Could author Anna Leonard make selkies sexy? That was the challenge when it came to writing her new book from Silhouette Nocturne, The Hunted. Read on as Anna tells us how she did it with the trifecta of sexy, danger, and secrets…
by Anna Leonard, author of THE HUNTED (Silhouette Nocturne, April 2010)
I’ve always been fascinated by the ocean. It was probably inevitable, considering that although I was born and raised in New Jersey, both sides of my family are from coastal New England. Some of my earliest summer vacation memories involve the shoreline, from the gentle sands of South Jersey to the rockier coastline of Main, as well as everything in-between. When I was a young child, we spent part of a summer in Nantucket, and the memories of that little cottage are still strong, three decades later.
And I had just been on the Left Coast, and seen, once again, the sea lions lounging along that coastline.
So when my editor, Mary Theresa Hussey, asked if I had an idea for my next Nocturne, all of that collided in my head, and I said – “can I do selkies?”
“Seals?” She said, her voice rising a little in polite disbelief. “You want to do sexy seals?”
Okay, it does sound sort of… weird. The legend of the selkie is usually more mournful than dangerous – those marriages rarely end well. But the love between a selkie and their human mate always touched me in ways most fairy tales didn’t. The problems they faced felt real, and I thought that there had to be a way to update it.
Trying to convince Mary-Therese that a seal could too be sexy took some doing, but I think their big brown eyes finally won her over. Well, that and the fact that any creature that spends most of its life swimming is going to have one hell of a human physique… Olympic swimmer bod, anyone?
Um. Right. Where were we?
Sexy, check.
Okay, so once I’d convinced her that Dylan would be a hero worthy of Nocturne, I had to come up with the other two elements that make a good Nocturne: Danger, and secrets.
Danger. Right.
Who would endanger a selkie? The same sort of person who would endanger a seal, probably. Someone who looked at it and didn’t see a magnificent creature, but a product, or a means to an end. Someone who hunted selkies — and didn’t shy from killing to get what they wanted. Human, and deadly.
Boom. I had the danger.
And with my heroine – a woman trapped by the ocean she loves, who doesn’t know the depth of her own courage, who is going to have to face her family history in order to find future happiness — the trifecta of sexy, danger, and secrets was complete.
The Hunted. The result of my summer vacations (oh, I wish!) Enjoy!
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