An Interview with Me

Many thanks to my author friend Uvi Pozansky for featuring this interview with me in her newsletter. https://uviart.bmeurl.co/13A7E66F

Susanne Lee Matthews, Author ofThe Awakening

Today I have the pleasure to present an author who is retired educator. Susanne Matthews spends her time creating adventures for her readers in a variety of genres that range from contemporary to romantic thrillers. She loves the ins and outs of complex stories and the journey it takes to get from the first word to the last period of a novel. She lives in Eastern Ontario, Canada with her husband.

When did you decide that you wanted to be a published author?

As a child, I guess. I am Asthmatic, a condition that was much harder to treat in the 1950s and 1960s than it is today. I spent a lot of time home sick, along with regular stays in the hospital, which I suspect was more to allow my family to sleep than to help me. I loved books. At first, it was picture books. Then I graduated to Little Golden Books, with text to accompany the pictures. From there, I moved on to graphic novels, what we used to call comic books. In time, I was able to read more complex novels like Swiss Family Robinson, War of the Worlds, Treasure Island, as well as my Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys books. I remember telling my parents that I would love to be able to write books like that to entertain people who were sick or spent a lot of time alone like I did. My dad was a great storyteller, and I hoped I had even a sliver of his imagination.
As the years passed, asthma treatments improved, but I would still have the odd bad bout. When I did, I retreated into my books again. By this time, I’d discovered history, ancient civilizations, and mythology. There wasn’t a book on Ancient Egypt, Greece or Rome in our library that I didn’t read.
I graduated from high school and went to university where I chose to complete my Bachelor of Arts with a double major in English and history. I also fell in love, got married, and over the course of the next ten years, I was lucky enough to be a stay-at-home-mother to our three children. Nap time for them meant reading time for me. Once they were all in school full-time, I returned to university and earned my Bachelor of Education.
Over the years, I primarily taught English, and the creative writing activities were always my favorites. When I retired in 2010, I read books by the truckload, eventually spending more time critiquing what I was reading than enjoying the books. One day, a friend said that I should take the plunge and try my hand at writing a novel. I’d already written short stories for children for our local newspaper, poetry, and curriculum, so I figured what did I have to lose? I penned the novel, submitted it to a publisher, and it was accepted. The edits required were eye-opening, but I learned more about writing by doing than I had in the 35 years of teaching it. My first book was published on April 23, 2013, Shakespeare’s birthday, something I considered a good omen. Since then, I’ve published 54 novels and I’m currently at work on 55, 56, and 57.
I’ve satisfied my need to write books to entertain others, and I hope they are pleased and satisfied with my work. While I’m at the age where most people retire completely, I’m not ready to stop writing yet. There are still a few characters racing around inside my head, begging me to tell their stories.

 You write books in the romance genre, but I can see that you do so in several different subgenres. Which book do you have with you today and into which of these many sub-genres does it fit?

Actually, the book I have with me straddles several genres. The Awakening, is from my paranormal-fantasy-romance series, Listen to the Stones. It’s a multi-book series written along the lines of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, or JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books. I’m not claiming to be as brilliant and talented as they are, but I’m hoping the people who enjoy that type of book will enjoy mine.
There are four books in Listen to the Stones, each one covering a step of the journey not only of self-discovery and love, but also of the on-going battle between good and evil.

