My special guest today is the wonderful Crystal Jordan. Crystal is a fellow Romance Diva and began writing romance after she finished graduate school and needed something to fill the hours that used to be eaten away by homework. She is originally from California, but has lived and worked all over the United States. Currently, she serves as a librarian at a large research university in the Rocky Mountains and writes paranormal, futuristic, and erotic romance.
Today, Crystal is talking about shape-shifters, and as you can see from my template above, they’re one of my favorite type of paranormal story to read and write.
BTW – to read behind the scene details of Crystal’s Carnal Desires series, go here.
One of my favorite (sub-sub) genres to write is shape-shifter romance. Four of my next five releases have shifters in them. You could say I’m a fan of things that go bump in the night…as long as I’m not actually bumping into them in real life. I have my limits.
Because I have such a love of shifters, I’m starting to run into the problem of which shifter to do next. I’ve pretty much done all the major predators on Earth. Well, the sexy predators. I could do Mongoose heroine or a Kimodo Dragon hero, but they just don’t seem sexy to me. Sexy is a big, dangerous cat. A ferocious wolf. An enormous bear.
Giraffe and camel shifters? Noooo.
So, when I limit to just the “sexy predators,” it reduces the kinds of shifters I can write about, and that means I run out of different animals pretty quickly. That’s when desperation sets in. I mean, recycling is all well and good with my plastic Sierra Mist bottles, but is a little less awesome when it come to my books. I want people to read my work and say each one is distinct (and hopefully as awesome as recycling is for the planet. Just sayin’). So, I’ve researched the heck out of the different species and breeds within my predator groups. I’ve used most of them already. Lions, tigers, bears, dragons, mermaids, wolves, minxes, hawks, falcons, eagles, ocelots, cougars, leopards, snow leopards, panthers, lynxes. The list goes on; those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head. But you can see how it might leave me with the questions of…so now what do I do?
I’ve tried to mix up the shifters in each book, and maybe have more than one in a particular “world.” For example, my upcoming Kensington release, Carnal Desires, has four different kinds of shifters in a futuristic world. Bears, mermaids, dragons, and tigers. Whereas, in my October release from Samhain, I only have werewolf shifters in a modern world, but I have every other imaginable paranormal creature under the sun, from sirens to nymphs to sprites to vampires. Then with my May 09 Kensington book, On The Prowl (also a contemporary story), I have panthers. Only panthers and nothing else. So, I’m trying to change it up a little every time even if I can’t come up with a bright and shiny new shifter I haven’t used before.
And let’s face it. If I haven’t used it or come up with it, someone else has. It’s a pretty popular genre, especially in erotic romance. Not that I have a problem with that. My fetish for shifters isn’t just for writing them, but for reading them as well.
Anyone have any good recommends? I’m always looking for new additions to my mountainous To Be Read pile.
Thanks for having me, Shelley! This was fun!
Related posts:
June 25th, 2008 at 5:19 am · Link
Thanks so much for having me, Shelley! This was fun!
June 25th, 2008 at 6:43 am · Link
And I just realized my first comment was almost exactly the same as the last line of my guest blogger post. I feel so original.
June 25th, 2008 at 6:59 am · Link
giraffe shifters LOL!
Your sexy predators are awesome! I love shifters too. Which is probably why I love reading your books ;)
June 25th, 2008 at 7:00 am · Link
Awww! She wuvs me.
*slips R.G. a C-note*
June 25th, 2008 at 10:51 am · Link
WOOOOOOT!!!! This book is HOT HOT HOT!!!!!!!! I’ve gotten to hear about it so I can’t wait to get my copy!!!
June 25th, 2008 at 10:51 am · Link
I hope you like it, Jen.
June 25th, 2008 at 1:52 pm · Link
Hi Crystal! I’m looking forward to your book. I’m a huge shifter fan, although I prefer big cats and have so far written black leopards and lions in my Middlemarch Mates series with Ellora’s Cave. I have written a killer whale shifter that was rather fun. It’s in the From the Deep anthology.
