Friday Feature a Paranormal World
Today we’d like to tell you a little bit about the paranormal shape shifter world we created for our series The Turning Stone Chronicles.
We started brainstorming our book on a long road trip. A sign, entitled Turning Stone, was the impetus for the series name, The Turning Stone Chronicles. We decided we were going to go with shape shifters in part because we like paranormal books and because the title of the series lent itself nicely to shape shifters. We briefly considered vampires—after all they shift into bats—but ditched the idea because Catherine didn’t think she could sleep at night if we wrote a vampire book. They’ve always scared the life out of her—no pun intended.
While talking about what our shifter world would look like, Donald suggested we do
something different. Typically, a shape shifter has one alternate form—an animal, which is more often than not a wolf. Donald remembered a class he’d taken in college where they talked about the three parts of the human psyche, the id, ego, and super ego. He suggested we take that concept, a tri-personality aspect, and tweek it a bit for our books. Consequently, our shifters have the ability to shift into other human forms, as well as an animal form.
As we talked about how the shape shifting elements were going to differ in our books, we 
began to wonder about the clothing question our characters faced when they turned into an animal. Catherine had done some were-animal research earlier that revealed hiding humans’ clothes, when they have shifted into an animal, prevents them from turning back into humans. That makes shape shifters susceptible to easy capture, in our opinion, so we decided to eliminate that problem by adding magic rings to the mix—the Turning Stone rings, carved from an ancient bloodstone by Celtic druids. Because of the magic in the rings, when our characters shift into animals their clothing, the ring, and anything else on their person is transformed, too. However, that is not the case when they are shifting into another human form, which makes for some interesting scenes in the book.
We’ve had a lot of fun designing a new and different shape shifting world, developing
interesting rules for our tri-personality shifters, and discovering who and what each character’s alter ego and animal ego are. We like to listen to our characters and let them give us clues about their other personalities. Here’s a hint about the secret Turning Stone Society shape shifters—it’s a zoo out there.
Do you like shape shifter stories? What’s your favorite were-animal? What animal do you think you would be if you had a Turning Stone ring?
Amazon buy links:The Promised One (The Turning Stone Chronicles Book 1)
Blood Brothers (The Turning Stone Chronicles Book 2)
Son of the Moonless Night (The Turning Stone Chronicles Book 3)
The Mercenary and the Shifters (The Turning Stone Chronicles Book 4)
