While a student at the University of Notre Dame, I was invited to assist in the restoration of a 17th-century chateau on the Breton coast. The manor sat in near-ruins after generations of neglect, yet still it bore the official designation "chateau." This was owing to its long having been in the possession of nobility, the owner's family bearing the title "vicomte" since the reign of Louis XIV. In the course of the restoration, I discovered letters, journals and various keepsakes which spoke of the chateau's past. While hacking at vines that had overgrown the chapel and rebuilding the dovecot, stone by stone, it was easy for me to conjure an alternate history for the chateau — the history which became The Book of Shadows.

I returned stateside and settled in New Orleans. The story took further shape when — while employed at the New Orleans Museum of Art — I came across the memoirs of Elizabeth Vigee-LeBrun, court portraitist to Marie Antoinette. Later, I discovered the published version of a manuscript found in the archives of the French Department of Public Hygiene and published as Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite. These discoveries lent the story texture and a provocative metaphor for the restraints and expectations of gender roles. An interest in the legend and lore of witchcraft further spiced the narrative.