Hello There Naked Hero lovers!
I have been getting a lot of questions about my inspiration for the shape-shifting dragons in Luck of the Dragon. It involved a summer day, a spring feed river, and a Smith and Wesson dagger.
I live in the Missouri Ozarks, where rivers and rolling mountains and livestock abide. During the summer, it is our family’s favorite escape to go to one of the local spring-fed rivers. Now, lest you think it is entirely bucolic, our peaceful spot of heaven is also “floated” by folks from the metroplex, who carpool south in party barges loaded with kegs, and Mardi Gras beads, and vodka Jello shots.
The canoers hit our stretch of the White River about mid-afternoon. Up and down the canyon, the limestone bluffs echo with their whooping and music and rated-R antics. When we don’t have to shepherd the kids inside, we very much enjoy the entertainment. If you’ve never seen a drunk, sun-burned man stand up in the back of a canoe and yell at his wife to watch for rocks, only to plow into said rock, then summersault-face-plant into 65 degree water—it is a laugh-out-loud show!
The juxtaposition of one of the most beautiful places on the earth, with the Bourbon Street behavior, never fails to tickle my funny and creative bones. I sun bathe and make up back-stories for the couples that float by. I pull out my body language and emotional thesaurus books and test my skills. I plot novels in my head.
One summer day, my kids recovered a sheathed dagger in the river and reluctantly surrendered it to me. Usually we find sunglasses and shoes—lots of beer cans—but not weapons. I twirled the knife in my hand as my imagination skipped like a flat rock over the water: a dagger, a fight, a thief…
Overhead, a blue heron flapped by, big and graceful in the air, elegantly swooping his feet toward the river with each U stoke. I warg-ed into his brain, feeling the wind through his wing tips, the brush of water on my feet, the lure of fish swimming under the surface, the thrill of the hunt.
Ah ha—a dagger, a fight, a thief—and a dragon! I knew then, that my hero would be a shape-shifting dragon, and my heroine a conflicted thief.
Now, all these years later, I have Alec, my uber hot, Joe Manganiello-looking hero whose Las Vegas casino provides a hidden-in-plain-sight sanctuary for his dragon people. Alec’s only problem is the sexy gem appraiser trying to steal from him just might be his mate.
What about you? The recovered dagger led me to Lucy and Alec’s story. What is the strangest and/or coolest thing you’ve ever found?
All my best,
Susannah Scott
