High Tide Episode 25: Places, Everyone! is live on Kindle Vella. Go forth, read, enjoy.

Today: 1,732 words
Total: 10,590 words

I had kind of a nice breakthrough today while working. As you now, Bob, I like to have a good, solid backstory for all of my characters before I start a story. I may not use much (or any) of that backstory in the actual book, but it informs how the character behaves and reacts to events.

I had come up with Scott’s backstory (mother died at birth, father was a park ranger, he grew up camping a lot and knew that there were non-human people out there, dad accepted his sexuality, he’d just broken up with a closeted boyfriend before coming to Olympic Cove) and Orrin’s backstory (was taken when he was only one by a Boche and raised as the family’s pet/retainer. Was well-educated, managed to travel a bit with the family using disguises, and had a torrid affair with Anton Boche who was going to return Orrin to Greece until he died unexpectedly and Anton’s son Charles decided to use Orrin as an experimental subject in his research into immortality).

Rian, however, was still kind of a mystery. I knew he was the grumpy to Orrin’s sunshine, he was the only male siren born in centuries, but that was pretty much it. And then it came to me today—his grandmother had decreed that Rian would stand as their family’s stud once he was of age and sire children on his cousins and aunts. Rian’s mother was horrified at this idea, stole Rian, and they’ve been on the run ever since. They’d made it to the coast of Florida and were moving from grotto to grotto when his mom got attacked by an ilkothella. Rian managed to kill it, and his mother begged him to kill her as well before she could transform fully. Desperate, he sang her to sleep and hid her in a cave, intending to travel to Olympic Cove and beg Poseidon for help when he was captured by Boche’s men.

I like to have echoes with my MCs as a reason why they’re attracted to each other so both Scott and Rian are unusual examples of a normally female breed, and both Orrin and Rian had been stolen from their families as infants and forced to hide what they were in order to survive.

This pleases me.