Magic
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This page is devoted to the magic behind the books. By that I mean background information. I often deal with paranormal/supernatural elements in my books, so that's some of the magic that will get explanation here. But there will also be some historical or other pertinent information for those seeking more. In some cases I will also share what inspired me to write the book, or what I was thinking when I included certain aspects. BEWARE! There will be spoilers on this page, so if you haven't read the book many things you read here will give away important information. You will also find more complete information starting with the MacDonell trilogy. The research for those books is fresh in my mind, whereas I researched the others years ago and tend to forget things. Also, I will update entries as I remember things, or if someone writes with a question .
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I wrote this book so long ago that it's really hard for me to remember everything I put in it and I generally avoid rereading my own books after they're published. As there is no real basis for the time-travel device I have nothing to add about that here. However, I used quite a few real historical personages, and I portrayed them as accurately as I could. At the time I was particularly enamored with the earls of Bothwell. There is a flashback where Brenden is imprisoned with James Hepburn (Bothwell) at Dragsholm in Denmark. Bothwell was imprisoned for more than 10 years at various Danish prisons, but eventually died (allegedly) insane and alone in the dungeons of Dragsholm. It is also said he was chained to a pillar in the center of his prison and wore a semicircle in the ground around it with his pacing. This is what inspired the entire book. I was fascinated by Bothwell and found his sad lonely end disturbing. Whether he and Mary loved each other (and I like to believe they did) will never be known--but *I* loved him and hated the thought of him dying in such a horrible manner. So I gave him a companion at the end. The flashback was one of the first things I wrote and I built the rest of the book around it. If you're a writer you'll understand what happened. It was my first book, I knew nothing about writing and I floundered about with my early chapters. It wasn't until I wrote that flashback that the rest of the book came together. Why? Because the flashback provided Brenden's motivation. His actions drove the entire book, but until I wrote the flashback, I didn't know why. Once I understood, everything else fell into place. |
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This is my only non-paranormal book, though it has occult overtones to it, and until the last two books of the MacDonell trilogy, the hardest book I'd ever written. What is interesting about this book is Francis Stewart--another earl of Bothwell, James's nephew. He was alleged to be a wizard (the Devil of North Berwick) and it does seem he was involved in something. He was in line for the throne and so had reason for wanting King James dead. Though never found guilty of the charges brought against him, he was eventually forced to flee the country in 1595. What inspired me to write a book including him (and I've written another in which he is a secondary character, but FOREVER is the only one published) is a letter written by Francis to an avowed persecutor of witches some years before his death (1624), taken from Godfrey Watson's Bothwell and the Witches: "You Christians are treacherous and obstinate. When you have any strong desire, you depart from your master and have recourse to me: but when your desire is accomplished, you turn your back on me as your enemy, and you go back to your God, who being benign and merciful, pardons you and receives you willingly. But make me a promise, written and signed by your own hand, that you voluntarily renounce Christ and your Baptism and promise that you will adhere and be with me to the day of judgement, and after that you will rejoice yourself with me to suffer eternal pains; and I will accomplish your desire." Something was going on there! Since he was not hero material, I built a story around him. And then another (never published). In retrospect (and boy have I had a lot of retrospective insights recently) I probably should have written some straight historical fiction about him. |
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I'm going to do the Bloodstone trilogy collectively since most of the time I don't even remember character NAMES from these books. I wrote them so fast (very short deadlines so they could be published within 6 months of each other) that the whole thing is a blur to me. However, I do remember the premise--the search for the Clachan Fala, a bloodstone. This I actually found in the legends of King Arthur. The scabbard of Excalibur was said to be set with jewels, and also to protect the wearer from harm--they will not fall in battle. Excalibur was stolen from Arthur by Morgan le Fay. Though it was recovered, the scabbard was lost forever. The "blood stone" in my trilogy was taken from Excalibur's scabbard and still retained the protective powers. |
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Since I cannot post anything about the individual books of the trilogy until the books are actually out (too many possible spoilers), I have decided to write something about the trilogy as a whole. This is a note about the witchcraze in 1590s Scotland, which is the social and political background of the trilogy. Beginning in June 2005, I will post info on each individual book as it's released. The witchcraze in Scotland really happened. Ever since I wrote FOREVER, MY LADY I've wanted to do something more with it. It nagged at me until finally I wrote a trilogy about it. Although I used many books for background research, my primary source was Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland: James VI's Demonology and The North Berwick Witches by Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts. Before the 1590's Scotland was no stranger to burning witches, but a unique set of events led up to a sort of mass hysteria. When he was young, King James VI (James I of England in 1603) was rather paranoid about witches. I've read varying theories as to why, but I don't suppose anyone really knows some 400 years removed. He did consider himself such an expert on the subject he wrote a book on it, DEMONOLOGY. In 1589 James was married by proxy to Anne of Denmark, but his bride was unable to join him in Scotland because her ship had been beset by storms. At about the same time Scotland also experienced some storms that caused fatalities. James set out to personally fetch his bride to Scotland and again encountered storms. After their return, several witches were tried and executed in Denmark for causing the storms that prevented Anne from joining her royal husband. After their return in 1590, a series of witchcraft trials began in the Lowlands that eventually culminated in confessions of conspiring to kill the king through witchcraft (raising the afore mentioned storms, pacts with the devil, wax images, etc.). The king's cousin, James Hepburn Stewart, 5th earl of Bothwell, an arrogant, intelligent, and rash man, was also accused of witchcraft. It is said he was in line for the throne and with James now married and expected to begin siring heirs, Bothwell's possible succession was threatened, so apparently he did have motive. Eventually even James became involved in the examinations, interviewing accused witches himself. In the end some 70 people were accused. But this was just the beginning. The sheer amount of trials caused the government to rethink its witchcraft laws. In 1592 the privy council established royal and kirk commissions to distribute standing commissions in localities for prosecuting witches. Basically this was a license for anyone to indiscriminately hunt, torture, try, and execute witches. For the next five years that is exactly what happened. The abuses of the commissions was such that in 1597 it was finally rescinded but not before many people had been tortured and executed (There are no exact figures on how many people died as a result of this edict, but it's believed to be well over 1000, and some say even more than that.). As the MacDonell Sisters trilogy takes place in 1597 before the edict is rescinded, this is the state of the nation during the trilogy.
