What Inspired Solstice Surrender

I don’t write a lot of paranormal books.  I don’t mind reading them at all, but…well, you want the honest truth?  Paranormals are SO popular, I keep hesitating to write them because it feels like I’d just be jumping on the bandwagon to take advantage of the market.  It’s a bit too whorish for me.

Whereas, if I keep writing what I write — romantic suspense, historical romances and some contemporary romances (and any of them could be erotic romance versions) — then I won’t be abandoning those readers who like those genres, and perhaps can’t find them anywhere else because everyone else is writing paranormals…

However, when I first started writing for Ellora’s Cave, my editor asked me to contribute to an anthology they were putting together.  It was only after I’d agreed to write it, that I was told it was to be a paranormal romantic suspense series of stories.

I confess my heart sank when I was told that.  You see, I’d never written paranormal before.

Denise, Rosemary and I put our heads together and came up with the idea of the SIA – the Secret Intelligence Agency — that uses psychics as their agents to hunt out enemies of the state.

And because I hadn’t actually written paranormal stuff before, I dived into researching the subject for a few weeks.  I swiftly realized that paranormal is actually closely aligned to one of my favourite romance subgenres, historicals.  A great deal of paranormal abilities, profiles and phenomenon plug into historical roots and myths of old.  Aha!  I had the key to my story.

I went back into one of the oldest myths out there:  King Arthur.  The Arthurian tales are woven with a heap of their own paranormal events and talents, and it was so much fun building a modern, fiesty heroine worthy of my powerful, historically-inspired hero, Rhys.

Then, because I was writing an erotic story, I found some really neat ways to twist paranormal elements into the sexual subplot.

The novella was huge fun to write, especially as I (for once) got to set the story on familiar home turf — the Canadian Rockies at mid-winter.

First appeared on Stories Rule! on February 09, 2008

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Tracy Cooper-Posey © 2009. Cannot be copied or distributed without permission, or without this copyright notice attached.