In my world of contemporary fantasy, the unreal can become real.

Real historical facts:

• Vikings and other explorers visited northeastern North America at least 1000 years ago.
• Scottish sailors and others probably explored the region in the 1300s and 1400s.
• The Red Paint People were an indigenous group that lived in northeastern North America three to five thousand years ago.
• More on Northeast history and Red Paint People.

There are many monolithic structures in New England and northward. Who built them? Perhaps Scandinavian settlers, perhaps earlier people. Yankee Magazine has an interesting article on America’s Stonehenge.

My world of the Unreal

All stories begin with “what if,” and usually my “what ifs” involve magic.

There are unseen energies all around us. Electricity, radio waves and gravity are very real, but we can’t see them. Yet they exist. Think of our universe as a bubble. There is scientific discussion about this theory of bubble universes. If we exist in a bubble, there must be other universes around ours.

Suppose there was a way to travel from a world in one bubble to one in another. To those who could not conceive of such travel, it would be like magic. It was once thought that human flight was impossible. Maybe flight is magic. Computers, smartphones and modern televisions – even cars – are electronic magic.

What if there are people who can see magical energies and manipulate them? And, what if, millennia ago, some people from another world who could wield Magic opened gateways from their world to Earth and other worlds through which they traveled and traded with each other? Suppose one of those gateways was constructed in the mountains along the coast of Maine, near my mythical town of Moose Harbor.

That’s how I got from real to  Magic in my contemporary fantasy/horror novel, Gatekeeper, soon to be free.

Stay tuned for the Rules of Magic.