How dare I, an American, connect myself with British lore? Let alone claim to have Merlin as a muse. Like all Americans, ancestry plays a big role. My father’s people were of Celtic decent, while my mother’s were French, not of Brittany, but not far from. They were a romantic people with a love of music, arts, a good tale and wine.

While I, my father’s firstborn, was coming into the world on the Pacific coast, my father, a career navy man, was sailing in the Atlantic waters. Soon after my birth, my mother took me to live with my grandparents, in the Avalon apartments atop Queen Anne Hill in Seattle, Washington.

The first two years of my life were spent in the loving care of a doting grandfather, a mystical grandmother, and an adoring mother...constantly bathed in a nurturing environment of love, laughter and music. Each night as my mother rocked me to sleep she would sing sweet Celtic lullabies, or tell wonderful tales of Merlin and King Arthur.

Is it possible for destiny to be imprinted before birth? Perhaps that is why I was whisked away to live at Avalon, secluded atop a Queen’s hill...to be contacted by Merlin so many years later...urged to write a story written a hundred times before? How arrogant of me, how absurd! I should re-title the novel “A Madwoman’s Musings.”

Yet, Merlin’s nightly whispers keep calling to me. I close my eyes and his words flow from lost memories of distance times. They summon me home to British shores. I feel both blessed and humbled with any inadvertent connection to the lands of Merlin, to the lands of Arthurian Legends.

Dee-Marie