Wattpad Malaysia proudly presents BrittanieCharmintine, a Wattys winner, a featured writer, a Wattpad star, a successful published author and she's coming here all the way from Hollywood to give you a sneak peek of her future work. That is so exciting, isn't it? 

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Hi Wattpad Malaysia! 

Welcome to the wonderful world of Wattpad. So happy you're here. I'm Brittanie Charmintine on Wattpad and Debra Goelz in real life. Here is my official bio:

Debra Goelz is a refugee from Hollywood where she served for ten years as a financial executive for such companies as Universal Pictures, Dino de Laurentiis and Jim Henson Productions. Her performing career began and ended with her puppeteering a chicken during the closing scene in Muppet Treasure Island. After garnering over 9 million on-line reads, her award-winning YA fantasy, Mermaids and the Vampires Who Love Them, was published by Hachette audio in October, 2017. She lives in a magical redwood forest in rural Marin County.

This is an excerpt from a work in progress of mine called "Magic Sucks." It's like The Princess Diaries, except instead of the heroine discovering she's the princess of a small European country, she discovers she is destined to be the next evil queen.

Magic Sucks and Other Facts of Life

How Witches are Made

Chapter 1

Once upon a time we created a new evil queen.

Not many humans know witches and warlocks come into being through magic, the secret being heavily guarded by our community mostly for PR purposes—it's best for all involved that humans think we are born in the usual way. Throughout history, the word "witch" doesn't conjure many happy thoughts. Except for Glinda, who everyone knows isn't even real.

But you seem trustworthy, so I shall tell you the tale of that night, fourteen years ago, beneath a full moon when the queen gathered us, her 13 favorite Minions—all of us handsome and virile by the way, with dark eyes and hair and sculpted chins and torsos—in a clearing in the Forbidden Forest, the freezing fog clinging to our ankles. This forest is where the queen grows her poisonous apples, dragons slumber in nearby caves, and fairies lurk beneath the rowan trees.

There is a lot of lurking in forbidden forests.

I generally try to stay out of the place, but when the queen says "jump" we say "how high?" So instead of being at the Queen's creepy, drafty old castle, we're in the creepy drafty forest. A bat just buzzed past my ear.

There are also a lot of bats.

That night we stood in itchy purple robes, sweating beneath our pointy hats, around a bubbling cauldron, its dark stench of sulfurous smoke filling the air. My lungs burned and my throat was dry. The sunglasses we had to wear did little to protect our eyes from the toxic smoke.

Allow me to tell you of our queen.

Petronella Grimshaw has been the evil queen for the last 500 years. Do not laugh at her name. She was created in the days when Petronella was like Brittany or Megan is today. No one teases her. No one would dare! Because our queen is one of the darkest witches ever made. You know all that field blighting, freak snowstorms in July, and the sudden onset of jeggings? Those all happened because Petronella was having a bad day.

She was still beautiful when she was a young witch of 400 or so. And now, although she's managed to keep away most of the warts or goiters, the closer she gets to the end of her 500-year term as queen, she looks kind of like your Betty White in a suit. Like a sweet, doddering grandma.

Irony.

Petronella's term ended in exactly fourteen years. So that night our goal was to make her replacement. The new queen would then rule for 500 years, bound by old and powerful magic.

500 years seemed quite a commitment, but no one asked me. Oh, and if we weren't successful in creating a new queen tonight, Petronella would be automatically signed up for another 500-year stint. Because this was not a workable option for our queen, who wanted to hook up with some mysterious "love of her life" she had had to leave when she took office, there were to be no glitches. It had to work. Period.

If it didn't, I could not even imagine the tantrum. You, the humans of earth, would be beset by a deluge of locusts or acid rain or telemarketers. We, her Minions, well ... let's just say we'd all have to learn to croak and enjoy a fly-based cuisine.

The Head Minion, Roberto, read items from the queen-making recipe in a Grimoire older than time. Eye of newt. Puppy dog tails. Snails. Dinosaur kale, which let's face it is better in a cauldron than on a plate. On and on. We Minions threw the items into the brew in the correct order.

Then came the important part.

The magic.

According to the official recipe, a queen was made from a balance of dark and light magic from six of the most powerful witches and warlocks of all time. Back at the castle, the queen had a four-story, football field-sized warehouse stacked from floor to ceiling with urns containing the magic of all sorts of beings—all catalogued by strength, degree of darkness, type of creature, etc.