Here’s the description for the entire series. Listen to the Stones, Four Book Series True love is the most powerful magic in the universe. For ten millennia, the world has waited but now, the time of reckoning approaches. When it arrives, the Chosen One will have a chance to break a curse and reverse an eons old spell. The choice is hers, to be made using free will, the gift given to all by Danu, the mother of the gods. If she makes the right choice, she’ll save her world; the wrong one will doom them all. But to do so, she has to believe in herself, her psychic abilities, magic, and the power of love.
“You must fulfill your destiny, find true love, and break the curse.” Those were Marina Fraser Robertson Mitchell’s grandmother’s last words, but Nana hadn’t been well for a long time. She’d lived in a fantasy world no doubt brought on by her unusual beliefs and the recollection of the folk tales she used to read to her as a child.
But Nana’s words could well be prophetic. Her life has consisted of one overwhelming loss after another. Added to the sense of failure is the fact that she senses that she doesn’t belong here. She spends her days battling fears and phobias, trying to downplay the way she can hear and feel the thoughts of others, and her nights fighting off monsters in recurring nightmares that threaten her sanity. But these bad dreams feel more like memories than imaginings. At the heart of them, amidst the horror, are strange standing stones that speak to her in an ancient language, a faceless lover, and a red-eyed creature who terrifies her.
When she loses the last thing she holds dear and her world is crumbling beneath her, she’s distraught, convinced that she should never have been born. But things aren’t as dismal as she believes. Changes are happening within her, some as frightening as they are liberating. The answer may be within reach—an inheritance from a great-uncle she never knew existed. To claim it, she has to return to the Scottish island where she was born, but can she do so? Can she face the thought of living on an island, surrounded by deep water, the thing that terrifies her most?
A firm believer in mysticism and reincarnation, archeologist and novelist Jerome Morrison can’t deny the power of the mysterious stone circle near Fraser Hall, stones that speak to him. The last few years, a woman has haunted his dreams, a woman he loves above all others, a woman he’s convinced was his in another lifetime but was lost to him. Now, he must find her, positive that his future lies with hers. But discovering that everything he knew about himself is a lie confounds the situation. When the dreams stop and strange things begin to happen to him, there’s a sense of urgency he can’t dismiss. Discovering that his mystery woman is none other than Marina Fraser, heir to the Fraser estate and the land on which the mysterious stones sit, comes as a shock, especially when she doesn’t recognize him and there is another, one who triggers powerful feelings of hatred within him, vying for her attention, her love, and her land. How can he convince her that they are meant to be together when she doesn’t trust him or recall the love they once shared?
There’s a war coming, one they must fight united. The future is at stake, and time is running out. Each side must muster their forces for the final battle. Evil has grown even stronger than the gods anticipated. Three will fight, two will survive, but which two? The answer lies with the Standing Stones on the Fraser estate.
Will these two lost souls find true love, or will the demon-demigod’s rage and power keep them apart? Only as one can they prevent him from dooming the world to a living hell. The first book, The Awakening, focuses primarily on Marina, the heroine of the saga. With her, we live through the changes as she discovers that she is far more than she ever thought she could be. We also meet the hero, Jerome, and the demon-demigod, Teine, through dreams and nightmares that shake Marina’s world.

Here’s the burb for The Awakening. An only child raised by a secretive, single mother who forever mourned the loss of the man she loved and an Irish grandmother who espoused a strange blend of Christianity and paganism, Marina Fraser Robertson Mitchell has eschewed all beliefs in magic and fantasy that made up a great deal of her early life, but doing so hasn’t stopped the vicious nightmares about monsters and a deep water phobia that have haunted her for years.
As her thirtieth birthday approaches, changes are happening within her, alterations to her personality that lead to psychic abilities she neither wants nor understands. She’s convinced that she’s on the verge of madness, an insanity brought on by some form of physical illness or mental illness inherited from her maternal grandmother.
When her ex-husband sends over three boxes and a footlocker that were misplaced after her mother’s passing, Marina discovers that everything she knows about herself is a lie. While her mother’s letter gives her some explanations, it doesn’t explain her ESP, her sense that she doesn’t belong here, and her phantom lover. She has more questions than answers.
At the suggestion of her neighbor, a friendly, elderly woman with a cat named Rosie, Marina visits a psychic on her thirtieth birthday, but that only increases her confusion. The unusual woman greets her with the words, my lady, and exhorts her to accept herself for who and what she is. She warns her that the choices she makes from now on will determine who wins the final battle for the fate of the world. Shaken, Marina leaves, well aware of that those words are similar to those her grandmother spouted in her dying days.
As the nightmares she’s suffered so long continue, she searches for answers and a reprieve, an escape from a life in which she has lost everything that matters. Her prayers may be answered when she discovers that she has inherited property on the Isle of Lewis and Harris, the place where she suspects the standing stones from her dreams are located, stones that speak to her in the dead of night and may hold the answer to her future.
But can she accept what she’s becoming? Does she dare return to the place where she was born, a place her mother fled in fear? Everything she knows about herself is a lie. Is the truth waiting for her there? She has a choice to make. Will she make the right one? Only time will tell.

