Thw book came out today and is available from Amazon as an ebook.
One quote by William James always intrigued me: “If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.”
James expounded on this statement when he made a speech in 1894, when he became president of the Society for Psychical Reseaerch. “My own white crow is Mrs. Piper. In the trances of this medium I cannot resist the conviction that knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and Wits.”
On a site called American Heritage, Lenora Piper is described as “the world’s greatest psychic medium,” who “was outwardly the world’s most ordinary woman. She was a shy, self-effacing lady, as wary of publicity as any other prim Bostonian…If we try to sum her up in a metaphor, she becomes a drab house sparrow slightly grayed by the factory smoke of Boston.”
What I find fascinating about Mrs. Piper is that medium and author Jane Roberts (The Seth books) once claimed she had been Lenora Piper. I read everything that Roberts wrote – as herself, as Seth.- and this claim makes intuitive sense to me. So perhaps Roberts was my white crow and my fictional psychic, Mira Morales, is fashioned after her. But Mira isn’t a “drab house sparrow.”
Mira was born in The Hanged Man. She lived in Fort Lauderdale, where she was a practicing psychic and also owned a bookstore – One World Books. She was a single mom whose daughter, Annie, was five or six in that book. Her husband, Tom Morales, had been killed during a convenience store robbery when Annie was just a baby. Mira’s psychic grandmother, Nadine, a Cuban, runs the bookstore with Mira.
In this book, the first in the series, Mira meets FBI agent Wayne Sheppard. The romance that develops between these two is tempered by Shep’s skepticism about Mira’s psychic world and her ability. They end up living together after they both move to Tango Key and eventually get married. Sheppard becomes the father Annie never had.
After The Hanged Man, there were four more books in the series that took place on Tango Key and were published by Kensington: Black Water, Total Silence, Category 5, Cold As Death. All the books are now available through Crossroad Press. Afterward, I set several thrillers on Tango Key, with other characters. But I missed Mira and started what became White Crows. I did it first as a screenplay, then turned it into a novel. The logline made things easier:
When her island home is invaded by people from the future with extraordinary abilities, a reluctant psychic discovers that the heinous leader is her descendant. In order to defeat him, she must embrace her full power.
When I wrote White Crows, I intended for these invaders to be from 2141. They travel back to Tango Key in 2022 to escape their lives in a dome and to seize the island and make it their own. The crows are descendants of the climate refugees who headed inland when the seas rose. During their decades-long trek, their offspring evolved with certain powers that supposedly would allow them a better shot at survival in a post apocalyptic world. But in that world, in a dome, they were a minority hunted and captured by Normals. The man who leads the crows is able to create illusions that others believe are true. He turns out to be a descendant of Mira’s.
The novel is now available on Amazon, an ebook. I don’t know what comes next. Nancy Pickard, who was nice enough to blurb the book, and I exchanged emails about the next installment. But where do you go when the planet’s future with climate change has been revealed and it’s really not pretty? Do you join Matt Damon on Mars? Move out elsewhere into the solar system?
I’m hoping Mira lets me know.
