All this week I’ve been sharing background info on the
creation of my romantic suspense novel DEEP BLUE on Facebook, so I thought I’d group
it all into a blog post in case any of you missed it and might be interested in
my thought process while writing it.
I began my writing career with historical western romances,
but I’d always been fascinated by sharks so had long entertained story ideas
around them. About 3 years ago, I decided to finally write the book I had been
thinking of. Initially, I saw it as more of a thriller (going back to an
outline I’d written over 15 years prior), but in light of the devastation to
the shark population due to overfishing and shark finning, I knew I wanted to
write a story that showed more love to the shark than was usually the
case in shark books and movies. I’m a great fan of the movie JAWS, but I wanted
to explore the subject deeper than simply the abject fear that people experience
when it comes to these often misunderstood fish.
Enter Dr. Grace Mann, my main character. It took a few
drafts to smooth her out because at first she was smart but aloof and all
business. A bit too cold, unfortunately. When I backtracked and built up her
childhood, that’s when I found her overwhelming love for sharks, and the story
began to click. (She accompanied her shark researcher father to the Farallon
Islands as a child, bringing out her wild nature, an aspect I find really
important when excavating a character.) She’s also a computer geek and that
played into her rather obsessive nature regarding her work and the underwater
sonar array she’s trying to develop.
Part of the backstory for my underwater filmmaker hero Alec
Galloway is related to surfing. I read up on big wave surfing (THE WAVE by
Susan Casey is an amazing book about giant waves, rogue waves, ship-crushing
waves, and she includes chapters about the men who try to surf them – Jaws in
Maui, Mavericks in Northern California, and Teahupoo in Tahiti)
I was so intrigued by this that I decided the Galloway family,
led by Alec’s dad, Big Jim Galloway, would not only be a surfing family, but
Big Wave surfers to boot. This includes Alec’s younger siblings, Tyler
(who stars in Book 2, COLD HORIZON) and Brynn (star of upcoming Book 3, ANCIENT
WINDS).
While they no longer do this in the present time of their
stories, it was a piece of their backstory that showcased the drive and nerve
that each of them possessed. It also informs Alec’s character in that he’s a
fairly cautious guy because of some of the crazy stuff he’s seen and done. This
created some clashes with Grace in DEEP BLUE, since he believes her actions are
reckless at times. Grace, of course, doesn’t see it that way.
How do you feel about this picture? This is Ocean Ramsey, a
biologist and shark conservation advocate who spends nearly every day in the
water with sharks. She is also the target of much criticism due to her
interactions with sharks, especially great whites. I state at the end of DEEP
BLUE that my character Dr. Grace Mann was inspired by Ms. Ramsey, and this is
true. Ramsey’s interactions and knowledge of marine life, and especially
sharks, shows us what’s possible when it comes to human/fish interactions. I find
her work fascinating, and it informed Grace in the sense that I knew these
types of encounters were possible. I write fiction, and I certainly take poetic
license at times, but I do try to couch my storylines in a thread of truth.
There’s no easy answers as to whether interacting with wildlife – and in the
case of great white sharks, very dangerous wildlife – should or shouldn’t
happen. I did explore this further with Grace and another marine scientist in DEEP
BLUE: COCOS ISLAND, a follow-up short story. It’s an interesting discussion
that I will continue to follow, both in the real world and in my work.
One reason I enjoy writing romances is the fun in creating a
scenario for two people to fall in love and following along on that journey. DEEP
BLUE, and the second book COLD HORIZON, aren’t strictly romances—these books
are more action oriented and I made an effort to make them more readable to a
broader audience by not following the standard romance plot, which is generally
filled with more internal character musings and structure. Still, at the center
of these stories are two people finding their way to each other.
The key to a good romance is finding the inherent obstacle
between the couple. For Alec and Grace, it boiled down to a clash between
Grace’s love and confidence in the water with sharks and Alec’s inherent
caution around such dangerous creatures. I built up these viewpoints by giving each
of them specific experiences from their past. For Grace, it was growing up at
the feet of her shark researcher dad and absorbing his obsession and respect
for great white sharks; for Alec, it was having a healthy respect for the
ocean, whether it be via big wave surfing or the loss of a close friend to a
great white attack that has continued to haunt him.
From there, it became great fun to write their scenes and
let the sparks fly.
During early drafts of DEEP BLUE, I was swamped with shark
info that I’d been collecting. I usually take different passes on a manuscript –
one to lay out the general outline and pacing, one to add layers to the
characters, one to beef up the romantic tension between the hero and heroine,
one to add descriptive details. It didn’t really occur to me that I should have
a shark main character (as I said, brain overload) but near the end of one of
the drafts Bonnie showed up, and it stopped me cold in my writing tracks. She
was a very large and very mature female great white shark. An alpha. A true
alpha of any creature on earth. I immediately began moving around scenes and
rewriting the beginning of the book because Bonnie needed to be present throughout
the story. There’s also a secondary shark named Felix, a randy youngin’ who
causes all sorts of trouble. If you’ve ever met a teenage boy, then you know
what I’m talking about.