Taking no chances, Petronella had ordered us to select only urns from the darkest witches and warlocks ever to exist. Plus a few special ingredients—essence of dragon, dark fairy dust, troll, werewolf, a couple of those child-eating, philandering Titans, and more.

Petronella held her breath as she poured the last urn, consisting of her own magic, into the cauldron. The inky contents disappeared into the thick black swirl of liquid.

Screams rented the air.

Good sign.

"Calvin, please," said the queen.

This was my one job. Remove the new queen from the cauldron, wipe her off, swaddle her in the royal baby blanket, which had been spun by the Queen's fleet of poisonous spiders, and present her to Petronella.

I rolled up my billowy sleeves and plunged my arms into the hot, tar-like liquid. I bit back a scream. My arms felt as if it they were being eaten by acid. I was shocked that they were still encased in skin, as I pulled a wrinkly babe from the cauldron.

I did my clean up and roll up of the child and presented her to our monarch.

"Let us have a look, shall we?" said Petronella.

She muttered some strange incantations.

Prodded the toes.

"Show us your magic!" the queen demanded, shaking the infant so hard she began to scream. I made a move to wrench the child out of the queen's arms, but Bob held me back. "Look, I'll take anything, A minor earthquake. A meteor strike. I'd even be happy with the teensiest flood."

Nothing happened other than the wind whipping around the cauldron, guttering out the fire.

Boils broke out on the queen's face. Steam poured out of her nostrils.

"Throw her back into the pot," Petronella ordered, handing me back the child.

"Are you sure o' wise queen?" I said. Look, I know I shouldn't have questioned her, but this was an innocent baby we were talking about here. The child couldn't help not having any powers. "Perhaps her magic will come in later."

"Let me tell you this only once, Calvin" Petronella spat. "You never, ever question me. Get it? This time I'll let you keep your human form. Mostly because you can really rock those sunglasses. But one more outburst and you will be a toad for life without the possibility of a kiss turning you back."

I gulped. "Yes, your highness."

"No one understands my burden!"

Later I discovered that Petronella, in her temper that night, caused several potato crops to blight. She hated the tuberous vegetables. An earthquake or two in the Antarctic, because penguins. Brought back disco for an encore.

"Clean this up," Petronella barked, flicking a hand dismissively at the grove, "then return to the castle." She snatched the baby from my arms, mounted her broomstick, and rocketed from the grove.

Relief poured through me. The child would be given a chance. Hopefully I was right and her powers would emerge eventually.

The Minions organized the supplies.

I dragged the cauldron to a rowan tree, and poured out the contents, shocked at what slid out from beneath the sludge. I piled leaves over it and helped my brethren with the rest of the cleanup.

Once we finished packing the vials, canisters, urns, and animal parts into boxes, making sure they were properly labeled, we magicked them back to the warehouse. I waited for my fellow Minions to take to the sky on their broomsticks. They whooped and hollered like the young warlocks they were—reveling in a brief moment of freedom before they'd return to the Queen's realm and take up their drudgery.

I threw my leg over my broomstick as I said goodbye to the last remaining warlock, pretending to leave. Once they were all out of sight, I set down my broom and rushed to the rowan tree, where a tiny red-haired baby witch watched me with reptilian eyes. Unnatural. Bright green and when she blinked, the lids moved sideways. The earth shook as a legion of slimy monsters with red eyes and fangs emerged, flapping and slithering around the child.

I thought about what I should do. It was obvious that if I gave the child to Petronella, I would be rewarded. But what might happen to the poor thing if I did. Petronella would make a horrible mother. And what would become of the other child? It took all of thirty seconds for me to make my decision, even though it would mean hiding from the evil queen forever. I knew what I had to do.

"It's okay," I said to the tiny witch. "I won't let anyone hurt you."

With the monsters standing guard, I knelt beside the girl, who never took her unnatural eyes off of me. I bundled her into the folds of my robe and set out on my broomstick for Cousin Nigel's house in Southern California. Nigel and Paul had always longed to be parents. And me? I never wanted to be a cat, but not everyone gets a happy ending.

Thank you for reading.

Enter Debbie's giveaway to stand a chance to win Mermaids and the Vampires Who Love Them audiobook.

Thank you so much for giving us such an enthralling sneak peek, Debbie. We are indeed very lucky to have you here.    

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If you have any questions regarding magic, mermaids, aliens, vampires or other interesting topics, feel free to ask Debbie in the comment below.