Bob Olson is a former skeptic and private eye who has investigated life after death for 27 years. He shares meaningful stories to expand minds, comfort grief, and uplift souls. He’s the host of Afterlife TV, author of Answers About The Afterlife and The Magic Mala, and founder of the directory of credible psychics, mediums, animal communicators, and intuitive practitioners, BestPsychicDirectory.com.
In May of 2014, my book Answers About the Afterlife was published. I spent the next year promoting it. In addition to being interviewed on radio shows and podcasts to promote the book, I was working on Afterlife TV, Best Psychic Directory, and investigating life after death. Consequently, even though I felt ready to write my next book in May 2015, I wasn’t inspired to write anything new. In hindsight, it’s not surprising I felt this way. I hadn’t had any time to rest and rejuvenate.
I tried writing a few books out of sheer willpower. After ten or twenty pages, the ideas fell flat. Eventually, I surrendered to the notion that the timing wasn’t right. It was late spring, so I hoped inspiration would come over the summer. It didn’t. I decided to let the autumn leaves be my muse. The leaves turned color and eventually fell from the branches without a single twinge of inspiration for me. Before I knew it, it was May again—2016.
That’s when Melissa gave me a new keyboard for my birthday. The Bluetooth keyboard was designed to look and feel like an old typewriter from the 1930s. It even had that clickety-clack sound when I typed the round, concave keys.
After setting up the keyboard, I wanted to play with it. I decided to write a fictional story based on my experiences after getting my first mala beads. I had absolutely no intention of sharing this with anyone. I genuinely just wanted to play with my new keyboard.
The moment I began to type, something unexpected happened. A story began to unfold inside my head. I don’t know where the story came from. It was based on my experiences, but I quickly recognized that it led in a different direction. It began with one character named Robby, who found some mala beads stored away in his attic.
I was typing frantically because the words were flowing through my brain, and my fingers were struggling to keep up with the fast pace at which the words and images were being revealed. From another room, Melissa could hear a symphony unfolding, the rhythmic beat of clickety-clack keys. I got so lost in the story that hours went by like minutes.