It’s not often we get to write about things that we’ve actually done. Most writers just research, or find someone who has done it and go from there. But every once in a great while we do get to weave a little bit of our real lives into our stories. In my latest story from Entangled’s Indulgence line, Her Sworn Enemy, I have a dive salvage operator and a historical preservationist/specialist who are searching for a sunken ship.
Now I only wish I’d found sunken treasure. The closest I came was in purchasing a Spanish Reale coin for my husband on our honeymoon that had been plucked from the ocean floor. What I have done is gone diving. In fact, these Throwback Thursday shots are from my honeymoon in 1989 in Grand Cayman when I was just 19! Diving is one of the coolest recreation sports I’ve ever done. Of course I blame my interest in it on my Pisces husband…is it any wonder I wanted to write about Pisces for the Men of the Zodiac series? Take a peek at my dedication in the story and you’ll see I’m surrounded by them!
One thing I love most about diving is the sensation of being weightless when your bounancy neutral. It feels kind of like being a fish, because you can just hang there in the water, not moving and let the current push and pull on you, while you breathe in and out. I also love the beautiful world beneath the waves. Once, when we were diving in Montery, California, we had the opportunity to swim through a kelp forest. The big bull kelp really did look like a forest of skinny trees and the harbor seals where bobbing and weaving between the trunks, playing with us.
Like my character Belladonna Dupre in the story, I had a mishap while I was getting my open water diving certification. My mouthpiece separated from my regulator, meaning I was down at 35 feet sucking in water instead of air! Thankfully it was a training dive in a lake and my instructor was able to buddy breathe with me to the surface, but it wasn’t something you forget. In Bella’s case it’s a bit scarier, first because she’s out in the open ocean (and let me tell you nothing makes you feel smaller than being out in the big blue) and two, she is down a lot deeper than I was when my mishap occurred. But that’s a writer for you! We take what we know, or research, and we tweak and adapt it for our characters. It may be real, but everything that happens to our characters is still tuned to their unique perspective as a person.
So now you’ve gotten a little snapshot of my past and seen how it’s impact my latest book. I hope you’ll dive into Her Sworn Enemy and come up only when you need air.
Find out more about Her Sworn Enemy!
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