My Inspiration

My Heritage and Research

People sometimes ask where the world of Nechtan Cameron comes from. The honest answer is that it grew out of a long, quiet looking backward.

I carry Scottish ancestry that reaches, through an ancient aunt, to Malcolm Wallace—father of the more famous William. I have never set foot on Scottish soil in person. What I know of the land has come through years of reading, through historical texts and folklore collections, and through long hours spent drifting across the hills and coastlines of Scotland on Google Earth. I have followed the old roads, hovered over the ruins at Dunnichen, and traced the edges of lochs and glens until the place felt almost familiar. That kind of study does not replace standing on the ground itself, but it has given me a deep respect for the history and the older stories that still live in the landscape.

Alongside the family thread I have spent years reading about the Picts, the early Celtic traditions, the complicated figure of the Druid, and the older beliefs that sat beneath the later layers of history. The research was never meant to be academic display. It was personal. I wanted to understand the world my ancestors moved through, the way they thought about land, loyalty, power, and the thin places between what is seen and what is not. Those questions found their way into the stories.

The Cameron world is fiction, of course. Yet the bones of it—the weight of long memory, the cost of power, the stubborn loyalty of chosen family, the sense that the land itself remembers—grew out of that looking back. When I write about a scarred oak table in a small Edinburgh stone building, or about an ancient rivalry that refuses to die, I am drawing on more than pure invention. I am drawing on years of quiet study and on a heritage that, even from a distance, still feels like home.

That is the ground the stories stand on. The rest is the work of sitting down each day and trying to tell them true.