 The series sounds fascinating. What made you decide to write something so complex?

I didn’t set out to write a four book series, but most authors know that the story they set out to write and the story they end up writing are never exactly the same. No matter whether you’re a plotter, a pantser, or some type of hybrid, life happens, and things change. Sometimes, the story just doesn’t work, and when that happens, you have to go back and figure out why. Writing involves putting words down, but it also means research, character development, rereading what’s been written, editing, and rewriting some more until the piece is as good as you can possibly make it. Sometimes, what you expect to be one story evolves into several others. During the summer of 2023, I had the opportunity to visit the Standing Stones of Calanais on the Isle of Lewis and Harris. If you haven’t heard of them, and I hadn’t until we booked the cruise, the stone circle is a neolithic monument on an island in the Outer Hebrides in Northern Scotland. It isn’t the only one of its kind since similar ones have been found in various places around the world including the Orkney Islands, the Brazilian rainforest, and even at the bottom of Lake Michigan here in North America.
I’d visited Stonehenge a few days earlier, and as much as the site with its great stones impressed me, it paled in comparison with my reaction to the Standing Stones of Calanais. It touched a creative spark in me that I rediscovered a few years ago–my love of fantasy and paranormal.
While I have written other novels in this genre, this is by far my most complex endeavor. Looking at the stones, walking among them, and touching them set off a chain reaction within me that I hadn’t expected. The need to create not just a story but an entire mythology about the place overwhelmed me. I not only needed to write the story, but I also needed to introduce the site to my readers and transport them into a realm of possibilities while keeping one foot grounded in this time and place, but I knew this couldn’t simply be a romance. I had to find a way to explain the stones. Why were they here? What were they? Even my unimaginative husband could see faces in them. Had there been a Medusa-like creature in the mythology of this place that had turned its residents to stone? One of the myths they mention in the visitors’ centre stated that the stones could be the island’s early inhabitants turned to stone for refusing to embrace Christianity. I took that premise and ran with it, changing it into something far more ancient. I decided the focus of the Listen to the Stones Saga would be on liberating the trapped souls and undoing the curse responsible for their misery.
The first step was to create a mythology, a backstory to explain how the stones had been cursed and who and what could break the spell. I researched and drew from Celtic, Scottish, Irish, and Norse mythologies. I learned all I could about paganism, druidism, Wicca, witchcraft, and the supernatural as it pertained to Scotland. The more I discovered, the more intrigued I was.
The story flowed from my fingertips. I fleshed out Marina, the main character and the key to breaking the curse, and Jerome, the hero who would need to be by her side to ensure success. I introduced the dark lord, the villain of the piece and the various secondary characters required. As I wrote, new ideas flooded me, ideas that invaded my dreams and stayed with me long after I woke. As I neared the end of the novel, I realized it would be a monster to publish. It was close to 700 pages long, and that was before final edits! What to do?
The stones kept calling to me, begging me to tell their story. In the end, instead of writing one book, I’ve written a series with each book leading to the last one, the ultimate battle between good and evil. The books are: The Awakening, The Homecoming, The Bonding, and The Reckoning.

Can you share any of the story with us? 

Of course. Chapter One is the mythology that I created for the story, so here’s an excerpt from Chapter Two.

