Worldbuilding for the Family Pride Shifter Romance Series

 

When I got the idea for my shifter romance series, Family Pride, I was inspired by the TV show, Bewitched. 

It featured Samantha, a witch with many magical powers. She falls in love with an average guy and lives in the suburbs. Samantha gives up her status for love—though in spite of her husband Darrin’s desire that she give up using witchcraft, she never completely lives a normal, average life. Relatives and friends pop in and out, and eventually the children are born with powers as well. 

The premise of the series is that there's a magical world interconnected with the normal human world. This is the basis of countless fantasy stories, and in them often the human world has no idea of the magical world in their midst.

When I wrote Family Pride: Love and Challenges, I wanted to flip the script. What would happen if a human started dating a lion shapeshifter? She would have to learn to navigate his world, instead of the other way around.

 

But in the Family Pride fantasy world, the shifters are living the regular, suburban life. They have their own customs and conventions, but they’re also under the radar as far as the rest of the world is concerned. Like Samantha, they have powers and rituals, but they have to keep everything under wraps so that the human population doesn’t discover that they exist. 

 

I did some research on lions and their behavior, then added a few twists for the shifter version. For instance, there are challenges for domination and control—which figure into the plot of book 1. The shifters group themselves into prides, which are made up of extended families. So, there is a normal world on one side, and the fantasy world on the other and Mac and Zora have to balance between the two. 

In Family Pride: Blood Fever, Mac hints that other magical creatures exist in the everyday world (in addition to shapeshifters). I didn't go into any detail about the other magical beings, but maybe I will one day. 

In the series, I wanted to show that "normal" depends on how you define it. There are all kinds of worlds intersecting all the time, and what you see on the surface doesn’t tell the whole story.