Why I Wrote My Novel- Finding Her Claire

When asked what type of work I’m in, my usual response lacks depth.  It is quite lazy of me to be so brief. Maybe it doesn’t really matter anymore since I am retired from the financial industry after twenty-eight years.  If the conversation lends itself to more, I’ll share that I have been blogging and writing a novel. People’s initial responses are usually avid. Lots of enthusiasts tell me that they are writing a book, too. Yet, the most common questions to my admissions are why are you writing a book or what is your book about?

It would be convenient to say the answers are simple. Instead, it’s quite complicated. At first my exit from my career was about my blood pressure and my fragile mental health. But it wasn’t. All the signs were there for me to leave. On top of that, the economy was slowly recovering and many investors were still reeling. Americans seemed sluggish. My decision to quit was sealed when deals started to fall through and nothing seemed to be working. It was a defining moment.

Now, fast forward to almost three years later and why I wrote the novel.

I felt compelled. It was a higher power that had urged me to write about fictional Rose Toffoli and her journey into finding her own clair.  What every girl should know is that there are four Clair’s: Clairvoyance (seeing), Clairaudience (hearing), Clairsentience (sensing), and Clair cognizance (knowing). One tends to be more dominant in any person’s life yet you can have all four.

My strongest clair is Clair cognizance with a close second in clairsentience. I’ve experienced all four. Ever since I was a young girl, I just knew things that had already happened or were going to happen.  It was tough to lie to me. My ability gave me clarity.

Gaining confidence, I became bold enough to call others out only to confirm my suspicions.  It was a curse as well as a gift.  For years many people told me secrets I didn’t want to know.  They called me emotional, rarely seeing it as positive.  It was my emphatic ability to feel what others were feeling or experience their physical pain.  It worked close up and across miles with distance being irrelevant.  Thankfully, it has become my greatest gift.

I write about the clairs in my book which has been written and re-written four times now.  It’s called editing. Certainly this is the most arduous exercise for any aspiring writer. The path has been expensive and very time consuming; like going back to school.

Rose, the main character, experiences at 16 years old,  a series of events that bring her to question her own gifts from her ancestry.   She faces challenges during the height of the Viet Nam War though the fall of 1969 and into the spring of 1970. The book is meant to help other women who may have gone through some of the same spiritual experiences and want to understand them.