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| Cover art by Ran Valerhon |
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| Art by Ran Valerhon |
This week we're lucky to have a visit from paranormal romance author
Cheryse Durrant. With her first book, and the first book in her Heart Hunters trilogy newly launched in e-book form, and soon to appear in paperback, please welcome Cheryse as she tells us how she went about
Unleashing the demon within...
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A child’s fingers curled around the outside rim
of a partially-open
coffin… my courageous
Heart
Hunters heroine
Shahkara evolved from this single, spooky image after it flashed
through my
mind more than five years ago. Those tiny, lifeless fingers didn’t
belong to my
Shahkara, but their discovery forced her to unearth and expose a
horrifying
cover-up.
That moment of inspiration, that Enchanted Orb, led to ideas and questions that had to be answered before my pen could hit the page.
My ‘barest of
bones’ puzzle included:
- Why were children going
missing – and why was
the child corpse found with its chest ripped out?
- What was the secret that
forced Shahkara to fear
herself even more than the evil Taloners devastating her
homelands?
As I jiggled away at the broken images and
half-baked
cookies scattered inside my mind, I discovered the answer: My
Taloner demons
fed off human hearts. That’s why they plagued Shahkara’s
homelands, and why an insidious
Taloner had infiltrated the castle – to slay humans for his own
hungry desires.
My Heart Hunters were
born.
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| Cover art by Ran Valerhon |
Of course, I still didn’t know how my demons
killed their prey,
but that secret lay in my subconscious. Why did I name them
Taloners? They had
to have…
talons. These
super-strong,
super-sharp claws, concealed between their knuckles, enabled them
to rip out a heart
with a single snatch.
My first Heart
Hunters
exploration was a short story chronicling Shahkara’s discovery of
a demon lurking
within her royal castle. The twist: my Shah was hiding her
half-Taloner
bloodline (and its associated cravings) in order to protect her
subjects.
Once I ended my original short, I kept
wondering: What happens
next? How will Shahkara destroy
the blood-thirsty Coven? How will she cope with the spiralling
heart hunger
that rides her blood? That’s how my novel, The Blood She Betrayed, about to be published by
Clan Destine
Press, was born.
Again, the answers to my questions hounded me
for yet more solutions:
- What if Shahkara discovered
there was an ancient
artefact, a death lantern, which could destroy all those
heart-devouring Taloners
in a single blast?
- What if that artefact was
hidden on earth and
she was forced to travel through a portal to find it?
- How would a royal princess
from medieval Gorias cope
with the bizarre, technological minefield of Brisbane, 2013?
I upped the ante by strengthening Shakara’s
motivations –
she lives with the guilt of ripping out her fiance’s heart the
night before
they were wed. Now she’s an exiled princess desperate to find the
lantern that
will, by saving her people, salve her condemned conscience.
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| Art by Ran Valerhon |
All Shahkara needed now was a little more
conflict – and some
love. An image of geeky billionaire Max McCalden flashed through
my head. He’s
the first
boy-man she
connects with when
she arrives on Earth (um, she catches him after he falls from a
balcony).
Max becomes the one person she can trust, but
his friendship
and tantalising heartbeats become a temptation she struggles to
control. The
more she relies on him, the harder it is to deny her heartlust –
and one human
heart in particular!
Although my novel, The
Blood She Betrayed, and my Heart
Hunter series, started with one thought-provoking image that
flashed through
my mind many years ago, it has been the piecing together of image
upon image, question
upon question, concept upon concept, that has created the rich
tapestry of my Heart
Hunters world that I now invite
you to enter.
Email me at cheryse (at) quietdawn (dot) org
and I’ll add
you to my mailing list to be part of The
Blood She Betrayed promotional giveaways when my paperback
is launched next
month. Until then, may the Enchanted
Orb
be with you, filling your life with magic, and ideas, every day.
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Bio: Cheryse Durrant grew up on an
Australian
cattle property where she invented stories about scrub faeries and
imaginary
superheroes. She wrote her first prose on her aunt's bedroom wall
at the age of
five but it did not attract literary acclaim. She worked as a
journalist for 15
years before trading her soul for fiction. The Blood She
Betrayed, is
her first Urban Fantasy novel, and is described by Vampire Diaries creator LJ Smith as ingenious and
unique. A
caffeine and Twitter addict, Cheryse shares her love of writing
and all things spec
fic at:
@cherysedurrant
(Twitter)
