My new novella, Swift – The Story of a Witch, heads back in time to tell the tale of the mysterious origins of the Tirthas and of the even more mysterious woman who finds them…

So, for the first time in 4 years, there’s a new chapter in my fantasy adventure series, The Secret of the Tirthas! Here’s more on how I came to write it:

Creating a world…

Building a world with a supernatural element that can sustain a whole series of books is a complex process. This is true even when that world is mostly the same as ours, and involves only a few differences – in my case, the Astral Realm and Tirthas, or portals, with all the strange beings they contain. Before I began writing The City of Light, I wrote an intricate explanation of how the Tirthas were created, involving an ‘umbilical’ cord from the original landmass, Pangaia, to the Astral Realm, tectonic shift, and more ‘modern’ ideas such as ley lines.

I created a backstory going back centuries to how the demons and other supernatural characters were created in the mythical plane of the Astral Realm. From here, they could come down on to earth via the Tirthas and wreak havoc (or whatever else they felt like doing!) On top of this, there was the obscure ‘summons’ of the place known only as the Unknown Realms, which exerted its strange pull on these beings. (The Unknown Realms seemed a good metaphor at the time for the fading away of a more mysterious, religious view of the world – although I’m not sure that’s fading at all now!)

It all necessitated a long timeline involving the main characters and their ancestors, and explaining which had magical natures, and what it meant for them.

A mysterious woman appears…

One of the most interesting of these characters was Hattie Swift, a distant relative of Lizzie’s, who plays a small but vital role in the series. Hattie turns up out of nowhere at the village pub one night in a summer storm . She’s derided as a witch by the locals – but thanks to one man, a Quaker, she finds the safety and space to explore the magical woodland glade through which she entered the world. And soon Hattie discovers the fantastic portals that exist there, in what will become the garden of rooms Lizzie explores a century later. But alongside wonders, her discovery leads her into great – and potentially mortal – peril…

So grab your copy on Amazon now to read Hattie’s story and discover the origins of the tirthas…