In Season of the Witch I started out with a number of highly random ideas:
a) I wanted my hero to fall in love with a disembodied voice in a diary. Admittedly, I was concerned that this might not be a realistic scenario. Would a woman be able to bewitch a man simply with the beauty of her words? The story of Sheherezade who captivated a cruel Sultan by spinning stories is a familiar one, but Sheherezade was not veiled and one gets the impression the lady in question was rather beautiful... Furthermore, in Season of the Witch there is an added complication. The owner of the diary may be a murdereress. My hero may be falling in love with a killer.
b) The search for enlightenment and the lengths people will go in order to achieve an enlightened mind, forms the backbone of the narrative in Season of the Witch. The search for enlightenment is one of the oldest quests of mankind. It is indeed the Holy Grail. Even today, people all over the world holding different philosophies and from widely different cultures pursue exactly the same goal. Martial artists partake in shugyo or fearsome rituals designed to break down body and spirit. North American shamans use meditation and drugs to achieve an enlightened state of mind. Right at this minute there are people staring at a blank wall or sitting on top of a tall pole in order to expand their consciousness. This may seem ridiculous, even laughable to many of us, but man's hunger to experience something larger than himself - a true moment of blinding illumination - is one of the most poignant aspects of the human condition. As the hero in Season of the Witch says: 'One of the crueller jokes of creation is being burdened with brains capable of conceptualising a state of higher consciousness we have little hope of ever achieving.'
c) A chance reading of Dale Graff's book River Dreams, gave me the idea of giving my characters the talent for remote viewing. Mr. Graff was the director of Project STARGATE before it was shut down in the nineties. STARGATE was a top secret program of the United States Government and Mr. Graff was in charge of training and using remote viewers to gather intelligence information. Even though ESP is hardly a fresh topic and a rather tired staple of many paranormal mysteries, I thought it might be fun to try and do something new with it...
I always fall passionately in love with my hero. I dream about him, I fantasize. My husband knows all about it and has long since made peace with this state of affairs. Sadly, I confess to also being a fickle woman and when I move on to the next book, I transfer my affections very easily to the new man in my life. However, I must admit that I am especially fond of Gabriel Blackstone, the main protagonist in Season of the Witch.
Gabriel is a Londoner and very much a twenty-first century guy. A computer hacker by trade, he deals in other people's secrets. He is also a thief, which makes his values rather suspect, but he is a charming thief. I wanted a hero who is cool, hip, with a great sense of humour. A modern day buccaneer.
Does Gabriel fancy himself, just a little? Definitely. But I was careful not to make him a narcissist (after all, what woman wants to be with a guy who thinks he is more attractive than she is) but his belief in himself and his own abilities is strong. And he has an amazing gift: the gift of remote viewing. Compared to what some of my other leading men have in their arsenal, I was generous. Gabriel sets out on his journey fully armed: powerful, sexy, gifted. But will it be enough to get him through the challenges ahead? Readers who are familiar with my work know that I do not necessarily subscribe to conventional, happy endings. The reader can never assume that in the end everything will work out alright...
As for my two witches, Minnaloushe and Morrighan Monk, the challenge was to create two fully formed characters, without giving too much away. The women have to remain enigmatic and ultimately unknowable. One of them is a killer and if I had made their characters too accessible, the identity of the villain would be too easy to guess.
I also had to take care not to turn the sisters into Tweedledum and Tweedledee. It would have been very easy to make them mirror images of each other with the only difference being that the one has black hair and the other red. They had to be very different people with very different talents and tastes.
But again, as the plot of the book hinges on discovering who the writer of the mysterious diary is, they also needed to be similar enough so that Gabriel remains confused. He must be unable to tell whether it is Minnaloushe or Morrighan, who so bewitches him with her words...
