How did I come up with the idea for Almost Like Magic?

I figured this would be the best inaugural article for my new blog series. I came up with the idea for the first book all the way back in 2011! But I need to back up a little bit…

(Okay, this next part doesn’t seem related but it is)

I reconnected with a college friend 3000 miles from where we went to school—from NE Florida to the Pacific Northwest—and after a couple months of weekly lunches, she told me she was writing a YA novel and asked if I wanted to read what she had so far. I devoured it and screamed when it ended at a cliffhanger. I demanded more. AND SHE HADN’T WRITTEN IT YET! Thankfully she eventually did!!!

That’s when I was like, well if she can write a book I can too! So I did. And it was meandering and I had no idea how long a book should be and I didn’t really know how to stop the story so I just kept adding more, and it was eventually 230,000 words!! For comparison, most of the ALM books are around 100,000. But I'd written a whole book, with a beginning, middle, and end.

So cut forward a few years… It’s 2011 and I am six seasons into this amazing TV show called Supernatural (maybe you’ve heard of it?) and had this random thought one night before falling asleep: What if the Winchesters showed up and the person they were trying to save legit hated them? Like they had a mysterious past together and the hatred was real. But they still had to work together to beat the big bad.

That night I had a dream about it. And the next night. And the next.

Finally after a week of this scene playing over and over in my dreams, I took an hour and wrote it. I didn’t even give the characters names. They were just her, him, and his brother in the very first draft. And then it sat there for a while. I added a little more and a little more, figured out names for these characters that you now know as Stella, Cole, and Mikey.

I gave those first few chapters to my friend and she was so mad there wasn’t more. Never mind the pages I gave her were absolutely not the beginning of a story—that first chapter ended up somewhere toward the middle—it wasn't even her usual genre of choice. But she wanted more, and I was determined to make it happen.

Suddenly I had a rough plot and character arc and reasons why they hated each other and how all of that played into the overall story. And then I didn’t just have a book.

I had a SERIES.

An eight book series no less, one for each of the Sabbats that make up the pagan wheel of the year. That’s absolutely where the name for Eight-Fold Acres came from, as well as the tracker tattoo.

I still can’t believe I had the original idea so many years ago.

So why didn’t it come out until 2021? I tried for years to find an agent and have the book traditionally published, and though I had a lot of requests for partials and fulls of the manuscript, after endless rejections based not on the quality of the idea or the writing, but simply that there were so many authors writing similar books… I decided to take the indie publishing route. And I don’t regret it. I get to hire my own editor, cover artist, and have complete control over the story like adding all of those lovely interior illustrations.

And all because of a TV show that got into my head and wouldn’t let go!

That’s how the series (so far) has come to be in your—hopefully eager—hands.