LOL – how about a hippo shifter? Hyenas? They’d both obviously be bad guys with big girths and leers.
June 25th, 2008 at 1:53 pm · Link
I do have a hyena shifter…and he is a bad guy. That’s a WIP though, hopefully available soon!
June 25th, 2008 at 2:49 pm · Link
I adore shapeshifters!
Your cover is gorgeous!!!!
June 25th, 2008 at 2:51 pm · Link
Thanks, N.J.! I had nothing to do with it. I said “tigers are sexy…so are nekked men.” The artists did the rest. LOL!
June 25th, 2008 at 2:59 pm · Link
I’ve toyed with the idea of a squid. LOL!
Sounds great Crystal.
June 25th, 2008 at 2:59 pm · Link
Hi Crystal,
Carnal Desires sounds like a hot read. I just started reading shape-shifters but I’m already hooked. I would recommend Cynthia Eden’s Hotter After Midnight.
June 25th, 2008 at 3:02 pm · Link
A squid?
Those are kind of scary to me. I’ll stick with my sexy kitties. Good luck though–I’m convinced if you write it well enough, you can make anything work!
Thanks for the recommend, Jane! That’s awesome. I’ll have to go check out her site.
June 25th, 2008 at 4:17 pm · Link
Love the cover!
June 25th, 2008 at 4:20 pm · Link
Thank you!
June 25th, 2008 at 4:39 pm · Link
I love shifter books. Especially cats.
June 25th, 2008 at 6:15 pm · Link
I love cat shifters.
Great interview.
June 25th, 2008 at 6:17 pm · Link
Yay! Cat shifters are my favorite, too. Though I did love writing a polar bear shifter, just because it felt like it hadn’t been done a lot before.
June 25th, 2008 at 11:24 pm · Link
I’ve noticed no one seems to do insect shifters. Well, besides Stan Lee and Spiderman. LOL. Of course, he’s not really a shifter and technically, I’m not 100% that spiders are considered insects.
I know they don’t consider themselves to be insects. More like bad-ass web-slingers.
But you get my drift, right? I’m thinking it might be fun to have a dude be a butterfly…or a ladybug! hee, hee…
Great interview! Thanks.
June 26th, 2008 at 12:21 am · Link
An insect??
Somehow I can’t see an insect as an alpha shifter. Ooh, how about a praying mantis. You could have all sorts of fun with that since the female eats the males after mating.
June 26th, 2008 at 6:27 am · Link
Okay, now y’all are just starting to scare me. Heroines who kill the heroes after sex is just not right. Then again–death by orgasm–what a way to go, right?
June 26th, 2008 at 11:11 am · Link
Hi Crystal! I’m so thrilled for you (and me too) on your upcoming Aph. book! You so deserve this and going to be looking forward to more there from you! I haven’t seen you around so now I know why even tho I haven’t been on as much as I’d like to either so thrilled to find you on Shelley’s blog! I so love this cover of CARNAL DESIRES. The cover tells you so much what to look forward to. I felt it fit the blurb perfectly!
Is this a start of a series there? How many within the series you plan for? and too the one out after that at Kensington thats in the contemp world, is that too a start of a series or they both just going to be single titles with? I shall go to your site, I bet it will answer that over there.
I have sort of a fun question for you… If you could invite five writers, alive or from the past, to your house for dinner, who would you invite? What have you always wanted to ask them or say to them? And too whats your favorite meal you’d serve?
June 26th, 2008 at 11:19 am · Link
Heya Caffey! Thanks for stopping by!
Right now, both the Carnal Desires novellas and the On The Prowl novellas are stand-alones. I don’t have plans for more currently, but my Kensington editor could always ask for more stories in those worlds if they sell well. I guess we’ll see, huh?
Hmm…five authors dead or alive? Well, first, they’d be getting my secret spaghetti recipe for dinner because it’s the only thing I cook really well. The authors themselves would be Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Ian Fleming, Anne McCaffrey, and Chaucer. And I think I’d just chat with them and see how fascinating they were naturally. No specific questions.