Marley Delarose

Hi guys! Today we have the first of several interviews with psychics. If you’ve read BLIND SIGHT, you’ll know I write from time to time about the paranormal. (In Blind Sight, the heroine is a touch psychic who learns that a serial killer is at work in her small town.)

 Not being psychic, I’ve often wondered what it would truly be like.

So I sent out a call on the Romance Writers of America FF & P loop (I think that stand for Futuristic, Fantasy and Paranormal, but this morning I won’t swear to it. LOL.)

There’s a great bunch of women on that loop, and a few very special ladies have stepped up to help me out.

Here’s our first psychic.

Mild mannered mail carrier by day, psychic by night – NOT – Marley Delarose is a native of the D.C. area and a RWA PRO member of FF&P, Nola Stars, DSRA and GRW. A former manager and computer trainer, she is working on a paranormal series and regularly blogs about software programs for writers. Visit her blog at www.marleydelaroseauthor.blogspot.com and her soon to be redesigned website at www.marleydelarose.com.

Wow, Susan, I’ve never discussed this in public before much less on the internet! But it will probably be cathartic.

Hmm, psychic. That word has always held a bad connotation for me, smacking of charlatans, palm readers, fortune tellers and 900 numbers. So, I looked it up on Dictionary.com – ‘relating to or denoting faculties or phenomena that are apparently inexplicable by natural laws, especially involving telepathy, esp or clairvoyance. (of a person) appearing or considered to have powers of telepathy or clairvoyance’ I guess it is what it is, no matter what name you apply to it.

You asked me to describe the curse (no, I’m sorry, you said gift). But that’s how I felt about it for about twenty years. It wasn’t something controllable with obvious results like one of our novels. I knew it was happening but tried to convince myself I was imagining it. If it had just been something small, I could have ignored it.

I was in my twenties the first time, singing in a local club and mid-song I got a – okay I’ve never known what to call it – vision, picture, mind image, waking dream? – so for the sake of argument let’s just call it vision. I know it’s seems so X-Filesy, but there ‘ya go. Anyway, the vision that came to me was of blood dripping down glass doors like those at the front of a retail store. Lots of blood. I didn’t know what to think.

My boyfriend had taken my sports car and planned on returning for me so I was worried that he’d had a wreck or something. Twenty minutes later, one of the local cops in the lounge who was off duty was called to come to a scene at the mall. It seems someone had attacked the manager of a clothing store and one of his employees, killed and robbed them. The police knew something terrible had happened when a patrol car drove through the parking lot and spotted the blood all over the glass front doors.

The next time was close on the heels of that. Our bridge over the River was being painted. As I drove over the bridge one afternoon, my gaze locked with one of the workers and tears came to my eyes, my thought was, ‘oh, it will be so sad when he dies’. The next day the newspaper reported one of the workers fell to his death on the bridge.

Any wonder why I denied these ‘visions’ were real? I mean, what could I do? Who would believe me? And yet I was always left with the feeling that I should have done more. A friend of mine used to say, “Don’t premonit about me!” and my husband would just cluck his tongue and say, sarcastically, I think, “Sometimes you just know.” (He didn’t believe it until one of the only visions I had that identified him, saved him from serious harm three days later.)

Eventually, it turned into a dreamlike ‘knowing’ that someone was going to die. I learned that this unknown person had less than a week. But I usually didn’t know who it was until after it happened and I could put the clues of the ‘vision’ together.

The last time this happened was April 1, 2003, but it wasn’t an April Fools joke. I was watching David Bloom, the NBC reporter who was embedded with the Army during the Gulf War, and I had a similar reaction to the bridge incident. But what was I to do? Call NBC? Right. Five days later, I remember feeling so terribly guilty that I hadn’t done anything.

When the guilt got to be too much, I asked a preacher about them. He said, it was of the devil. But one of the wiser women in the church said, “Just pray for whoever it is. It’s all you can do.” His attitude is one of the prime reasons I never talked about it before but I know he was wrong.

You asked if I can ‘reach for it. No, but I know I sometimes shut it off, at least the dire premonitions. Being able to tell that a Highway patrolman is about to top the hill when you’re doing 67 or when a deer is about to run in front of your car are welcome ‘hunches’, lol. Here’s something I found interesting. I took the Myers-Briggs personality test several years ago and my personality said it was 75% more likely to be psychic, so maybe the level of ‘ability’ is linked to intuitive personalities.

These days, I’ve accepted the mystical aspects of my life and the world and I welcome any opportunity to help, even if all I can do is send out my prayers and positive energy.