity is not just a book. It’s more. It’s a ministry. In fact, you have a ministry, and your ministry is through your stories. This is your power, and it’s an important one. You can help people. You can uplift, you can enlighten, you can heal and you can spread love and joy through your stories. This is your calling. This is your life’s work. Eternity is the strongest example of that, to date. It’s an important book and it’s message is deeper than even its author knows.

And then she told me to stay away from Salem. Something about a very strong energy that would be opposite my own and would clash with me, and might leave a mark.

I did go to Salem. I’ve been to Salem many times. I haven’t felt any negative repercussions thus far, probably because I didn’t visit the actual sites of any of the persecutions or executions, which took place in Danvers, not Salem proper, anyway. I don’t know if I would   feel this alleged clash even if I did. I am quite averse to focusing on the past. I mostly feel that if the past lifetime was still important to us, we’d still be in it. We have left it behind and moved on. This current lifetime is where our attention needs to be.

All that aside, this was the third weird, magical thing that happened to me surrounding the novel ETERNITY, which is currently free on Kindle, Nook, iBooks, Kobo, and GooglePlay in the US, UK, AU, CA, and IN. You can find all those links on my HOME PAGE

Until next weekend, have a great and wonderful week!

PS: Today was the day my newsletter went out with the very first episode of a brand new, never before published, utterly FREE, BROWN and DE LUCA serial story, THE ONE WHO CRIED WOLF.  Episode 2 comes out by 2/28.

If you sign up late, don’t worry. You’ll receive any episodes you’ve missed as soon as you subscribe, along with all episodes of last year’s serialized version of The Rhiannon Chronicles.

 

 

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The Powerful Magic of Story, Part 2

And now back to that magical book, ETERNITY, (which is free right now, in case you didn’t hear me screaming that from the rooftops.) In my previous post I talked about the odd physical symptoms, the tachycardia and such, that came to me with the story and stayed.

You can read that post here, if you missed it.

This time, I want to talk to you about one of the best friends of my life here on earth, a delightful man, writer, and mystic by the name of David O. Norris. David and I had only spoken a couple of times by email before he got his hands on a copy of ETERNITY. When he read the book, he was swept away by the gallows scene, to another time and place, and he became convinced that I had not just invented that scene, but that I had lived it. He knew it, he said, because he had lived it too. We had been side by side on the gallows. He felt it very strongly, and I had to wonder if such a thing could be true, and if it was, whether that explained the strange heart issues that overcame me while writing it. He never knew about those things, however.

I had never met David face to face, but we became good friends after that through email. Then, one year, we were planning to attend the same magical gathering at the same campground. Finally we’d get to meet face to face.

There were a couple of hundred people at this event. As I arrived, I followed the same protocol as everyone else. You drive into the camping area, around a looping road, find your spot, unload your car, and then drive it to the parking area some distance away and hike back. As I pulled in, and drove slowly around the circle, looking for my spot, David was near his already pitched tent with his wife. Cars bearing newcomers had been passing by his spot all day. But as my car passed, he got a chill up his spine, turned slowly, and looked right at me. “That’s Maggie,” he said.

He had no idea what I was driving. But he felt my presence. He walked toward the road, and I hit the brakes and said, “That’s David.” Then I jumped out of the car and got the biggest, warmest hug ever.

David and I remain friends to this day. He is the big brother I never had. We can go months without a conversation and then see each other again and it’s as if not a single day has passed.

Among other things, David is a fabulous writer. He wrote the lyrics to “Witches on the Wind,” the song that backs the video trailer for my MARK OF THE WITCH. Mark of the Witch incidentally, is the first book of my second Witch-related series. Eternity was, of course, the first book of my first Witch related series. Queue the mystical music.

Here’s the video, in case you want to hear that haunting song again, or for the first time.

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New Baby!

We interrupt our regularly scheduled blog post (briefly) to announce the arrival of Emma Jean. Emma is my 11th grandchild, the 4th girl, and the very 1st baby born to my daughter, who writes as Miranda Shayne. We had a very eventful week, a few scares, an emergency c-section, but all is well and we are so incredibly grateful and deeply, deeply aware of how amazingly blessed we are.

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The Powerful Magic of Story

ETERNITY was the strangest story I ever wrote. Actually, I didn’t write it. I think it wrote itself. I was just the channel. The idea came to me fully formed. I didn’t plot or outline. I didn’t think about it. I just sat down and began. The words flowed through me, searing me on the way. It was like channeling wildfire.

As the opening scenes unfolded, something happened to me. I felt a rush in my chest, and suddenly my heart was racing. Not like, boy-am-I- excited type racing. This was more like, Oh-shit-I- think-I’m-going-to-die type racing. I had to go to the ER. My heartrate was over 220 beats per minute. We tried some things in the ER. Ice packs on my face and neck. Bearing down. Carotid massage. And my heart slowed down to normal again within a few minutes of my arrival. The entire episode was probably an hour in duration.

But it came back. It came back for the next month or so, and it only happened when I was working on this particular story.

Later, the heart thing was diagnosed as an electrical issue, primary supra-ventricular tachycardia. The nerve endings in my heart would sometimes misfire for no apparent reason, triggering the racing heart result. Over the coming years it would return at random. I’ve been flat-lined 5 times in order to get my heart rate out of this state of tachycardia. And I later found several things that could trigger it. Too little water, alcohol, even in small amounts, happy excitement, stretching in a certain way, sleeping on my left side, driving when traffic is slow and I’m late. One time it happened when I saw news coverage of a hurricane battering North Carolina while my firstborn was living there, and it hit me so hard and fast I was sure it was an actual heart attack. Sometimes there’s no apparent reason at all.

It hardly ever happens anymore. I’ve applied Law of Attraction to eliminate the problem from my life almost entirely, and I have a little pill I can take if it manages to slip through again.

However, none of that explains the onset. The way it came to me for the first time during the creation of this book, when creative fire was rushing through me in a way it had never done before or since. This book is the only book that ever triggered such a reaction.

ETERNITY was not made up. It was channeled. There’s something real, some collective consciousness memory that it stirs, and not just in me, but in its readers. Many readers told me they had to skip those opening few scenes, because they were too real.

I’m going to blog more about the mysterious happenings associated with this book. There are several other inexplicable events related to the story. But for now, I’ll leave you with this link where you can read an excerpt and download the entire book at Amazon. And just so you know, ETERNITY is free right now in all ebook formats in all countries. (You can find the links to Eternity for Nook, iBooks, and Kobo right below the excerpt link.)

Get it for Nook  Get it for iBooks  Get it for Kobo  Get it on GooglePlay (Android users)

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