So I read a lot…
I love reading and have been quite a voracious reader since elementary school. I loved Dr. Seuss and Amelia Bedelia followed by Nancy Drew and Jane Austin. Not a real fan of the Bronte sisters—too dark and depressing. I found Tolkien, which you already know helped lead to this trilogy. I got into nonfiction with Elie Weisel’s Night and began years of memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, and most often, specific histories (ie. Stephen King’s JFK or Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage. After reading Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in high school, I became very interested in Native American history and read anything and everything I could get my hands on—fiction o nonfiction or a blend. I also read everything I could find on world mythology, folklore, and legends, which is where the idea of the wereling originated.
In a book or books whose title(s) I cannot remember, I read about various legends of shapeshifters. The ones that gave me the idea for the wereling came from Romania, I believe, where you could get out of punishment for being outed as a witch if you said that you were actually a shapeshifter protecting your village from vampires and other evils. Perhaps that’s where the ancient lore about the war between vampires and werewolves originated. I don’t remember if what I was reading ever said that or it just became my idea. As I have said, I have read a lot of books in my life and sometimes stories, facts, and ideas run together.
Anyway, when I began writing my bad fan fiction, the wereling weren’t a race but a couple characters who could transform—one into a black wolf and another into a mountain lion. Neither was especially good or evil. They were just there interacting with my character who became Sylle. When my daughter challenged me to do something with all my horrid stories of the past, those two characters morphed into the wereling race—a group of beings who were animal and human—and I chose three of my favorite animals for them: bears (think Kodiak), wolves (because no shapeshifting story is complete without wolves; plus, they are absolutely the coolest), and mountain lions (because nothing is as unsettling as a catamount shrieking in the mountains of Appalachia).
Their power and strength is what made them a target for extermination. In The Lost, Sylle must get her group safely through their desolate kingdom and to say the journey is unsettling for everyone in the group would be an understatement. But are they all gone or do some remain? Or is it only their dead that occupy the mountains who still remain? You’ll have to read my book to find out.
In The Dead, which is the final book in the trilogy and comes out in 2026, I introduce one last type of wereling inspired again by all the mythology and legends I have read. These wereling are the rarest of the rare and can shapeshift into one of the rarest and in my mind, one of the coolest creatures from mythology. I look forward to everyone meeting them.