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The inspiration for this book, believe it or not, was the X-Files. I am a huge X-Files fan (not counting the final two seasons...) and when I started this book I was watching the entire series on DVD. I started thinking about why I love the show so much and of course it came back to the characters. Mulder and Scully. I decided I wanted to base characters on them. So Sir Philip is inspired by Mulder. I wanted to create a character that was so deeply affected by a single formative event that he spent his whole life trying to make it right. Survivor guilt of a sort, I suppose. Mulder's emotional development is arrested in that moment when his sister was taken and in many ways he was never able to move forward emotionally. Of course, for Sir Philip to be heroic he couldn't be as immature as Mulder often is, but still, in many ways they are similar (note the words "similar" and "inspired"-please, no emails on how different they are, I wasn't trying to create a Mulder clone). The other thing I'll mention about this book is Isobel's witchcraft. In all three books I've used fairly well known psychic phenomena and labeled it as witchcraft. This is what I believe essentially happened (in addition to complete innocents burning)-witches were often what we would call psychics and folks with paranormal abilities. Isobel's ability is psychometry. Webster's defines psychometry as "divination of facts concerning an object or its owner through contact with or proximity to the object," and this is what Isobel does. |
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I really like Nicholas. At the time of this writing, he's probably my favorite of the heroes I've written. That really doesn't have anything to do with anything, I just thought I'd mention it. (o: I like Gillian a lot, too-she's not the typical spunky heroine, but one who has a lot of self-doubt and some self-esteem issues. Pretty typical of a lot of women and I enjoyed writing her. I labeled her as a necromancer in this book, but mostly because there was really no word at the time for what she did. She was what we would call a medium. The definition of necromancy is: "conjuration of the spirits of the dead for purposes of magically revealing the future or influencing the course of events." Which isn't exactly what Gillian does-but it is how her contemporaries would perceive what she does. The more research I did on ghosts and life after death, the more vast the wealth of individual experiences became. So I really felt free to do just about anything in regards to her experiences. There is more than one type of "haunting." A residual haunting, which is like watching a video. It is the essence or energy of an event imprinted on a place and it replays over and over again, but it is not actually the spirit itself. The other kind is an actual ghost or spirit haunting, in which apparitions, noises, and interactions with the living occur. I used both of these in this book, as well as other ghostly phenomena such as automatic writing. The other interesting thing about this book is Nicholas's first wife, Catriona. I confess to going through a morbid period during the writing of this book-I was fascinated with serial killers. I must have read a dozen books on the subject. Catriona is based on a real female serial killer. Jane Toppan dubbed "The Jolly Psychopath" was an Angel of Death in nineteenth century America. She poisoned her patients and derived sexual pleasure from crawling into bed with them and holding them during their death-throes.
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There is a lot going on in this book. First I'll start with character. Back to the X-files theme I mentioned in My Wicked Highlander-I wanted to base some characters on two of my favorite television characters. So here we find Rose, based on Scully. Basing a character on Scully was a lot harder than basing a character on Mulder because some of what makes Scully such a great character are modern aspects that wouldn't translate well to sixteenth-century Scotland. But nevertheless I was determined to make a go of it. I tried to make her feminine, clever, no-nonsense, strong, and professional about her work and yet still have vulnerabilities. In the end, she's my favorite heroine of all the ones I've written. The aural healing. This was a real challenge. Somehow writing all kinds of magiks felt believable to me, but when it came to miracle healing, it kept feeling unbelievable. I don't know why it felt anymore unbelievable than all the other types of phenomena I've written about, but it did, hence the great detail about much of it. I guess I was trying to convince myself half the time. (o: I used aural healing as a basis for the magic, but extrapolated from there. And last we have Roderick and his use of the incubus/succubus. Although I added my own touches to Alan MacDonell's experiences, they derive from an experience known as "hagging." This is where a person wakes in the night with a crushing weight on their chest, paralyzed. The original name for this however is "nightmare." The word nightmare itself comes from the Anglo-Saxon nicht (night) and mara (incubus or succubus) (Llewellyn Encyclopedia). |
