Stories develop in strange and convoluted ways, and each is unique. At least, that’s how it is for me. 🙂

I have long found the idea of twins intriguing. I was never close to a twin, so I didn’t have a first row seat to watch the dynamics between twins play out. However, from what I did see, I often thought they got a raw deal. People seem to think twins would automatically like to be around each other, and like to share all that they share by default, through no choice of their own.

I started thinking about twins with powers. I made my first notes on the subject in 2003. Yep, that long ago. At first, my twins were just oddities, born to a witch who was part of a reclusive coven — back then, my twins were the first of their kind. One of them could astral project, and the other used psychokinesis.

That was before the name. I am certain I read the name on that sign on Highway 101 as a child. I’m a lifelong Oregonian, and my family spent time on the coast. My freshman year roommate in college (also a high-school friend and volleyball teammate and one of my best friends to this day) had spent a lot of time as a kid just fifteen miles north of Cape Foulweather. We drove that strip of coast often in college. Often. It was just over an hour’s drive through farmland and over a curvy mountain pass before dropping down to the coast. We loved that drive. We’re the type of friends who can just be together in silence, or any manner of goofiness, and many times we ended up atop a cliff at one of her favorite childhood spots, watching the ocean spray and the sea for ships and whales. However, the first time the name Cape Foulweather really stuck with me was when I met a coffee roaster at a farmer’s market from Cape Foulweather Coffee Company. Their coffee was AMAZING, by the way, which is why I included a link. 🙂

Trees bent with the constant wind

A historical sign from Cape Foulweather

The view looking south from Cape Foulweather

How did that name and my twins get all wound up together? Well…Cape Foulweather is on that stretch of coast where I played with so many ideas about my reclusive coven, where I was inspired by the idea of caves and caverns to combine my coven with the Lady of the Lake, from Arthurian legend. That is a story I’ve read from many points of view, my favorite being the Mysts of Avalon. Cape Foulweather is also a place of immense natural power, in the form of churning waves and hundred mile an hour winds — it just fit with my developing story of storm-born twins who were part of a very odd family.

Those twins are now a reality in my Foulweather Twins fantasy series, which starts with Queen Witch.

Stubborn and suspicious are two qualities that don’t go over well in the Queen family…

Where does my story truly begin? Maybe with the birth of twins to a soon-dead witch. Or possibly with the name bestowed on me by the Lady, the immortal we serve. She called me Sage, and my sister Wren. The Foulweather twins. As I choose to see it, my story begins when I first participated in the course of my life. When I started making my own decisions, despite everything I’d been taught. Forced recluse with a secret life? That’s me.

Sage Brighton is a young woman of incredible power, but she doesn’t decide how that power is used, or anything else about her life. As a witch of the Queen family, and a twin, Sage will serve the Lady all her days. The immortal has plans for Sage and her twin Wren. They are to be her Hands, her enforcers in the mortal, modern world. But first Sage must survive her training, learn to control her sociopathic sister without getting maimed in the process, and all the while try to keep something of her life for her own.