“I’m a muse, not a NASA engineer.”
Lisa to Jack, in Muse Delusion by T.K. Flor

Finally, the long anticipated novel, Muse Delusion, is published!!!
(OK, long-anticipated, and written, by me).

The initial idea for the novel emerged during a family vacation in the spring break of 2015. I could practically see in my mind’s eye the members of the Hopeville Murder Club finding an unresponsive woman in an empty house, what they dreaded, and how they responded. The guy this novel is dedicated to liked the idea. He suggested that I write a lighthearted story. I wanted it to be a love story about two people who seemingly have nothing in common, a contemporary tale with a touch of Greek mythology. Five years later, the story can be distilled to this:

A lost manuscript. A woman determined to find it. A man who finds her irresistible.

In NYC, freelance consultant Jack Ellis – still grieving after the death of his beloved grandmother – finally starts to put his life back together. But his attempts to leave the past behind unravel when he meets Lisa, a storybook-beautiful woman who claims she came for a manuscript that Jack’s grandmother promised her. A manuscript Jack has never heard of.

Allured by her beauty and drawn to her impetuous personality, Jack joins Lisa in a search that takes them on an unexpected journey, casting the people he thought he knew in a whole new light.

There’s no doubt Lisa is a disruptive force, yet Jack cannot disentangle himself from her quirky and potentially dangerous intrusion. Lisa is all charm when it suits her, but can Jack accept her mysterious mental powers and embrace a woman who believes she is actually a muse from Mount Olympus?

Muse Delusion begins with: “Was this worth it?” – a question Jack asked himself “as he stacked the papers into the water-stained manila envelope.” The answer, however, isn’t so simple.

“The value of the manuscript, he had learned during the search for it, was subjective. His grandmother had thought the world of it. He would not go that far, but the dedication to his late mother made it personal. Unfortunately, it was too late to ask either of them which parts were true and which were fiction.

His jeans were still damp. The t-shirt had dried during the night and now wafted a pungent body odor. With a bit of grooming, he could look presentable at the border crossing, but forging ahead had its own risks. A reasonable man would drive back home and carefully weigh his next move. And so, Jack thought, would a coward. If he turned back, he would never know whether what he had read was even possible.”

It took me years to figure out what Jack discovered, who Lisa really is and why it’s so important to her to find the lost manuscript. It took more time to forge all the revelations into a love story I’m satisfied with. My part is done. If you’re curious about what happened, you can find Muse Delusion here.