The Bloodline Watchers: The Awakening follows a man branded the family black sheep who one day has mysterious symbols appear beneath his skin, leading him to uncover a deeply hidden family secret that has been buried for generations. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story? 

The inspiration was based on my own experience of growing up feeling like I was not in the right family. I felt different, and I questioned myself while the people raising me continued to push and pull me into a system of control and compliance. At the same time, I watched people judge others without acknowledging the differences and beauty in them.

A lot of Sam came from that experience. Many of his memories and flashbacks are my memories. That feeling of being the black sheep, of wondering why you see or feel things differently from the people around you, is something I understand personally.

The Bloodline Watchers was also a story that lived in my mind rent free for several years. I kept seeing pieces of it, the bloodline, the family secrets, the awakening, and this idea that maybe the things that make someone different are not necessarily the things that are wrong with them. Maybe there is a reason they never fit the mold everyone else created for them.

How did you develop Sam and his feeling that he has always been the black sheep of his family, and how does discovering the truth about his bloodline change the way Sam understands the qualities he once tried to hide?

I have always had this idea that we are more powerful than we understand. That there is something divine within us, but when we come into this world, we forget where we came from and what we are. Sam grew out of that idea.

As a kid, I loved comic books and superheroes. Even as an adult, if somebody asks me how I managed to do something, my standard response has always been, “Well, I’m a superhero.” That idea became part of Sam’s DNA too, but I wanted to approach it from a spiritual direction rather than the traditional superhero story.

Sam has spent most of his life believing that being different means something is wrong with him. As the story develops, he has to confront the possibility that some of the qualities he tried to suppress were never weaknesses. They were pieces of himself he did not yet understand.

That connects to the larger world of The Bloodline Watchers. In this universe, the spiritual and physical worlds are beginning to bleed into one another. Sam is not simply gaining powers. He is remembering, awakening, and discovering that his family lineage is connected to something much older than any of them realized.

A lot of that world came from years of daydreaming, sketching characters, building lineages, and writing down ideas whenever they came to me. I collected those notes for years because I believed that one day I would actually write the story.

When I finally did, I wrote one massive story. It was too much. A family member suggested I work with an editor, and she gave me some great advice, including breaking the larger story into sections instead of trying to tell everything at once. That changed the way I approached the series. It gave the characters room to breathe and allowed me to expand the mythology instead of rushing through it.

That is especially important with Sam. His understanding of himself has to change gradually. He spent a lifetime believing he was the black sheep. Discovering the truth about his bloodline does not suddenly answer everything. It changes the question. Instead of asking, “What is wrong with me?” Sam begins to ask, “What if there was always a reason I was different?”

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book? Why did you want family relationships to be at the center of such a large supernatural story, and what does the story suggest about the things families inherit beyond possessions or genetics?

Family, trauma, acceptance, memory, and what we pass from one generation to the next were all important themes for me. I wanted to explore the idea that families inherit much more than possessions or genetics. We inherit stories. We inherit beliefs, fears, traditions, expectations, secrets, and sometimes wounds that began long before we were born.

That is one of the reasons family had to be at the center of The Bloodline Watchers. You can have this enormous supernatural world with ancient beings, spiritual forces, hidden bloodlines, and a reality much larger than we understand, but at the center of it are still people trying to figure out who they are and where they belong.

Families can love each other and still hurt each other. They can protect one another while also passing down patterns that should have ended generations ago. Sometimes what one generation believes it is doing to protect the next becomes the very thing the next generation has to confront.

That became part of the bloodline mythology for me. What if memory itself could travel through a family? What if trauma could? What if strength could? What if something spiritual could be passed forward too, even after everyone had forgotten where it began?

I also wanted the members of Sam’s family to respond differently when their understanding of the world begins to fall apart. They do not all believe the same things. They do not all accept what is happening at the same time. Some embrace it, some question it, and some resist it. That was important to me because that is how families actually work. We can come from the same place and still see the world completely differently.

Underneath the supernatural story, I think there is a question about what we choose to carry forward. We cannot control everything that was handed to us by the people who came before us, but we can decide what we do with it. Some things deserve to be remembered. Some things deserve to be healed. And some cycles deserve to end with us.  The story overall is the type of family that I had in my mind where there is caring and love that is unconditional instead of transactional.  Audry is what I am used to from the family overall except for Grandparents.  That was the love and caring that I valued and miss after they passed away.

As the first book in a larger series, what foundations did you most want The Awakening to establish for the story ahead?

The biggest foundation I wanted to establish was that awakening is only the beginning. The Awakening is not about Sam suddenly understanding who he is or gaining powers and knowing how to use them. It is about realizing that the world he thought he understood is much larger, much older, and much stranger than he ever imagined.

I wanted to introduce the idea that the spiritual world and the physical world are not necessarily separate. There is a Veil between them, and that Veil is beginning to thin. Things humanity has called myths, religions, legends, gods, angels, demons, or something else entirely may be different interpretations of pieces of the same much larger reality.

The bloodline is another important foundation. Sam’s awakening is personal, but it is not only about Sam. His family is part of something that has been moving through generations, and as that begins to surface, they realize there are forces that have known about it much longer than they have.

I also wanted to establish that power in this world has consequences. Awakening does not automatically mean enlightenment, and discovering that you are capable of something extraordinary does not mean you are prepared for it. Sometimes becoming aware of something also makes it aware of you.

Most of all, I wanted The Awakening to leave the reader with the feeling that they have only seen the edge of something enormous. There are clues and pieces of mythology throughout the first book that may seem small at first, but this is a larger story, and some of those pieces will take on entirely different meanings as the series continues.

The Awakening opens the door. What comes next is about the consequences of opening it.