One of the questions I’ve been asked is why I made Birdie an archaeologist.
The simple answer is that Birdie needed to unlock the lore of the story.
Mirror Me has a long history behind it, and I didn’t want to spend hundreds of pages telling that history from beginning to end. Birdie became the vehicle that allowed both Sam and the reader to understand what came before without stopping the story to explain everything.
An archaeologist asks a simple question:
Who was here before us?
That’s exactly the question Birdie spends her life trying to answer.
She travels the world researching Indigenous peoples, ancient cultures, and places where the earth itself seems to hold memory. Through that research, she begins connecting what exists on Sam’s land with similar places around the world. Most people would never make those connections. They come through years of research, travel, documentation, and curiosity.
Birdie needed to be someone who was naturally curious. But curiosity wasn’t enough. She also needed the means to travel, the resources to spend years researching, and the freedom to dedicate her life to those questions. Because she never married and never had children, she was able to devote herself completely to that work.
In many ways, I think of Birdie as a female Indiana Jones. Not because she’s swinging from ropes or outrunning boulders, but because she’s driven by the same desire to understand the people who came before us and what they left behind.
More than anything, though, Birdie is a steward of memory.
She remembers her family.
She remembers the land.
She remembers the history that would otherwise be lost.
Her journals become the bridge between what was and what is.
They give Sam the information she needs without simply handing her the answers. Birdie is careful about what she records and careful about what she leaves for Sam to discover on her own.
From a storytelling standpoint, making Birdie an archaeologist also gave her credibility. When she writes about the vibration sites and the history behind them, the reader believes she has earned that knowledge. Her research makes the larger world of Mirror Me feel believable because it doesn’t begin with Sam. It has always existed. Birdie simply spent her life uncovering it.
One of the things I love most about Birdie is that, even though she never appears on the page in the present day, many readers tell me she’s one of their favorite characters.
I understand why.
She’s wise without being mysterious.
She’s plain-spoken without talking down to people.
She never pushes Sam toward the answer. She simply leaves the path lit and trusts her to keep walking.
In the end, Birdie isn’t just the catalyst for Sam’s journey.
She’s the steward of a story that has always belonged to the land.
Mirror Me Launches February 2027
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