While the gist of the story of DEEP BLUE is Grace freediving
with great sharks in an effort to observe their behavior without the impediment
and noise of scuba equipment, a side story is the testing of a prototype shark
sonar array she designed in an effort to detect sharks in a specified grid
area. Her goal is to have such an apparatus installed at ‘sharky’ beaches
around the world as an early warning system to swimmers and surfers. So, is
this a real thing?
I studied shark deterrents already in use and their effectiveness varied. It included such things as repellants (sonar,
chemical), underwater nets (as you can imagine, these devastate more than
sharks by trapping and killing everything else), and aerial spotters. The sonar
array that Grace builds using artificial intelligence was a work of wishful
fiction on my part. The idea is that there are multiple layers of code
identifying creatures as they enter the grid area. This type of neural network
is a “deep learning” program that becomes better over time as it acquires more
and more data points. My son Sam, a data engineer, was a huge help as I developed
this for the story, explaining to me how this would work. One exciting development
was that after the book was published, I came across scientists working on a
similar apparatus. So maybe one day you’ll go to the beach and pull up an app
on your phone that tells you immediately what’s in the ocean you’re about to
step into.
How did I research Guadalupe Island?
DEEP BLUE opens in Monterey, California, but the bulk of the
story takes place on a boat off the coast of Guadalupe Island, located on the Pacific
Ocean side of Baja California. It’s a fairly uninhabited island, with a handful
of fisherman and scientists in residence, and from August until about January,
it’s a hotspot of great white shark activity. The males arrive first, and then
in October the very large females make an appearance. It’s unknown why the
sharks congregate here, but it’s thought that they mate and feed, since there’s
a large seal population. (And for the record, no one has ever seen or filmed white
sharks mating or giving birth.) There are several companies that ferry
customers on live-aboard boats to cage-dive with the sharks, with departures
from San Diego, and if you’ve ever watched Shark Week on Discovery Channel,
many of the shows have been filmed here.
Still, I found it a challenge to find information about the
area so that I could realistically write about it (and since I was unable to go
myself). Internet searches turned up general info, but I’m always in search of
smaller, more interesting tidbits, the kind of stuff that isn’t on a Wikipedia page.
It took me a while, but I finally located several blogs written by people who
had visited the area, offering raw first impressions that made the writer in me
squeal with delight.
I’ve envisioned the Pathway series as loosely connected
standalones, which has been both a pro and a con when it comes to marketing.
Because the series isn’t deep, meaning I only have two books currently available,
advertising them has been a challenge. Eventually when I have the planned 6-8
books published, it will be easier to do more extensive marketing.
The main reason I wrote DEEP BLUE: AUSTRALIA was to offer a
free but exclusive read to my newsletter subscribers, giving them another
chance to hang out with Grace and Alec. An author’s newsletter list is a
beloved holy grail because it offers us the chance to reach our readers
directly (Amazon and Facebook greatly throttle that ability). But … if readers
are signed up for too many newsletters, they can be rightly overwhelmed by the
email volume in their inbox. It was my hope to sweeten the pot by offering
something they couldn’t get anywhere else in exchange for their valuable time.
Last year, I managed to get a coveted BookBub Feature Deal
for Deep Blue, but I had to make the book free. The key to making this type of
advertising work is to have follow-up books in which to recoup your losses.
BookBub deals aren’t cheap and generally run in the hundreds of dollars. I had
COLD HORIZON out, but with its mountain climbing theme it was a very different
book than DEEP BLUE, so in an effort to compensate for a low read-through rate,
I decided to publish AUSTRALIA and charge $2.99 for digital downloads. This is
an aggressive price for this type of short, and while other authors do use this
price point successfully, I didn’t have the name recognition to pull it off.
The result was reader backlash. Being an indie author means I’m able to pivot
and switch gears quickly, so I did. I wrote two more short adventures – REUNION
ISLAND and COCOS ISLAND – so that I could package all three together for $2.99,
giving readers a little more bang for their buck. While I must always consider
the economics of creating and pricing my projects, I strive to balance that
with reader expectations.
Some people have asked for another novel starring Grace and
Alec, but since that can take me upwards of a year to write, these shorts were
a way to continue their story while I work on other books in the Pathway
universe. I sure hope you enjoy them!
Did you know there’s a bonus scene of Alec’s first
impression of Grace over at Book+Main Bites? You can read it here.
To learn more about DEEP BLUE, visit my website.
