Q&A with Connie Senior

  

 

 

Connie Senior is the author of the new novel Blue Moon. Her other books include The Wolf's Den. She is also an engineer.

 

Q: Blue Moon is the third book featuring your character Caleb O’Connor--do you think he's changed from the first book to now?

 

A: In the second book, Caleb, who is a werewolf, returns to his hometown of Bar Harbor, Maine after six years of self-imposed exile in Romania. He’s hunting an old vampire nemesis.

 

At the end of the book, he defeats his enemy, but he hasn’t resolved the trauma that drove him from Bar Harbor originally, and he’s not sure of how he’ll find a place for himself or the young werewolf boy he adopted.

 

In the beginning of Blue Moon, the third book, Caleb is building a new life: he’s fallen in love with Sophia, his childhood friend, and has been helping the werewolf packs in New England lead better lives—as well as trying to get them to stop biting people when the moon is full.

 

He thinks he knows what path he’s on, until a teenage girl is bitten by a mysterious werewolf pack, and he’s called in to investigate. Then things veer off course for Caleb, and the fun begins.

 

Q: What inspired the plot of Blue Moon?

 

A: I know and love the characters in this fantasy universe I’ve created over the last 20 years. (I’m a slow writer!) In one sense, the inspiration for the plot of Blue Moon arose from asking: what’s next for the characters from the first two books, knowing what I know about them?

 

However, going back to my earliest notes about the book, I can see that one idea niggled at me from the beginning: the idea of kidnapped children, who must be brave and clever enough to escape, even as Caleb searches for them.

 

The plot started as an answer to the question of who would kidnap children and why. Then it got complicated.

 

Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?

 

A: Yes and no. Early in the writing process, I created a complete outline of plot points at the level of index cards. I had a goal, but a lot changed along the way.

 

For example, new, secondary characters created themselves during the writing process. At least, that’s how it felt to me. Of course, all characters are products of my imagination, but imagination draws from the murky darkness of the unconscious mind. I needed those new characters, but didn’t know that I did until they arrived.

 

Also, some of the new characters made me laugh. We can all use a laugh while mired in the middle of writing a book!

 

As is often the case, the themes of the book didn’t become apparent until late in the writing process. For the first three or four years (slow writer…), I was focused on making a complicated plot work: Time tables! Maps! New characters!

 

When the first draft was completed, I could contemplate the book from a distance. I was very fortunate to have a group of other writers who read the entire first draft and provided feedback. The next four drafts shaped the plot into what it needed to be.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

 

A: If I had to limit myself to one thing that the book is “about,” it would be the importance of finding and creating family, not necessarily the family one is born into. This is as true for a werewolf finding a pack as it is for the rest of us humans. I hope that sticks with readers.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: An idea is niggling at me for another book that would exist in the fictional universe of the other books. But currently, I’m having fun posting the backstories of the books’ main characters on my Substack.

 

The three novels I’ve written follow Caleb from ages 17 to 27, but Caleb’s childhood and the friends he’s known since age 12 motivate critical plot points. I wrote biographies for Caleb’s friends, but that wasn’t enough for me.

 

To hear their voices in my head, I wanted to know more: the nicknames they called each other, the pranks they pulled, what they argued about, how they stood up for one another, how they failed one another.

 

As a way of finding out, I wrote and wrote and wrote: not lists or biographies, but stories about the characters’ early lives. The stories didn’t make it into the books, but taught me more about them and their friendships than any biography could. I hope readers of the books will enjoy these stories.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: In addition to a lifelong passion for reading and writing fantasy, I’ve always been interested in the environment. I have a Ph.D. in environmental engineering and worked for decades as an engineer. For much of that time, writing fiction took a back seat to technical writing.

 

Eventually, the use and misuse of science found its way into my fiction: a vampire grad student studying high energy physics; experiments on mice aimed at making humans immune to vampire bites; better ways to kill werewolves with science. Fun things to dream up!

 

Blue Moon will be released in November 2026. There’ll be updates on my website or Instagram. Thanks!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb