Eight Years of White Haven Witches — How It All Began

This post first appeared on my Substack, Where the Witches Gather.

October 2026 marks eight years since Buried Magic first landed in the world, and what eight years it's been. That one book genuinely changed the trajectory of my life. When I wrote it, I was working as a nurse in Regional Public Health in Wellington, New Zealand — writing whenever I could carve out the time. Today I'm a full-time author living in the Algarve in Portugal, and I owe that entirely to the White Haven Witches series and everything that's grown from it.

Over the years, readers have asked me the same questions again and again — am I really a witch? What places inspired White Haven? How did the series come about? I've touched on these before in various blog posts, but it feels like the right moment to tell the whole story properly.

A Fresh Start

The series grew from a turning point in my writing career. My first series, Rise of the King, was a YA Arthurian fantasy set in the Otherworld — a world that now connects to the wider White Haven universe. My readers loved it, but commercially it didn't take off. Rather than abandon everything I loved about writing, I asked myself a different question: what do I genuinely love, and how do I meet readers where they already are?

The answer was witches.

I'd been a pagan for years, and witchcraft had always been part of my life — you can read more about that in my post Who Is TJ Green? Magic, Writing, and a Life Lived Differently. The Arthurian legends had drawn me in precisely because of their witches and that liminal, in-between quality. So the passion was already there. I just needed to channel it into the right kind of story.

Why Mysteries?

Looking at the witch fiction that existed in 2018, most of it was romance. Romance is a perfectly wonderful genre, but it's not what I write or read. What I love is a good mystery — puzzles, investigations, characters piecing things together. So I decided my witches would be solvers of mysteries, firmly on the side of good. I was tired of witches being cast as villains. I wanted modern, believable women (and men) who practiced real witchcraft and happened to have crimes to solve.

When it came to the magic itself, I didn't want to construct an elaborate invented system. Real magical traditions already exist and are genuinely fascinating, so I researched further into the elemental magic and ritual practice I'd been reading about for years. I practise eclectic witchcraft myself, and while I draw on some Wiccan traditions, my witches aren't Wiccans, they're eclectic, just as I am.

The Characters

From the start, I wanted the series to appeal beyond a purely female readership, which meant a mixed cast of witches from the beginning. In the summer of 2018 I worked through names, the first plot, and the series title — making sure that magic and witches were clearly signalled, as I'd learned from my first series just how much titles matter for findability and reader expectations.

Cornwall — The Only Choice

Then came the setting, which in many ways was the easiest decision of all. I needed somewhere with winding lanes, ancient history, wild landscape, folklore, and a genuine pagan tradition. I needed atmosphere. I needed Cornwall.

I've been visiting Cornwall since childhood and know it well — the fishing villages, the coastal paths, the standing stones, the moors. It's the most pagan county in the UK, and it has a richness of myth and legend that feels genuinely alive. The south coast in particular has my heart.

Rather than set the series in a real town, which would have boxed me in, I invented White Haven, a place that draws on everywhere I love: Looe, Mevagissey, Fowey, St Ives, Mousehole, Padstow, Boscastle (home of the wonderful Museum of Witchcraft and Magic), and Polperro with its stream threading through the village. Bodmin Moor, Jamaica Inn, the gardens at Heligan — all of it feeds into the world. White Haven can grow and surprise as the stories require, which has been one of the real joys of the series.

The Books Themselves

The first two books, Buried Magic and Magic Unbound, form a single story — the search for the lost family grimoires of the five White Haven Witches, told entirely from Avery's point of view. Every book after that is self-contained, though characters grow and the threads continue. From Vengeful Magic onwards, following a lot of reader requests and my own instinct, the stories open up to multiple perspectives.

In upcoming posts I'll be going deeper into the characters, the Cornish locations that feature across the series, the myths woven through the books, and the seasonal celebrations that shape so many of the plots.

If you haven't started the series yet, the full White Haven Witches collection is waiting for you in the shop.