Polishing The Hook

When I first began interviewing my fictional main character Rose Toffoli, she was sixty years old and reading Tarot cards for extra money, out of her modest home in north Denver. Although she had been born in Italy, she was adopted and raised outside of Boston at aged three, when her birth family drowned after the ship collision of the Andrea Doria in 1956 off coast of Nantucket. They had been on their way to build a life in America.

Stubborn that she was, she insisted that I go back to Minton, Mass and talk about her junior year of High School the summer of 1969. I acquiesced and put aside hundreds of pages of writing to start over. Together we started fresh by smoking cigarettes on my back porch and collaborating to write about her journey. The opening scene took place forty-four years ago when she ended up on the door step of a Palm Reader. My book Finding Her Claire covers only six months of the start of her journey to uncovering her family’s gifts of medium ship and her own skills as a psychic medium.

This book is only the first in a series which will eventually lead the reader down the path of understanding and believing in reincarnation.

Rose, through mentoring from the librarian Miss H, uncovers her gifts as a clairsentient. In her studies she discovers that there are four Clair’s: Clairaudience (hearing), clairsentience (feeling), clairvoyance (seeing), and claircognizance (knowing). She is clairsentient and clairvoyant.

Rose Toffoli’s life,  while vastly different than my own, was written using parts of my own experiences with the paranormal. I too, am a psychic medium and used my skills of claircognizance to write this novel. It was a higher power that compelled me to leave Wall Street after a successful career spanning 28 years and focus full-time on this book.

Over the years, I have had several articles published, mostly non-fiction. Although my Bachelor of Science degree is in Health and Human Sciences, I have continued to write and complete classes from Gotham and the Long Ridge Writers Group. My step is to query an agent.  I’ve got my fingers crossed and hoping it all pays off.  Wish me luck.