Marina Fraser Mitchell stared up at the darkened ceiling, tears of despair running down the sides of her face. How much longer could she go on this way? She was almost thirty, alone, struggling to make ends meet, and there didn’t seem to be any likelihood that the year starting in thirty minutes would be any better than the one ending. Not for the first time, she lamented the miserable life she had. She should never have been born, and yet deep inside her, the small voice she considered her conscience claimed she’d been put on this earth for an important reason, and sooner or later, that purpose would become clear. Perhaps she should’ve gone to Lenore and Jay’s party, had a few drinks, and rang in the new year in style, but socializing with others depleted what few resources she had.
As Lenore put it, she just wasn’t a people person. People were loud, sometimes so loud that it was as if they’d crawled inside her head and wouldn’t let her think. Lenore, her best friend, had suggested it could be a hearing issue like harmonic distortions. She’d visited an audiologist and the woman had assured her that there was nothing wrong with her hearing. If anything, she was extra sensitive to sounds. That hadn’t helped at all.
Marina sighed. The truth was that she’d never been comfortable in crowds and shied away from situations where making nice-nice with strangers was required. Given the choice, she preferred to be alone or with the few people she knew well, people who accepted her as she was—warts and all. Not that she had actual warts. Perhaps that was why she’d chosen to be a chef. Sure, there were people in the kitchen with her, but when it came right down to it, she was in charge and could socialize as much or as little as she wanted. Anything else was exhausting.
And make no mistake, she was exhausted. For the last few years, she’d felt her mind and body slipping away from her control, like a puppet on a string with someone else controlling all of her movements and thoughts. It was as if she was a character in a Punch and Judy Show, the one getting pounded all the time. Not only was her body tired and aching, her mind was fractured, and her soul was drained of all the joy that made life bearable.
While she couldn’t pinpoint exactly when this loss of control had happened, it had grown worse over the last five years, almost as if Fate herself were punishing her. Why? What could she possibly have done to deserve this? It was true that she’d made a few bad choices, decisions that had come back to bite her in the ass, but didn’t everyone? Wasn’t the point of making mistakes to learn from them? Sure, a few of hers, like her marriage, had been flagrant disasters, but had it really been all her fault?
There was a cure for the ailment that gripped her. She needed her faceless dream lover who’d appeared to her four years ago at one of the lowest moments of her life, not that things weren’t almost as bad now. In his arms, she belonged. She felt rejuvenated, alive as she rarely felt these days, and most of all she loved and was loved in return. The happiest day of her life should’ve been the one when she’d accepted that she would never find that love in real life, that she could stop searching for it, but instead, the knowledge filled her with both sorrow and dread.
She’d been searching for love and a sense of belonging her entire life. It wasn’t that her mother hadn’t loved her, but every time she’d looked at her watching her, Marina had seen the overwhelming sorrow in her mother’s eyes as she recalled the man she’d loved. Nana had been caring, but had always maintained a distance from her, one that had grown wider after the delusional dementia had changed her, and whatever love she’d had for her had turned to fear and anger.
And then, she’d met Bob. She’d liked him, enjoyed being in his company, but had she loved him? In her own way, she had, but the love she’d felt for him was a far cry from the passion her phantom lover ignited in her. It certainly hadn’t been enough for her ex-husband, a man who needed to be obeyed and adored by one and all. She’d done everything she could to please him, but he’d constantly criticized what he called her half-hearted efforts to be a good wife.
She should never have married him … she knew that now. Even on her wedding day, there had been an emptiness inside her, something missing that she couldn’t identify. Had that been the reason her marriage hadn’t survived the pandemic, her mother’s death, and her second-trimester miscarriage? Had it encouraged her husband’s roving eye, something she’d realized early in their union? A marriage without trust was no marriage at all. Perhaps the loss of her child had been a blessing. Having a baby wouldn’t have changed anything; it might just have made everything worse. But she’d wanted that baby so badly…
And here she was, older, worn out, and alone again. Even her fantasy lover had abandoned her.
She swiped at the tears and sighed. What she needed was a few nights of deep, uninterrupted, restorative sleep. Anyone who said sleep was overrated was a fool. Falling asleep should be automatic. You climbed into bed, pulled up the covers, and closed your eyes. Sure, some nights it took a few minutes to drift off, but recently, what little sleep she managed to get consisted of confusing dreams, long periods of wakefulness, and terrifying nightmares, many of them involving the one thing she feared most—deep water.
