The main character in my short story Spirit Wolf is a Mage. I don’t know why she’s a Mage as opposed to a witch or some other kind of magic user. I’m still working out what a Mage actually is.

Magic User
The clearest notion I had was that Melissa is some kind of magic user. She’s not a witch if you use the definition of witch as a magic user who approaches magic from a religious point of view. My Mages are more like physicists they work by manipulating the physical world on the molecular level. They play with energy and matter as though they were one and the same.

Secret Society
The other thing I know about Mages is that they maintain a separate society that exists within the ordinary human world. They have internet connections and ipods, but they also use magic as a tool for everyday living. They don’t have a democratic “government” the most powerful have formed a loose confederation that keeps the rest in line. There main task is to keep the existence of Mages secret. The penalty for “piercing the veil,” as they call it, is pretty drastic.

That is the kernel of what I know about the Mages. I can’t help but wonder what it must be like to have astonishing abilities, yet be forced to keep them a secret? I'd love to hear from people in the comments who are part of a "secret" segment of society.  How do you keep the secret?

The Dire Wolf is my inspiration this week. I kept running into images of them. The Shifters of Lowell Island are the last remnant of the Dire Wolf in the world. Click here to see picture of what Dire Wolves might have looked like.

The Secret History of Lowell Island

There was an ancient painting in a cave on Lowell Island, the paintings were ancient when the first of the Algonquin peoples settled the islands of Long Island Sound. 

The cave drawings seem to show a changing of the guard after the last ice age. The time of the mega-fauna had come to an end and most of the larger carnivores died off when the last of their prey animals went extinct. This die-off included the Dire wolves. That’s the temporal explanation of the scenes depicted in the cave. 

There is another story depicted in the cave paintings that predates human habitation of North America. The paintings depict battles between wolves huge, short-faced Dire Wolves and smaller more nimble modern wolves. As the pictures progress, the Dire Wolves seem to lose territory until they were pushed right off the North American mainland, and the final picture is of three Dire Wolves on an island. 

In a universe where matter can’t be created or destroyed, it seems that the energy of the wolves may have remained behind on Lowell Island after the death of the last pack.

The Tribe v. Individuals

I’m diving back in to my novel, Ravening. I got kind of lost in the plotting when I was working on it.  My outline had a lot of holes that really came back to bite me when I decided to try to write around them. I ended up putting it aside in favor of a much more linear non-fiction project.

It took me a long time to figure out what the story was really about. To me, the main theme is belonging. How does some one find their tribe?

I come from an immigrant background. I was born in Panama, my parents brought me to the US when I was a little girl. The funny thing is, that looking back in my own family history, we seem to have been on a generations long journey. My grandparents on both sides immigrated to Panama from other places. Then, a generation later, my parents came to the US.

The search for belonging forces us to make choices. There’s always pressure to join or reject the various tribes that we meet in order to define ourselves. We are all members of multiple tribes, some are more hermetic than others, but all tribes have initiations, markings, and codes of conduct for their members.

Tribes can be based on ethnicity, occupation, religion, location, or any combination of arbitrary criteria we can come up with. The power of the tribe, I think, is their ability to control the behavior of the membership.

 Although most of us try to fit into our tribes as best we can, there are always those who, for what ever reason, never quite fit in. I’ve always been fascinated by the outsiders. Outsiders shake up the established order and by their very existence threaten the power of tribes. If the tribe maintains that their way of life is the only valid one then how do outsiders not just survive, but go on to live long and happy lives.

I think that’s the root of why some groups are so tightly closed against outsiders. They worry that some of their members will see others living just fine and abandon the tribe. That threatens the power structure and that is not allowed.

Furthermore, I think we tend to have the sneaking suspicion that if a loner can survive without the tribe they must have some secret source of power they can tap into, a notion  that makes every levels of the hierarchy uneasy.


