Mr. Chuckles bumps into author Lorraine Devon Wilke while stirring the Wizard's Cauldron

The Wizard speaks:

California's Lorraine Devon Wilke has packed an awful lot into her life and she shows no signs of stopping

The third-eldest sibling of eleven, she packed her bags and hit the road as a travelling rock singer in the big-haired eighties, carrying her camera with her, before settling down to marriage, motherhood and a life of popular bloggery, including her current stint working for the Huffington Post.

Her list of past achievements and current work is quite staggering - and she's a delightful person too!

Lorraine is now a novelist writing (in Indie terms), that quiet, shy and vulnerable industry step-child Literary Fiction. 

The genre the 101 blogs tell you to avoid like the plague and yet, it's the one area where a reader can find really, really decent writing if you look for it. And Lorraine is a really, really decent writer.

I was introduced to her by Brenda Perlin and received both her short story and novel. The former is a cracking read, but the latter - I am twelve chapters in and I am engrossed is possibly a great book. I had to buy it in paperback. 

It's a sweeping, sassy, cynical, redeeming, tricky "Terms of Endearment" type family saga - remember those? - with dialogue so acute you can experience it, a real sense of place, and characters you can see and hear as if they were next to you, the novel deserves a wider audience. 

I picked up the Wizphone and interrupted Lorraine while she tapped out her latest blog on
a sunkissed veranda overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Here's what she had to say.

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