Around the Fire New Release Book Spotlight with Patricia McAlexander

The Last Golden Isle
by
Patricia McAlexander
Psychic Paranormal Romance
Release Date 12/11/23

Ever since a traumatic experience as a college freshman four years earlier, Clare Matthews has had an aversion to men. But when she goes to spend the summer on one of Georgia’s Golden Isles as a companion for her cousin Sally, she finds herself drawn to Jon, a handsome young security guard who works on the family estate. When the feeling seems mutual, she hopes she has at last been healed. Then signs of his possible involvement in a dangerous criminal activity crop up, and Clare must make a decision that will affect the rest of her life.

Grab your copy today.
https://www.amazon.com/Last-Golden-Isle-Patricia-McAlexander/dp/1509251995/ 
www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-last-golden-isle-patricia-mcalexander/1144163217
https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-last-golden-isle/id6468095788

 THE INSPIRATION BEHIND THE LAST GOLDEN ISLE
Where does inspiration come from? The ancients thought of the Muses-–goddesses of artistic creation, nine of them for different arts—as spirits of inspiration; thus Homer and Virgil appeal to a Muse at the beginning of their epics. Centuries later, John Milton tells us that Paradise Lost was dictated to him at night while asleep by the heavenly muse he calls Urania. Robert Louis Stevenson said he received his stories in a state of reverie in which visitors called “brownies” helped him compose. Edgar Allen Poe does not have spirit-like visitors, but he does say his inspiration comes during a state between waking and sleep that he calls “hypnagogia.”
I feel that I too, as a pantser, am in sort of an inspired dream state as I sit at the keyboard for that first draft and words pour out. I wish I knew how to access that inspiration—how to turn it on like a faucet. But for me, it just sometimes magically comes—in the case of The Last Golden Isle, after a visit to one of Georgia’s beautiful coastal islands, reading an old story with a somewhat similar plot that I’d written in high school, and hearing from a friend about her daughter’s experience with a “spiritual guide” in South America. Then these experiences, like the little chips of glass turned in a kaleidoscope, almost on their own formed the new patterns and shapes that became the first draft of this novel.
After the inspiration of a first draft, of course, comes the work of editing and molding it to its final form, then submission and hope for acceptance, then the publicizing and the hope that people will read and like the work. But there is less mystery in that.
​The mystery is in the inspiration for that first draft, however it comes.​

About the author.
Even as a child I loved writing stories—in first grade, my personal version of Dick and Jane tales with characters I named Jean and Jerry, in high school and college short stories and novellas I shared with my friends. With this interest in writing, it’s perhaps not surprising that all my degrees were in English—a BA from the University of New York at Albany, an MA from Columbia University, and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I taught grammar, composition, and literature at The University of Georgia and since retiring, have turned back to fiction, publishing three contemporary romantic suspense novellas with the Wild Rose Press--Stranger in the Storm, Shadows of Doubt, and The Student in Classroom 6, with a fourth, The Last Golden Isle, to be released today—December 11. My short story “Falling,” which came in second in the Atlanta, Georgia, Writers Club’s 2021 Terry Kay Prize for Fiction, was published in the Fall 2022 issue of the online journal Knot. I live in Athens, Georgia, with my husband Hubert, also a retired UGA professor.
For more, follow the author here.
Website: https://patriciamcalexander.weebly.com
Instagram: www.instagram.com/patriciamcalexander/
Email: [email protected]
Facebook: facebook.com/patriciamcalexanderwriter/ 
X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/PatMcAlexWriter 
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Patricia-McAlexander/author/ 
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/20262992.Patricia_McAlexander 
BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/patricia-mcalexander

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