Happy Holidays Everyone!    

It’s the time of year for gift giving, and don’t tell me I’m being un-PC.  I’m Wiccan, I celebrate the Winter Solstice, not Christmas.  And yet, I do it with the evergreens, the Santa figure, the mistletoe (which we got from the Pagans, the Lapland Shamans, and the Druids, respectively, by the way).  It all symbolizes the same stuff, when you come right down to it.  Life trumps death.  Even at the darkest time of all, the shortest day of the year, the light (in the form of the renewed sun or the newborn son) is born.  Life wins out.  Death is an illusion.  And best of all, gifts are exchanged!

 

 

  

I love this time of year.  Love it, love it, love it!  And because I love it and all it stands for, I’m going to give you a gift–the best gift I can think of for the holiday this year.  It’s a gift that will either make sense to you or it won’t.  Some people can get it, and others can’t.  I first heard of this gift a decade ago, and thought it was so much hooey.  So to me, it was.  Today, it has changed my life.  It fits with my needs now.  It didn’t then.  And when it didn’t fit with my needs, I couldn’t hear it or make sense of it. 

  

So take it or leave it.  Or follow up and do a little more research.  None of those choices is right or wrong.  Do the one that feels best to you.

  

So are you ready?  This gift I’m about to share with you is the secret of life.  It’s the reason we’re here.  It’s what all life is about, and it’s so incredibly simple you’ll die laughing once you get it.  (Not literally, although, really, what better way to go, than laughing?) 

  

The secret is this: (drumroll please….)

We are here to have fun.

  

That’s it.  Big secret, huh?  In spirit form, we choose to come into the physical for the sheer joy of experiencing life in this miraculous, passionate, wonderful, solid, earthy form.  We come knowing that we’ll experience all manner of things, things that will feel a way we humans think of as “good” and things that are what we’ll call “bad” and that we’ll be able to sort the things we want more of, from the things we want less of, and each time we do that, we’ll get more of what we want and less of what we don’t, because we know how.

  

We didn’t really plan on one thing, though.  Once we get into physical form, we tend to forget how to go about getting more of what we want and less of what we don’t.  As spirit beings it never occurs to us that that could happen.  I mean, it’s the easiest thing in the world!   How could anyone forget it? 

  

You get what you think about.  You get what you focus on.  You get what you expect, what you believe in, what you pay attention to. 

  

So here we come, bouncing happily into our physical bodies, and we get things we love and we smile and laugh and sing and dance, and think happily about those things and talk endlessly about those things, and are right on track to getting lots more of them, because of our focus being so thoroughly on them, and then—BAM!

  

We get something we don’t like.  A broken heart.  A stubbed toe.  An illness.  A debt.  A punch in the groin.  Whatever.

  

And immediately, our attention shifts to that bad thing.  And our minds are on that bad thing, and we talk about it, and think about it, and complain about it, and tell the story of it to all we meet, and we wallow in it, and get pity for it, and take vengeance on it, and fight against it.

  

And doing all of that puts our focus on it, on that bad thing, which in turn attracts more bad things to us. 

  

You get what you focus on.  The key?  When something happens in life that shows you “I don’t like that, and I don’t want that,” then let it go.  Don’t keep it close to you by focusing on it.  Just relax and gently turn your attention to the things in life you do want, and that thing you don’t want will fall away, and goodness and well being will come flowing in to replace it.

  

When you see something you love and shout YES at it, you are attracting more of that thing.

  

When you see something you hate and shout NO at it, you are attracting more of that thing. 

  

It’s your attention, you see, that creates your reality.  Make a conscious decision to always do what feels best to you in life, to do the things that make you happy, to focus on the good and not the bad, to home in on the one thing about that special person you love, and ignore the one thing about them that drives you crazy, and so on and so on.  And life will fall beautifully into place. 

  

And that, my friends, is the secret to life.  For more information on this secret, known as The Law of Attraction, you can fill your well at www.abraham-hicks.com and also through the wonderful programming at www.hayhouseradio.com.  It’s the principal on which the book and film “The Secret” were based, however, those projects seem to barely scratch the surface of the power of this law. 

  

Explore and enjoy!

  

Now that I’ve given you the gift to end all gifts, I’ll talk about me and my work just a bit.  I’m Maggie Shayne.  I’m a Wiccan High Priestess and a bestselling Author, and yes the two are intrinsically intertwined, but if I tell you how I’ll have to kill you.  <wink>

  

In the past three years I’ve been through the darkest, deepest, most thorough transition of my life.  The youngest of my daughters grew up and left home, when raising the kids had been my entire life for most of my life, from my mid-teens on, in fact.  My mother died.  My marriage dissolved.  I went from being the hub in the center of a huge, bustling family and constantly chaotic household, to living alone in a big farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.  I lost my ability to write for awhile.  But I found something far more precious.  I found me.  And I set about rebirthing myself in the midst of my darkest hour, which is probably why I so love the symbolism of the mid-winter holidays. 

  

And now I’m back on top. Writing again, better than ever.  Happy again.  Healthy again.  Thriving again.  Passionate again.  I’m more alive than I’ve ever been, in fact.  There is life after death.  I’m living proof.  And come to think of it, during those transition years, during my dark journey in the underworld, my heart was stopped three times, very very briefly, to “reboot” it and correct an inexplicable tachycardia.  It really was sort of a death and rebirth.  And that issue, too, has vanished now.

  

Okay, so in keeping with all that stuff, I’ve re-invented the Wings in the Night series, (known to some as the “Twilight” series) my ongoing stories of the undead.  The new chapter of the series, DEMON’S KISS, introduces a new group of vampires, an ensemble cast, a bigger set of stories, and a whole lot of new potential, while retaining ties, connectons, continuity with and guest appearances by, the vamps from the other books.  We even stopped calling the books “twilight” this and that.  We were just running out of titles, and once other vampire authors decided to start using that key word in their titles, it became entirely too confusing to my readers. 

    

DEMON’S KISS is on sale now from MIRA Books, and will be followed by LOVER’S BITE in May 2008 and ANGEL’S PAIN in October 2008.

 

 

  

Also on sale now is a holiday anthology with a touch of magic, AN ENCHANTED SEASON from Berkley Publishing, and my story, “Melting Frosty” is accompanied by novellas by fellow authors Erin McCarthy, Nalini Singh, & Jean Johnson.

  

To top off my November/December releases are ETERNAL LOVE and IMMORTAL DESIRE, the trade sized collector’s edition reissues of my immortal Witch series from Berkley.  The first includes my groundbreaking novels Eternity & Infinity, and the second, Destiny & Immortality.

 

 

 

 

  

You can read excerpts on my website, www.maggieshayne.com, and you can also catch me on my group blog site, www.storybroads.com where I post a new blog every Thursday. 

  

Have a wonderful, peaceful, blissful, joyous holiday season, and I sincerely hope 2008 is your best year yet.

  

Maggie

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