The Gift Of Maui By Malena Lott
“My life is like a stroll on the beach...as near
to the edge as I can go.”
--Thoreau
Last year, while brainstorming ideas on a follow-up to last
summer's novella, Life's a Beach, I knew I wanted the setting of Hawaii
for my beach read. Life's a Beach had been set in Mexico, a place I've
actually never been, but I have been to Hawaii and long to return. While
researching the islands, I settled on Maui, “the magic isle,” because I knew I
wanted to incorporate a little magic into my multi-POV story. Yet I didn't know
a) how I was going to get all my characters from my previous stories to Hawaii
in a realistic way and b) what the hook for my story would be to tie it all
together.
One day, while working in my garage office (I have two offices,
a small corner office in my kitchen with the nicest computer and a bigger
office in the garage) it hit me. Or, rather, it was a voice, and it was Rachel,
Ramona's sister from Dating da Vinci, my 2008 novel released by
Sourcebooks. I was surprised she wanted to lead the story and literally asked
her (in my head) “Why you?” She was already a growing celeb, but it seems in
the “fictional” year since I'd last seen her, she'd been a busy girl, becoming
a best-selling author with her mojo/fitness new agey spin and was hosting a
mojo conference for professional women in Maui. So that's how I got my
characters, all from the Midwest, together.
The scene from the opening of the story came to be fully as a
picture: Rachel standing at the ocean, waiting for the swell, which would be
symbolic for the story ahead, and her sister, Ramona, calling to her from the
lanai, calling for her return. As Rachel's standing barefoot in the ocean, she
seems to be looking for strength to get through her mojo conference – her own
mojo - to live up to the expectations
the women have for her.
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Author Bio
Malena Lott s
the author of three novels, two novellas, several short stories and also writes
young adult under the pen name Lena brown. Readers can connect with her on
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram under malenalott and she blogs about
mojo and zen at malenalott.com.
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Excerpt
“'On the long flight over from the mainland, her sister had told
her about the genealogy of Maui, the Polynesian demi-god who’d used a magic
hook to pull the islands out of the deep waters, raising the sky, finding fire
and making the land habitable for man.
A
magic hook,
Rachel thought. That’s what this whole conference was about.”
And that's the genesis of The Last
Resort, and a gift to a writer that was most unexpected, that the
polynesian demi-god Maui would set the tone for how these five women would
discover their deepest desires and fears on his golden sand.
