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I had a wonderful time working with Maria Zannini on her finaling entry – MISTRESS OF THE STONE. She had a sexy, paranormal historical story and she worked hard to take my suggestions about how to improve and strengthen the various challenges for each round. Read on and get to know her better. . . and I hope you’ll support her by voting for her entry MISTRESS OF THE STONE

UNSTOPPABLE

When I started Mistress Of The Stone I had been in a slump. I was recovering from four very painful eye surgeries that had left me blind or near blind for weeks at a time.

Miserable didn’t begin to describe how I felt. What made it worse is that I wasn’t used to being so vulnerable and dependent on others.

Samhain Publishing had just published Touch Of Fire, and True Believers (released last week from Carina Press) was in editing. I had my hands full with things to do, but no way to do them.

I was helpless in the beginning. All I could do was listen to my husband as he read emails to me from my editor. He acted as my secretary and answered my correspondence.

Even though I knew I should have been resting my eyes, whenever he left me alone, I found my way to the keyboard. I couldn’t edit, but I could still write. I was too antsy to wait for my eyes to heal completely.

I was unstoppable.

My husband prefers the term, pigheaded. (And he’s probably right.)

Every morning I put on my darkest sunglasses and sat in front of my keyboard. There was no point in looking at the screen. It was too bright for me and even giant letters looked like a child’s scribbling. So I opened a blank page in Word then shut off the screen. Like a blind pianist, I found my home keys and started typing.

Being trapped in my dark world, I was hungry for adventure. Something out of the ordinary. Something fresh and a little wicked.

In that moment, Luísa Tavares was born. She was young and wild. But she was also loyal to her family and to her pirate crew. She understood what it meant to lose the people she loved and she wasn’t going to let it happen again, not to Papa. Luísa would do anything to save her father from the gallows. Anything.

Like me, Luísa was unstoppable—and maybe a little pigheaded as well.

I am thrilled to have finaled in Kensington Brava’s Writing With The Stars. You can read the ‘call story’ here in all its embarrassing detail.

Mistress Of The Stone was a story borne of plain ornery pigheadedness, from a writer unwilling to let something as trivial as blindness stop her from writing.

What sort of things make you unstoppable? What won’t you ever give up?

Bio: Maria Zannini is a finalist in the Writing With The Stars contest. Her entry is called MISTRESS OF THE STONE, a 16th century pirate story with ghosts, ghouls and shifters. Read the excerpts and vote for the MISTRESS.

Follow Maria on her blog, Facebook and Twitter where she talks about her three loves, homesteading, writing, and dogs.