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Back when I sold my first book in 1999, nobody, but nobody, was buying paranormals. Publishers, that is. I had a fairy tale-esque paranormal that was doing well in contests, but all the comments came back saying "you will never sell this."

Well, thank goodness, it did sell (The Cat's Fancy) and over the next couple of years, paranormal grew and grew and grew, and considering the state of the paranormal romance and urban fantasy markets, it's not slowing down anytime soon. To which I say "yay!" because I love paranormal in all shapes and forms.

And the truth of the matter is that paranormal should be popular. After all, to my way of thinking, paranormal is the heart of genre fiction, if not all of fiction. Heck, of writing itself.

That's a lot of responsibility to shoulder, but I'm standing by my theory. I mean, think about it. Fiction is the creation of a world out of thin air--that's easy-squeazy for a paranormal author.

Building people. Putting characters together bit by bit, just like Frankenstein. That's paranormal.

No matter what the story, there's a little bit of magic in every book you pick up. And we should never forget how special that is. Authors dabble in magic, and instead of pulling a rabbit out of the hat, we pulled a novel.

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For the Deverry series I did a fair amount of research on the actual history of Dark Age cultures so that I could make up a plausible society and a consistent technology.  I started out to do the same for the magic worked in this world, but eventually I realized that what knowledge we have about the magic of Celtic lands in the Dark Ages is extremely scant.  We can postulate a lot of charms and curses, and indeed, I did incorporate a lead curse tablet into the plot in A Time Of Omens and the subsequent sections of the books that deal with the Deverry Civil Wars.  The inscription upon it, by the way, is based upon a curse given in Joshua Whatmough's The Dialects Of Ancient Gaul.

I realize that there are plenty of books available purporting to teach "ancient Celtic magic," supposedly preserved in folk customs or passed down among initiates or even "read from akashic records on the astral plane."  Anyone who's inclined to believe these theories might profit from reading two books, The Triumph of the Moon and The Stations of the Sun by Ronald Hutton, a reputable historian whose study of the actual facts reaches a very different conclusion.

What a great many people consider "ancient Celtic magic" is actually the product of the occult movements that flourished in 19th and 20th century Great Britian.  Modern paganism is indeed modern, the first and probably only religion ever born in the U.K.  Wicca falls into the same category.  Most folk traditions only go back so far and not very far at that, perhaps to the 16th century in some cases.  Now, I'm not saying that because of their lack of history these religions are somehow invalid or silly. Every religion had to start somewhere and with someone, either a great leader or a group of mystics whose teachings were later codified.