Every now and then, she would catch brief glimpses of the comforting green hills she’d first seen in her late teens, the ones with a stone circle in the distance. When she’d first seen them, she’d drawn them and had shown the sketch to her mother. Her mother had praised her imagination, but her eyes had been filled with sorrow. Recently, she’d dreamed that those stones spoke to her in the same ancient language her lover did, but their haunting words made no sense—The time of reckoning is at hand. Return to the land of your ancestors. Find true love. Make the right choice. Free us.
Choice? What choice? It was true that her current life was a mess, but it seemed that all the choices she made backfired—not going to school, staying to look after her grandmother and then her mother, and marrying a man she didn’t love. As for the land of her ancestors, wasn’t that right where she was, or could it be Ireland where her grandmother’s family had originated? Did it matter? The truth was she wasn’t going anywhere.
Her worst nights were filled with vicious nightmares. She would awaken crying, frightened—no terrified—by horrendous creatures reaching for her, ripping at her flesh with claws, and sucking the life out of her. When they’d started, not even Bob had been able to console her. Eventually, he’d stopped trying and had moved to his own room, increasing the void growing between them. Then, she’d lost the baby. He claimed she needed to see a psychiatrist, insinuating that her grandmother’s illness might now be hers. He might well be right since the night terrors continued, including new ones where she was drowning or being buried alive, sensations so real that they stayed with her for hours afterward.
The nightmares wouldn’t be so bad if her lover were there, standing beside her, fighting off the monsters with her, but he never was, and she always awoke cold, wet, and alone. She would give anything to be in his arms again.
Tears trickled from her eyes, ran down the side of her face, and landed on the pillow. She turned onto her side, pulled herself into the fetal position, and prayed to the man who existed only in her dreams.
“Come to me, lover,” she sobbed. “I don’t know what’s keeping you away, what’s keeping us apart, but I need you more than I ever have.”
The nightlight combined with the open curtains cast pale, shadow-filled light in the bedroom as Marina cried herself to sleep. The bed beneath her vanished, replaced by a woven blanket atop soft grass inside a green grotto created by the closely knit trees. Common sense told her this bower existed only within her imagination, but that didn’t matter. It was as real as she needed it to be, and tonight she needed it and him more than ever. The fresh aroma of pine, cedar, and the woodsy scent that was his alone invigorated her. As usual, their love nest was dark and shadowy, but she was never afraid here, especially when he held her as he did now.
She ran her hands along his muscled arms, across his tight shoulders, over his slightly hairy chest, and down his taut abdomen.“I’ve missed you, my love. Without you, loneliness is unbearable.”The words didn’t come from her mouth—they never did. Instead, they formed in her mind, in the ancient language her psyche understood.
She reached up and caressed his face, still shrouded in darkness, as her fingers caught in the hairs of his soft, neatly groomed beard. What would it be like to see his face clearly, to lose herself in the color of his hair and the magic of his eyes? The eyes were the mirror of the soul. She didn’t doubt his feelings for her. They were as real as her own, but since he was only a figment of her imagination, how could they be real?
With her hand against his cheek, she felt his smile.“As I’ve missed you, dearest one,” he answered telepathically. His jaw tensed. “Let’s not waste a minute of the precious time we have. I need you, sweetness. It’s been so long…”
She sighed. “You’re the only good thing in my life. The only time I feel whole is when you’re with me. I know you aren’t real, but if you are a figment of my imagination, don’t leave me again.”
“I’m as real as you are, my love. I will find you, and we will be together once more as we were meant to be. You must believe as I do.” He raised her hand to his chest. “I feel it here. My heart beats for you. We belong together. We are one.”
He rolled her onto her back and fastened his lips on hers. He tasted of mead and honey, and she was soon on her way to a realm of sensations that only he could create. His smooth hands traveled along her bare skin, filling her with unparalleled desire. His tongue plunged into her mouth, battling for supremacy with hers, a battle she happily ceded. This was more than a physical joining. It was a melding of body, heart, and soul. If magic existed, then this was it. It lived and breathed when they were together.
