Escape Into Magic

Crafting Stories That Always Feel Like Home

As I have said before I grew up in the Bronx, the vibrancy of the people, the folk tales and the magic that lived in every part of my neighborhood. The smell of incense that wafted from open windows on sunny saturdays when old puerto rican ladies conducted their sahumerios and despojos (particular spanish spiritual cleansing rituals) to drive the bad luck of the previous week out of their homes. What I learned both in my home and from the stories whispered in the houses of my friends about spirituality played an important part in my view of the world.

But it wasn't the only thing that influenced me, I was also raised as a Roman Catholic. From a young age, drawn to the church, the bible and the miraculous stories of the saints and the angels. I lived with one foot in each world. Both magical but both in opposition and tension - one to the other.

My religion was a big part of who I was. I knew my faith as a teenager. In fact, because of the unique makeup of my family—I had a Catholic mother but a Protestant maternal grandmother—I was more than conversant in biblical scholarship as well as the doctrines of the Catholic church. At one point in my life, I explored the possibility of the priesthood—a decision made not only because of my understanding of my faith, but also as an attempt to escape what I thought was my failure to be heterosexual. I was looking for a place where I could turn my back on that part of myself.

I never became a priest, and in the years that followed, I still continued my complicated relationship with the Church. I went to church every Sunday, and I prayed earnestly for the grace to change. It took a long time for me to find peace, and at times, the old me still knocks on the door and comes in for a chat. Issues of sexuality weren’t the only areas of tension I had with the Church—I was also exploring spirituality that the Church, for centuries, frowned upon: intuition, psychic phenomena, High and Elemental Magic, even the belief systems of the Caribbean—Spiritualism, Voodoo, and the Yoruba religion commonly known as Santería. So, effectively, I was living a true double life in more ways than one.

When I began to write, my words always held that dual legacy—deistic and esoteric. The worlds I created had to have magic in them. I found that I was more at home in a world where the spoken word could light candles and manipulate reality, where a magician could cast a circle and summon elemental spirits from beyond the veil.

My life experience has always found its way into my writing. The richness of my Catholic background has allowed me to explore what gods and goddesses might sound like or look like. The mysticism of the Caribbean has helped me write how a character might experience crossing to the other side or parting the veil of the world of the dead.

Some people like novels that are rooted in the ordinary—romance, mystery, true crime—and there is nothing wrong with those types of stories. But for me, I never wanted to read about the everyday world; I already lived that. Reading, for me, was an escape—a way to travel to worlds beyond the ordinary, worlds with magic, where words had power and the breath of creation could be breathed forth as an incantation or invocation.

That is what I try to bring forth when I write. My stories may begin in the mundane world, but my characters are always one step away from passing through the veil to the other side. They coexist with the magic that is hidden in the world around us.

Writing fantasy and paranormal stories is always a balancing act—crafting a narrative that feels believable and grounded in the reality we know, while also revealing the magic that exists just beyond our view.

So, a hotel in Galicia, Spain, can become a manor house for an 800-year-old vampire, and the history of the Catalan witches can become the legend of the Wise Ones, adopted by Hecate. This is the art of weaving myth into reality until there is no seam, and where one ends and the other begins is undetectable.

I didn't become a priest; history chose a different path for me.
What that path is, is still in the process of becoming, and my writing is my way of expressing the magic of that.

My stories step out into the world while carrying a seed of magic that can transport you and show you wonders—if you are willing to believe.