Where Cosmic Debt Came From

Here’s another little story about where this series came from.

My dad loved the TV show “My Name Is Earl”. That was his show. If you don’t remember it, it was a comedy about a guy who makes a list of every bad thing he’s ever done, and then spends his life crossing things off, trying to make it right with karma.

Me? I sort of tolerated it. It wasn’t my kind of show. But my dad would sit there laughing at it, and I’d be half-watching from the other room, and even then I remember thinking, that’s actually a really good idea. A guy who owes the universe, paying it back one thing at a time.

I never forgot it.

Years went by. I kept waiting for somebody to make something else like that. Nobody really did. And the idea just sat there in the back of my head, quietly waiting for me to do something with it.

Fifteen years later, eventually it turned into Marisol.

She’s not a guy with a list. She’s a 900-year-old witch with a cosmic debt so old and so tangled that even she doesn’t know the full number. Every full moon, the universe hands her an assignment. Every assignment pays down a little bit of what she owes. Nobody will tell her how much is left. She just keeps going.

Earl had karma and a list. Marisol has cosmic debt and endless assignments.

And instead of a brother riding along, she has Tibby, her cat. He’s been with her for centuries. He’s seen every assignment. He complains about all of them. He loves her anyway, in that way cats do, where they’d never admit it out loud.

My dad never knew his favorite show would end up tucked inside a book series about a witch and her cat. But it’s in there. Every time Marisol gets pulled into some new mess, there’s a little bit of my dad laughing at the TV, echoing each and every time.

And every time I write another Marisol story, it’s always my honor to do so.

Funny how that works.

P.S. If you want to know how Marisol got into all this debt in the first place, I wrote that story too. It’s called How I Got Into Massive Magical Debt, and How I’m Slowly Paying It Off, and it’s free right here: [LINK]

Much Love,

Dennis