I tweeted a new site about magic recently, but I want to discuss it at more length today: The site is The Magic Broadcast , where you can read about professional magicians and their events and listen to great interviews with top magicians.
Now why, you may ask, would a children's writer devote a post to a magic site? Well, in my first book, The Fourth Wish , a key character is a professional magician whose magic goes all wrong when a wish enables him to do the real thing. I'm finishing up two other books, a mystery and a historical novel, and then I've planned three sequels to The Fourth Wish -- so I need to understand my magician, The Great Mondo (aka "Pete Garrity") in more depth.
The Magic Broadcast offers me (and any writer who has a magician as a character in a WIP) a golden opportunity to listen in on a professional magician's thinking about the profession or follow a professional magician's life as he or she prepares for bookings or encounters problems during performances. It's a fun way to research, and it's quite enlightening.
