The son of a successful portrait photographer, John Husband grew up in the hard coal region of Northeastern Pennsylvania.  His maternal grandfather, a banker, built homes for each of his four grown children on his 110-acre farm. John, his siblings and cousins thus fell heir to an extraordinary summertime farm-life experience.

After high school, John studied art and later journalism at Syracuse University.  He then lived for a time in a brownstone in Manhattan from which he launched a varied career as a counter intelligence agent, newspaper reporter, advertising agency creative staffer, Washington news bureau chief, and entrepreneur. The father of four grown children, he resides in suburban Washington, DC.

Asked where he got the first seed of an idea for Maggie Again, John had this to say:

As a youngster fascinated by Agatha Christie mysteries, I discovered her secret.  She didn’t start plotting the book at the beginning and go to the end as I did when I read it.  She started somewhere near the end and moved back and forth.

So I tried it.  I plotted three books in my head, a murder mystery, a ghost story, and a time-warp story (Maggie Again.)

I used to enjoy regaling friends with my original plots until the day a friend admonished me to get on with it.  In the next eight days, hardly looking up from my keyboard, I wrote the first draft of Maggie Again.  That first go-through was only 114 double-spaced, typewritten pages – less than half its eventual length.

Then I expanded it in increments, adding, refining, researching, and developing the book until I was totally satisfied with it.  That took a while.

The first, smallest seed of an idea for Maggie Again came to me one restless night in a dream.

 I was sleeping on an uncomfortable cot with the radio playing some sort of stringed instrument, perhaps a banjo or a zither.  I dreamed some teenagers on a farm were frolicking about when they realized they didn’t know where one of the girls had gone.  Their search eventually took them to New York City where they found her.  At least they thought it was her.  She wasn’t a teenager any more but an elderly woman.

Then I woke up and turned off the radio.

If you read the book, you’ll discover the significance of the music – and a whole lot more.