I Love Shape-shifters by Crystal Jordan

Author Crystal Jordan takes shifters into super-sensual territory this month with her ebook Wild, part of Harlequin’s short erotica line Spice Briefs. Here’s Crystal to tell us more about this story and which animals make the sexiest shifters…

by Crystal Jordan, author of Wild

Some people love vampires, others love faeries, and still others aren’t fans of paranormal at all. Me? I’m a lover of shape-shifters. Which is a good thing considering I write them quite often. What I love about them is how much of a variety you can have with just one supernatural being. First, there are the almost-endless possibilities of the animals a character can change in to. There’s not even a rule that a person has to change into only one animal. Maybe they can have two or three…maybe they can change into any animal at all.

For me, I like to limit to the animals I consider “sexy.” Yes, there’s a class system to animals. I just can’t imagine a big, macho hero shifting into a squirrel. Maybe other writers could pull it off, but I’d laugh myself to death before I ever finished the book. One of my friend even suggested I write a giraffe-shifter. Um, no. Pass. Again, I’d die in a fit of uncontrollable giggles.

So, what are the sexy animals? One word: predators. There are lists of apex predator—those animals at the top of the food chain—that you can look up online and in encyclopedias, and I typically stick to those lists when writing my shifters. Really, there’s just something so sexy about a hero who can go on the hunt for his woman in a very real way. He’s predatory, he’s animalistic, and it’s not just a metaphor.

Apex predators tend to be big, scary beasts. Bears, sharks, eagles, just to name a few possible predator-shifters. There are always wolves, but other writers have done those and done them better than I ever could. I have written one or two, but I usually like to go for the big cats. Tigers, lions, leopards, jaguars, panthers, cougars, and—in the case of my Spice Brief—lynx.

WILD is about a species of shifters that meet for one week every year in the Sierra Nevada Mountains that straddle the border of California and Nevada in the United States. I picked that area because I’m from there, and even in paranormal writing, I like to write a little bit of what I know. From there, the lynx just jumped out at me as the shifter I needed to write. What’s interesting about these lynx-shifters is that all the females go into heat at the same time. Like spring fever meets mating season on a really awesome level. So, to burn off the heat, escape from civilization, and reconnect with everything that makes them not-quite-human.

It’s also a time for mates to be sensed, hunted, and claimed.

What makes my heroine different is that she’d been going to Wild for a long time and she’s never found her mate. She has to assume that she doesn’t have one. It’s sad, but not totally uncommon in her world. So, she goes to just have a chance to be who and what she really is—a lynx. This year, a European Lynx shows up at the North American Wild…and my heroine finds out exactly why she’s never found a mate at her own Wild.

Writing this story was fun—I got to play with the idea of different sub-species within the animal kingdom and got to think about how people who were feral deep down inside would manage to cut loose from human society and just be themselves. That’s the beauty of shifters—and of the paranormal genre in general—there are just so many ways to handle it. I could have chosen a different shifter. I could have made those shifters “out of the closet” in human society. I could have set the story in the past or in the future. There are so many possibilities. But given the choice between shape-shifters and any other supernatural beastie, I’m going to take shifters every time. Gotta love them!