Moonlight and roses evoke romance for many women but for me, its moonlight and something wicked. It may be fangs or fur or immortality or any class of beast but paranormal, anything above and beyond the ordinary or the expected, that lights my personal fire. Of course in real life, my husband is an average mortal with nary a whiff of otherworldliness but I like to dream and those fantasies become the stories that I write.
What sparked my interest in the strange and unusual is something I’ll never know for sure. It could have been growing up in that old brick Victorian house where the paranormal was just everyday normal or maybe it was some of the stories that my Granny, seer and seanachie, shared with me. Whatever her fey gifts, I received them in abundance. Like my great-grandmother, I have a gift for knowing what I should not know or seeing what to most remains unseen. That same talent also came to me from the other side of my family, from my mother’s grandfather, the seventh son of a seventh son (and he had the gift), her mother, and other relatives as well who shared a little DNA and made me what I prefer to call fey and I’ve accepted it long ago.
It could have been my mother’s addiction to Dark Shadows that introduced me to Barnabas Collins or the books I read. I always loved a good ghost story and as a teen, my uncle Darrell began sharing his vast collection of paranormal reads with me. I got hooked and remain so although his reading choices seldom included romance.
Maybe that werewolf I saw when I was eight or nine had something to do with it. Before anyone judges me crazy, I’ll just say that what my cousin and I encountered behind a stone edifice called “The Castle” in a heavily wooded park in an urban setting sure looked like a werewolf to two small kids who already had a very strong interest in all things paranormal. Our memory remains intact and whatever the hell the thing we saw was, we still both can describe it down to the finest hairs. Whether or not it was really a werewolf – which it probably wasn’t – doesn’t matter because we believed it was at the time. That is what makes paranormal and fantasy fiction work – at the moment we read, we believe.
I discovered romance early too, reading my mom’s book club editions of Victoria Holt classics and helping myself to my older cousin’s reading material, much of which happened to be rather explicit. I developed the notion that love and sex went hand in hand together. Add to that a taste for the exotic, the paranormal, and voila – you have a paranormal romance author who doesn’t mind tossing in some heat.
All my romances aren’t paranormal. Of the upcoming titles, I’d say it’s divided about evenly between the paranormal and the contemporary. It depends on whether or not the reader wants to count a little time travel as paranormal but since arriving in a time different than your own isn’t normal, I put it in that category.
Writing is the occupation I’ve striven to make my own for a very long time. Now that I’m living it, learning firsthand about the long hours, the hard work, and the never ending to-do list, I still have no regrets.
And I still dream about romantic moments with something or someone not of this world. If you do too, come join me in my stories.
Be sure to enter the giveaway below!
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About the Author
Great blog post!
Hello –
Just wanted to let you know that your link on this site to enter the contest/giveaway for Lee Ann Sontheimer Murphy’s book is not working. When you click onto where it says, ‘To enter fill out the form HERE’, the internet give you an ‘HTTP 404 Not Found error message’.
I’d like to enter the giveaway (if it’s for a print book), so how would we go about doing this?
Thanks,
Lea Ellen {night owl in IL}
borg_66@hotmail.com
Thanks for the giveaway and the link works now.
Wow, I got so caught up in the post, I wanted it to continue. Thanks for sharing and the opportunity to win the giveaway.
dz59001@gmail.com