Refuge and Rebellion

I have a confession to make: Rowanswood didn’t begin with a map, a family tree, or a carefully annotated magical taxonomy. No tidy chart of village history waited in a notebook. No rules for how the magic worked. It began, as many of the best and strangest things do, with a feeling.

I wanted a magical village tucked just out of sight, the sort of place you might find at the end of a lane you were certain wasn’t there yesterday. A place with old stone cottages, half-wild gardens, gossiping piskies, and rowan trees that know more than they are saying. More than anything, I wanted women at midlife and beyond to stop hovering at the edges as mentors, grandmothers, comic relief, or conveniently wise background figures. In Rowanswood, they’re the ones having the adventure.

Rowanswood began as refuge and rebellion. The refuge came from my love of cozy fantasy: the pleasure of stepping into a world where the kettle is close by, the cat familiar has opinions, and danger, while real, is not allowed to have the last word. The rebellion came from a quieter irritation. Why do so many magical adventures belong to the young? Why couldn’t older women inherit mysterious cottages, discover inconvenient powers, make questionable choices, fall in love, solve mysteries, argue with familiars, and save the day?

Why, in other words, should anyone’s most interesting chapter be presumed to have already happened?

So, when I began imagining Rowanswood, I didn’t start with magical regulations, village chronology, or the precise difference between a hedge-witch and a Crone. Those things matter. They are the bones beneath the floorboards. But for me, worldbuilding begins with atmosphere: what should the reader feel when they step through the door?

I wanted Rowanswood to feel safe, but not dull. Welcoming, but never quite tame. Ordinary life has not been replaced by magic; it has been threaded through with it. The village is not a stage set for spectacle. It is a place where tea, grief, gossip, second chances, old hurts, new powers, and minor supernatural inconveniences can all sit at the same kitchen table.

Magic in Rowanswood is not only about what someone can do. It is about what becomes possible when they stop apologizing for wanting more: more belonging, more courage, more mischief, more life. It is never too late to spark a little magic, and in Rowanswood that is not a slogan so much as a local fact.

Once the feeling of the village was there, the people began to arrive.

Crones did not wander in after the dryads, hedge-witches, piskies, and familiars. The Crones were the point. In the main Rowanswood series, choosing Crones as the central figures is not a joke about age, a costume, or a sideways nod to fairy-tale hags. It is a return to something older and truer: the Crone as the woman who has crossed thresholds and come back carrying knowledge; the one who sees what others miss; the keeper of endings, beginnings, memory, consequence, and power. Folklore has often made her frightening because a woman who no longer asks permission is frightening to the wrong people. In Rowanswood, that fear is not the definition. It is the misunderstanding.

To be a Crone in the truest sense is not simply to be old. It’s to be ripened by experience, sharpened by loss, freed by self-knowledge, and dangerous in the way wisdom is dangerous: quietly, precisely, and with excellent timing. The Crones of Rowanswood are not supporting characters at the edge of someone else’s quest. They are the ones with the quest. Dryads belong because old trees have long memories. Hedge-witches belong because practical magic is intimate magic. Piskies and familiars belong because no village worth visiting is entirely well-behaved. But the Crones are the deep root of the series: the proof that later life is not an afterword, but a threshold of its own.

Hamish and Magnus grew out of that same soil. I didn’t impose them on the village so much as discover they had already been there, making themselves useful, impossible, or both. That is one of the quiet joys of building a fictional place from mood rather than mechanics: if the atmosphere is true enough, the inhabitants begin to feel inevitable.

Rowanswood is cozy, but cozy does not mean trivial. A story can have warm kitchens, familiar paths, eccentric neighbours, and comforting rituals without being small. Sometimes comfort gives us the courage to look more closely at what hurts. Sometimes a safe place is exactly where transformation begins.

At its heart, Rowanswood is about later-life reinvention: confidence arriving late and all the more powerful for it; belonging after loneliness; purpose after uncertainty; the delicious shock of realizing that the life you thought you were supposed to have was not the only one available. Magic may arrive through a cottage, a cat, a spell, a tree, or a mystery, but the deeper enchantment is the permission to begin again.

That’s the promise I want Rowanswood to hold. Not ease. Not wounds vanishing because someone lights a candle or stirs herbs into a cup. But change. Friendship. Desire, bravery, foolishness, discovery, and wonder, all still possible.

Perhaps that is why Rowanswood feels familiar to me, even though I made it up. Or perhaps I made it up because some part of me had been looking for it: a village beyond the visible map, waiting with a crooked lane, a lit window, and a little magic that had not given up on me. Maybe some part of you has been looking for it too.