Guardian at the gates Breaker of chains

🐺 BloodMoon — out now 🌑 BloodMoon: Totality — out now

they are prehistoric. chthonic. chimeric.

a mix of wolf, hound, and dragon with fur AND scales.

horns. talons. serrated saber fangs. draconic tufted tails.

similar in size to Epicyon haydeni. similar in movement to Hyaenodon gigas.

their eyes glow like fire.

they are the deep places. the memory of what came before. the archivists of the natural world.

they coupled with werewolves in medieval Ireland to introduce quicksilver resistance into werewolf bloodlines — and the plan spread through pack bonds across the entire world.

Cian. Solaris. ancient beyond naming. still watching. still protecting.

the mythology in these books is extraordinary.

🌑 BloodMoon & BloodMoon: Totality by Hope McDonald — out now

✦ the silver thing is a LIE. a medieval werewolf pack spread it to survive the witch and werewolf hunts and the church believed it because silver was a pure metal and Hollywood ran with it. it is quicksilver — mercury — that is deadly. and it is everywhere in the modern world.

✦ werewolves don’t need the moon to shift. that’s just good etiquette for biting someone. it gives the bitten person a month before the change so they can find help.

✦ a werewolf without a pack moves toward rabidity. not aggression — insanity. the pack bond is sanity itself.

✦ hellhound-blooded werewolves have quicksilver resistance, stronger gifts, and a higher chance of becoming a Shade after a premature death.

✦ the first werewolf was created by a Paleolithic man who petitioned the spirits to join his soul with his dead wolf companion so the wolf could have new life. and the spirits answered.

this mythology was built from the ground up and i am obsessed with it.

🐺 BloodMoon & BloodMoon Totality by Hope McDonald — out now

✦ Summer Home — a settlement centered around an ancient angel oak draped in moss. dogwood and magnolia in bloom. wisteria brilliant with flowers.

✦ Wolf’s Lair — a massive cave system with its own coniferous forest, its own weather, a shrine at the base of a giant ancient magnolia, and sunlight breaking through cracks in the ceiling

✦ The Septarian Sea — to the west

✦ The Green Haven — coniferous forest with redwoods to the north

✦ Open Skies — sunflower fields to the south

✦ Samhain’s Ancestral Forest — ancient deciduous forest to the east, containing Hope’s Wellspring with giant ancient weeping willows

✦ Skugge Peak — mountains running north to southeast

✦ Truth of the Soul — a secret cave accessible only through a cavity in an ancient sycamore, containing ancient powerful spiritual magic

✦ a dragon who is too ancient for names who throws you a bone and goes back to sunbathing

✦ a gate between the living world and the Other World

it is, as Outlaw put it, a piece of the in-between that formed on Earth.

a threshold. a doorway.

Timbuktu.

🌑 BloodMoon: Totality by Hope McDonald — out now

— BloodMoon: Totality by Hope McDonald

🐺 Wolf’s Rain — the grief of it, the pack of it, the running

🌿 Princess Mononoke — the nature vs humanity of it, the teeth

🍃 Wolfwalkers — the feral girl, the found family, the transformation

🌙 Wolf Children — the between-ness of it, the motherhood

🐉 How To Train Your Dragon — the unexpected bonds, the found home

🎮 Elden Ring — the lore that goes so deep it changes your brain chemistry

🎮 Okami — the divine wolf energy

🐺 any Wardruna song that makes you feel like you are standing in an ancient forest in the rain

BloodMoon was written for you specifically. it’s dark. it’s mythological. it’s pagan in its bones. it has found family that will wreck you. it has a wolf protagonist who refuses to stay dead.

it is about abuse and survival and what happens to a body and a mind that endures without support.

it is about what a pack means to a wolf — not just company, but sanity. identity. the thing that keeps you from going rabid.

it is about grief that accumulates and breaks you open and the people who sit in the wreckage with you anyway.

it is about dogs freed into the night.

it is about a father found too late and lost too soon. it is about a cub who became an alpha who became a Shade who became a guardian of sacred things. but more than anything — it is about what it means to refuse the story you were handed.

to break every chain.

to howl anyway.

🐺🌑 BloodMoon & BloodMoon: Totality — out now

✦ a werewolf-hellhound hybrid who becomes a horned skeleton wreathed in black iridescent fire after she dies and comes back angrier

✦ found family forged in literal hell

✦ a dog fighting ring escape that includes freeing fifty dogs into the night

✦ mythology so old it remembers the Permian extinction ✦ werecoyotes. chaotic, beloved werecoyotes.

✦ a man named Coyote who once derailed an entire political campaign with a chupacabra, a straw hat, and a scarecrow

✦ the line “survival is the most sacred rebellion there is”

✦ a song that will rearrange your organs

✦ the word Laochra

My debut duology BloodMoon the crooked spiral saga is live

book 1 is BloodMoon

book 2 is BloodMoon: Totality

She was four years old the first time the world tried to break her. It would not be the last.

Born of a secret and hidden from the truth of her own blood, Skye has spent her life in cages — some made of chain and cellar walls, some made of grief and loss and the particular cruelty of a world that fears what it cannot control. Cast out, hunted, and stripped of everyone she loves, she learns the only name that fits her: Dirge.

But something ancient runs in her veins. Something that doesn’t break. Something that burns.

Across two books, Skye’s story unfolds from feral survivor to alpha, from the cellar of her childhood to the threshold of worlds — discovering along the way that her hellhound bloodline carries a heritage older than memory, that the dead never truly leave their pack, and that mercy can be the most ferocious act of all. She will build a family from the wreckage of loss, stand at a Gate between the living and the dead, and sing a song that both worlds need to hear.

The BloodMoon Duology is a dark, mythologically rich, deeply spiritual odyssey through grief, found family, ancient blood, and the savage, sacred act of survival. For the strays and the lone wolves. For the broken things that keep going.

Laochra — the ones who endure, the ones who carry, the ones who remain. Each of us, always.