Whopping Weasel Virgin?

I'm pretty sure this fellow is straight. I mean, check out the pictures he's looking at--at least, I THINK that's a woman. Too bad we can't see his face along with his other parts, which are all very nice, but I guess we can't have everything.

I finished Virgin and sent it off Tuesday morning before heading out to my riding lesson. I could have sent it Monday night, but for some reason I didn't want to let go of it one moment before I had to. My agent only gave me one suggestion after she read it, which was to make the opening scene as sexy as the one from Fugitive. Seems she'd discussed this with my editor and that was one of the things she wanted to be sure were included in the book.

This was something I knew my editor wanted, but which is easier said than done, particularly when you have a virgin hero who has rarely even had an erection before. True, he's finally spotted a woman who interests him, but as you know, unlike today's Whopping Weasel candidate, Zetithians can't function without the scent of feminine desire. Pictures and fantasies just plain don't work for them.

I've had a few people write to me to complain that they didn't like the idea that Zetithian men couldn't masturbate. This was a characteristic that I felt made the Zetithians more animal-like--that scent was more important to them than anything else. I stretched this a bit in Fugitive; Manx can do it, but only because of his keen sense of smell. He still has to have a woman at least upwind from him. An aroused woman. Dax, on the other hand, has rarely met a non-Zetithian woman whose scent does it for him and hasn't a clue what it feels like. My agent was able to offer some suggestions for the opening chapter, which made my work a little easier, but it was still hard to come up with anything quite as hot as Fugitive's prologue, and I'm not sure I succeeded.

This is one of the problems inherent in writing a series; once you've decided on the traits of a particular species, you pretty much have to stick to them. You can stretch the rules, but breaking them whenever it's convenient makes your creations seem less real. I've tried to adhere to those basic principles in my writing. If a character has supernatural powers, it's because those powers are natural for their species. In Virgin, I use a character that is a Mordrial, the alien species from which Tisana (Warrior) was descended, and from whom her powers are derived. Threldigan is a full-blooded Mordrial, but there are still limits to his powers. The Mordrials can control one of the elements (Tisana's specialty was fire) and/or possess some form of mind-reading ability (Tisana's was reading the thoughts of animals). Threldigan can read minds to a certain extent, but he is also a magician, adept at creating illusions, though these are learned abilities, rather than magical powers. For him to be able to do more than his species allows would be cheating, just as it would be for Dax to be aroused by something other than a female's scent.

I'm pretty sure the manuscript will come back to me with more suggestions from my editor, but this is the first step, and I'm glad it's finally done. Now I have to write a dozen guest blogs for Hero and start on the proposal for the next project, book #8 of the CSC, which has yet to be named.

And so it continues. . . .