Guest Blog- Courtney Pierce

This week's guest blog is by a friend and fellow author.  Courtney Pierce is a fiction writer and lives Milwaukie, Oregon, with her husband of thirty-four years and bossy cat. Her passion to write came from sitting in a theater seat. She studied what moved audiences as incredible stories unfolded on the stage. After a twenty-year career as a marketing executive in the Broadway entertainment industry, she made the leap to full-time fiction writer in 2011.

 

A Boomer Couple’s Magical Legacy

So, is my book happy speculative fiction?

Possibly peppy Baby Boomer paranormal?

It’s magical realism. The real can be magical.

In my trilogy series, the ghosts give guidance outside of the boundaries of life; a reach-out with answers of right and wrong beyond the lessons of their long-ago earthly upbringing. The immortals are sweeter than Leave it to Beaver; more honest than All in the Family.

The first book, Stitches, introduces two childless Baby Boomers who want a little magic in their lives after thirty-two years in the corporate grind. They’ve sold out to corporate America, and corporate America, in turn, sold them out. That’s when they discover a magical piece of fabric in an old chest from estate sale.

Heirlooms really do have a life of their own, and so do their former owners in the afterlife. The fabric holds the key to immortality—and it takes the couples’ lives from ordinary to extraordinary. While my books are not without their deadly moments, my protagonists embrace the magic in their life—real magic. They are life spies with secret information and use it to solve crimes with the FBI. They want to get the bad guys. But the underlying theme is this couple’s struggle with the choice of becoming immortal with the fabric. For them, the prospect of immortality ignites a quest for adventure, to right the wrongs in society, and also to create a lasting legacy in this life.

They use their magical power to help people, choosing to make the most of the here and now against the ticking clock.

In life’s third act, leaving a legacy is important. And it becomes even more important when you don’t have children. Who wants to fade away with a remote control in their hand without having done something significant? My characters want to help people one person at a time. No fanfare. No recognition. And they don’t want their names on a building. In fact, they want to stay anonymous.

What would you do if you had the choice to become immortal? Would you make the most of what you have today? Or, would you live for the eternal life that’s waiting for you on the other side?

Hmmm...questions to ponder.

Baby Boomers are retiring at a rate of over ten thousand per day. I’m one of them, smack in the middle at fifty-four. My husband is sixty-two and still believes that vinyl records are superior technology to anything else out there. I think he might be right. We think of ourselves as immortal, stuck in a time when we stood up for what’s right and pounded our feet on the pot-holed pavement of wrongs. Like the music we listened to, we’ll never die. We’re spurred on to victory by Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen, Woody Guthrie, and Iggy Pop.

Oh....and we believe that animals know more than people do.

It may sound Pollyanna, but look at the courage of those in Egypt who are fighting for a better life. Not so Pollyanna. Not so far off from society’s turning point in the 1960s.

Leaving a legacy is not easy. What’s going to be yours? 

 

 

Stitches is the first book of a trilogy about a boomer couple’s journey of living with magic. It’s a little Antiques Roadshow and History Detectives combined with the sparkling relationship of Nick and Nora Charles of The Thin Man series—with a magical twist.

Stitches is available at Amazon.com in soft cover and as an e-book for the Kindle. Other e-book formats are available at Smashwords.com.

Brushes, the second book of the series, will be released in September, 2013. The third book, Riffs, is due out in 2014.