Red Wolf Blogs

  I love some of the animal characters in the books I read. From the heroic nature of Dean Koontz’s goldens, through the tragic descent into madness of Stephen King’s Cujo, to the comic distractions of almost any pet, animal characters just add depth and breadth to any tale. Right now, I’m having a lot of fun with my MC’s horse in the epic romantasy series I’m writing. Brawn has a bit of faerie blood in him. He’s super-intelligent—a good bit smarter than the MC in many ways—and his frustration at not being able to communicate through speech makes for some interesting scenes. The following scene in A Verse for Witches was placed in the book after some back-and-forth with my editor on the pros and cons of making the horse one of the major characters. It was an experiment that--as she warned me it might--got out of hand. And now, more and more scenes are from the horse's point of view in the series. From A Verse for Witches, Chapter 1: Trevor stepped out from the shadows as the door...

 (From the 01/23/2026 newsletter) 19 th Day of Snow Moon, 1219 th Year, Human Age of Magic … We are three days into our journey north on a trail that winds its way through the foothills of the Darinian Mountains. As we crest each hill, we are afforded an occasionally spectacular view to the east. Through the morning of the first day, that view was of the sweeping grasslands of the Plains of Saha’ar. But we soon made our way through a pass between the Darinians that dominate our view to the west and another range of mountains, the Faricican, that juts away to the east, separating the grasslands in the south from the Great Eastern Desert in the north. Since then, our vistas to the east are nothing but a vast palette of rolling dunes stretching to the far horizon, broken only by an occasional dense cloud rising from its surface. Erin tells me the clouds mask fierce storms that constantly shift the pattern of dunes, confounding even the most experienced desert travelers. Erin cla...