Serendipity

It’s my enormous pleasure to welcome today a writer I’ve admired since before I ever thought of writing myself. For me, she is the queen of deliciously dark, paranormal erotica – Janine Ashbless. Welcome, Janine, and congratulations on the release of your Arabian Nights romance Heart of Flame.

Have you had it? It’s creepy and it’s spooky and it makes you feel like you are channeling a message from the Other Side. It’s Writer’s Serendipity and it’s one of the most fun things about being an author.

I was writing Heart of Flame, my Arabian Nights adventure, and I was looking for a Thing and a Monster for the next link in my plot-chain (HoF is a romantic romp involving magical travel all over the medieval Middle East, so I had a pretty broad choice).  I had the setting for this particular chunk of plot: the Swamps of Basra, famous for the floating islands of the Marsh Arabs. It’d make a nice contrast to all that desert they’d been exploring so far.  So I needed an excuse to send my characters there. And I needed something/one that would stop them getting what they came for, and send them off to get something else first.

I like to prolong the agony like that.

Anyway, this part of the job involves lots of shuffling of post-it notes and racking of my brains and reading around.

So, I thought, how about a magical tree, in the swamp? And they have to get a fruit off the tree, and it has a guardian. Well … the Swamps of Basra lie at the mouth of the Euphrates River. And in Genesis, the Euphrates is one of the rivers that are said to have their source in the Garden of Eden. So, if a certain apple-core were to have been thrown in the river and washed hundreds of miles downstream …  another tree could have grown there. The sole descendent of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

“Ha ha!” thought I.  “Of course, that tree would have to have a divine guardian.”

And then, online, I found that there IS ACTUALLY A HOLY TREE NEAR BASRA. It’s known as the “Tree of Adam,” and it was alive until very recently.

LINK:   http://www.panoramio.com/photo/5488853

*Hairs stand up on the back of my neck*

Then, THAT WEEK, I went to the British Museum and I looked in the Ancient Iran collection and I saw depicted there a creature I’d never heard of that would make a perfect holy guardian. And according to the caption it lived in a “tree without evil and of many seeds.” By that point, I wasn’t even surprised. Sometimes plots seem to write themselves…

So, has it ever happened to you?

xxx

Janine Ashbless

www.janineashbless.blogspot.com

And on the One-Thousand-and-Second night, Scheherazade told this story…

By day, Taqla uses her forbidden sorcery to move freely about the city of Damascus in the guise of an old sage. Her true identity known only by her faithful servant woman, Taqla is content with the comfortable, if restrictive, life that keeps her safe from the control of any man. Until she lays eyes on a handsome merchant-traveler. Suddenly her magical disguise doesn’t rest so easily on her shoulders.

When long-time widower, Rafiq, hears that the Amir’s beautiful daughter has been kidnapped by a scheming djinni—and that she will be given in marriage to her rescuer—he seeks the help of “Umar the Wise” to ensure he will be that man. Yet as he and the disguised Taqla set off, he senses that his prickly male companion is hiding something.

In a moment of dire peril, all of Taqla’s secrets are stripped bare—her fears, her sorcery and, worst of all, her love for Rafiq. Yet the princess’s life hangs in the balance, and there is no running away or turning back. Even though passion may yet betray them all…

Product Warning: Scary monsters and creepy ruins in the desert—check. Pagan gods that demand blood-sacrifices—double check. A handsome hero who looks good in a robe and even better out of it—oh yeah. Check, check and check. That’s worth a heroine dropping a veil or two.

Heart of Flame sale link:

http://store.samhainpublishing.com/heart-flame-p-6571.html