Tribes have the power to banish non-conformists or deny membership altogether. Some tribes demand absolute conformity in nearly every aspect of the lives of their members. Others seem to tolerate more individuality on the surface, but will crack down if the power structure is threatened.

What would happen if no one feared banishment from their tribe. I think most tribes would evaporate rather quickly. The power of tribes over people is an idea that’s just nagging me right now.

Our Mysterious Archipelago--New York City

                  It always seems funny to me that New Yorkers don’t see themselves as islanders. When in reality, except for Bronx residents, most people who live in the five boroughs live on islands. New York city is part of an archipelago that contains hundreds of islands, some very small, most uninhabited.

Each Island has it’s own unique history. Last year I was inspired by Gardener’s Island, owned by the same family for the last 450 years, the island a largely undeveloped private estate ruled by what may be the United States’ only titled family, the Lyons. The head of the family actually bears the title “Lord of the Manor.” How cool is that?

The island’s unique history inspired the setting of my shape shifter stories. For me, shape shifting predator’s need room to roam. Besides, I wanted my shifters to build their own society and live by their own rules. They wouldn’t be able to do that while still maintaining a human masquerade in a city or even a small town living side by side with humans.

Last week I learned about Execution Rocks Island, with a name like that how could I resist digging a little deeper? This eerie little island in Long Island Sound is home to Execution Rocks Lighthouse and a couple of grisly tales. According to local legend, British soldiers may have moved executions to this island to avoid further inflaming the populace. They were said to have chained the condemned to the rocks and let the tide drown them, even going so far as to leave the bodies so that the next batch of unfortunates could see their fate before it was their turn. A more likely story is that the rocks and nearby reef were a shipping hazard and “executed” a number of ships?

There’s even a serial killer associated with Execution Rocks Island. In 1928, Carl Panzram, admitted to having killed 21 people, although more victims were attributed to his killing spree. He used the island as a dumping ground.

Fictional Lowell Island is nestled among the many islands dotted around Long Island sound. I think there might be several preternatural communities hidden in the reaches of Long Island Sound.

Shapeshifter v. Werewolf

I have a little bit of a pet peeve about the blurring of the lines between werewolves and shapeshifters, just because a shifter takes the shape of a wolf that doesn’t mean he or she is a werewolf.

Let’s look at werewolves first. Werewolves are cursed creatures. They’re people who, under the influence of a curse, are forced into the shape of a wolf during the full moon. They don’t have any control over the change or over their actions while in wolf form. Finally, the “curse” can be transmitted through blood or body fluid contact.

A lot of the werewolves we see in fiction now are not, at least by that definition, werewolves. They are shapeshifters who take the form of a wolf. For the most part, they seem to retain their human intelligence and personality while in wolf form. Therefore, if the person is a killer the wolf will also kill humans. If the person is not a killer then the wolf is, for the most part, not a danger to humans.

I read a lot of paranormal romance and that issue bugs me. The werewolf is the hero so he can’t be entirely a werewolf otherwise it’s tough to make him sympathetic. So most of them are shapeshifters with werewolfy tendencies. They shift usually around the full moon, but they can shift at other times. Their shifting seems more connected to their emotional state than to the phase of the moon.

When I imagined the wolves of Lowell island, I called them werewoves at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I came to see that they weren’t really werewolves. They maintain human intelligence, they shift at will, they don’t stress about their loss of humanity. The shapeshifters of Lowell island, don’t consider themselves human at all. They don’t do  it often, but they are not averse to eating humans.

Oops, I almost called them werewolves again, the shapeshifters, or the changing kind of Lowell Island featured in my short story Spirit Wolf, are neither wolf nor man they are another species  that happens to share the world with humans. Usually, we put ourselves at the top of the food chain, but what if that’s an illusion. We look into the night and see only the lights and sounds of the city. What if there are things walking in the darkness, just beyond our sight, that watch and wait for  one of us to stray from path.  I think that is the ingredient I’ve been missing that I want in my own work. I want to take that journey into the shadows.