His lips left her mouth and traveled to that delicate spot under her ear, and her entire body tensed, becoming an instrument that only he could play. His hands moved along her torso, setting fires wherever they kneaded and caressed. Desire built inside her, an ache only he could assuage. He moved over her, spread her legs, and plunged into her core, sending them both spiraling into a whirlpool of sensations. Her body exploded into a thousand points of light, filling her with the energy she’d been lacking. She reached up to hold him tightly to her, when suddenly, something ripped him away from her. His pained cry tore through her mind.
Startled, she sat up, her arms and hands automatically seeking to cover her nudity.
A dark, billowy shape filled the entrance to the bower, stealing the heat from the confined space and filling it with the odor of evil, death, and decay. She shivered. The form’s only distinguishable features were its unblinking, burning, crimson eyes, eyes she’d seen before in the depths of her nightmares.
“You are mine. Not his. Not then, not now. Everything that you are, everything that is you, is mine and only mine.”
The angry words, spoken in the ancient language, erupted inside her mind, bringing with them memories that couldn’t possibly be her own and a deep-seated fear she couldn’t shake. The translucent blob slithered closer, a fetid stench unlike anything she’d ever smelled before wafted over her as the darkness gobbled up the dim light. She screamed, scrambling to pull herself away from it.
A brilliant light filled the grotto as if the very skies above it were aflame. The blob thinned, becoming more like smoke than a dark cloud. A gigantic black cat appeared filling the space between her and the miasma, its back arched as it hissed and growled at the intruder. Expecting more cat noises, she jerked as a woman’s voice filled the emptiness.
“Enough, servant of darkness, let her be. The appointed time has not yet arrived. Neither you nor your master has any power here. She still belongs to me as does the vessel that bears her essence. Be gone. When the time comes, they will be one and the choice will be hers, and hers alone.”
An impossibly bright flash of white light, brighter than any fork of lightning she’d ever seen, made Marina cover her eyes. The creature yowled in pain, and forcing herself to look, she watched as the vapor was sucked away like a genie pulled back into its bottle. The grotto vanished. Jumping up, sweat-covered, her heart pounding, Marina glanced around the dimly-lit room.
What the hell was that?
This dream had been different from anything else she’d endured. The birthmark on her left arm, the one that looked a lot like a bruise from fingers gripping her, throbbed. That arm had always been weak, easily bruised and injured. Mom had claimed she had a genetic bone deformity under the birthmark, something she’d inherited from her Irish ancestors. Occasionally, like tonight, it produced a burning ache that could last for hours.
Marina closed her eyes, forcing herself to recall the dream before it faded from her mind as they usually did. Her lover had been in their secret love nest. They’d come together in their usual spectacular manner, but the energy she’d experienced during the mating was dissipating far faster than it usually did.
There had been others in her dream—a large black cat, a woman’s voice, and the angry, evil miasma with burning red eyes. Her gaze fastened on the alarm clock. Midnight. The witching hour Nana would’ve said. It had only been a dream, a new nightmare to plague her sleep. If only her lover were real and not a fantasy. He would hold her in his arms and protect her from the creature of the night, the evil entity with the crimson eyes that burned her very soul.
She got out of bed and went into the bathroom. In the mirror she stared at her reflection. There was something about her eyes—had the color changed? It did occasionally, depending on what she was wearing, but tonight, they seemed blue rather than silvery gray. The dark circles under her eyes gave her a haunted look. And why not? Wasn’t she haunted? Wasn’t she cursed as Nana would’ve said? She blinked. The blue in her eyes was gone. She shook her head. Perhaps she was going crazy. Only time would tell.
“Believe in him, believe in yourself.”
Marina jumped. “Who said that?” She glanced around the small room. It was empty. “Here’s something new. Hearing voices. That can’t be a good thing.”
She poured two ibuprofen tablets into her hand to assuage the ache in her arm, swallowed them, and returned to bed. The sensation of being watched lingered, and she squeezed her eyes shut.
She turned onto her side and allowed the frustrated tears to fall once more. The woman’s words echoed in her mind.
The choice will be hers, and hers alone.
“My choice? As if that’s ever made a difference, but it would be nice to know what I’m supposed to choose,” she blubbered.
Before she could dwell on the conundrum, she fell into a restless sleep. Thank you so much Uvi Poznansky for having me here. I appreciate it.

For those who would like to know more about me and my writing, here is my Contact information:

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The Awakening is available from Amazon in eBook, paperback, and audio formats.

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