Surrender of a Siren

Rising star Tessa Dare talks to us about mythological inspiration, 18th-century erotic novels, Jane Austen and what all three have to do with her latest release, Surrender of a Siren.

Grayson is the captain of the Aphrodite, and Sophia is his beautiful siren. What inspired these mythological allusions?
Once I decided to set the book mostly on a ship, I just couldn't resist naming it for Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. Yes, it's the Regency-era Love Boat. As for sirens, in Greek mythology, the sirens were dangerous creatures-half woman, half bird-who sang so sweetly no man could resist their call. At the outset of Surrender of a Siren, Gray has given up his life of debauchery and privateering to "go respectable" and build a shipping business. Temptation appears in the form of Sophia Hathaway, a beautiful, passionate young miss seeking passage on his ship. Gray lives for conquest, and Sophia makes it clear she won't put up a fight. But to prove to himself and his brother that he's truly turned his life around, Gray resists her siren call. In the end, however, it's not pleasure he finds himself helpless to resist. It's love.

Sirens traditionally lured sailors to their doom, but Sophia actually becomes Grayson's salvation. Why are they the perfect couple?
I see Sophia and Gray as two very similar people, at very different places in their lives. Sophia has boundless imagination. She's a runaway bride eager to embrace infamy and adventure. Gray's had his fill of pleasure-seeking, and he's learned the nature of regret. But they share the qualities of bravery, a passion for life, and deep convictions that don't always match up with society's rules. Gray's experience and Sophia's idealism balance one another, and together I see them living quite happily indeed.

Readers first met Sophia in Goddess of the Hunt. Did you have her story already in mind while writing the first book or did her character just take on a life of her own?
Sophia definitely took on a life of her own! Originally I'd planned for her to end up with her romantic interest in Goddess of the Hunt, as a secondary romance. But I wasn't very far into writing the book when I realized she and Toby were entirely wrong for one another. And I had too much fun writing Sophia to give her up. She craved adventure, and I wanted to go with adventuring with her.

The Aphrodite's voyage to Tortola is incredibly realistic, from the crew's superstitions to the storms. Do you enjoy doing historical research? And how much of it actually makes it into your novels?
I'm a librarian, and I do enjoy research. More research went into Surrender of a Siren than any of my other books, simply because every setting was completely unfamiliar to me, from dock to ship to island. I read several first-hand accounts of sea voyages written by passengers and sailors during the era, and those inspired a several scenes-from the dolphin-fish catch to the sailors' strange hazing rituals. Of course, for every book I research things I don't end up using in the story, but it all helps me to get into my characters' heads.

Gray and Joss may be half-brothers, but as the son of a slave, Joss has had an entirely different life experience. What inspired their very interesting, very complex relationship?
When I first began thinking about the story, I'd decided to send Sophia to Tortola, and I'd decided her hero would be a sea captain who'd been raised on a Tortola plantation. That was all. I knew very little about the West Indies during the Regency era. Like Sophia, I simply thought it sounded like an exotic, romantic locale. When I began researching, however, I quickly realized that life on Tortola was no fairy tale. The entire plantation economy (one that was crumbling by this time) had been built on slave labor. I had a choice: I could gloss over the issue, or I could address it. I chose to address it, and created Joss Grayson, Gray's half-brother, business partner, and best friend. Joss is captain of the Aphrodite, and a widower with a young son. He has grief to work through, a child to support, and a tenuous position in society as the illegitimate child of an English nobleman and a slave. He and Gray have very different visions of their family's future, and this causes strife between them. I didn't ignore the issue of race in their relationship, but for the most part I saw their disagreements as typical antagonism between any overprotective older brother and his younger counterpart. And I loved writing Joss so much, I gave him a substantial role in my third book, A Lady of Persuasion.

Sophia has a most unladylike hobby-drawing ribald illustrations. Is there a real-life inspiration for the book she carries on her travels?
Ah, The Memoirs of a Wanton Dairymaid? Each heroine in the trilogy passes this "naughty book" to the next, and it means something different to each of them. I must admit, when writing Goddess of the Hunt, I chose the Wanton Dairymaid title just for laughs. There was no particular book that inspired it, but "dairymaid" was a rather eroticized occupation at the time. (One slang term for a woman's bosom was her "dairy"!) I envision the book as a sort of cross between Fanny Hill and Samuel Richardson's Pamela. A sweet romance between a gentleman employer and his fresh-faced dairymaid, liberally laced with erotic interludes and capped with a happy ending. In short, it's not unlike a modern romance novel!

Your stories contain lots of witty repartee between characters; what is your approach to writing dialogue that's both funny and true to the period?
I love writing dialogue. In real life, I seldom come up with a witty remark in the moment. The perfect rejoinder only comes to me hours, days...sometimes weeks later. The wonderful thing about being a writer is that I can save them up and use them in my books! As for writing period dialogue, I look to Jane Austen's novels for much of my inspiration. For me, the fun of writing Regency-esque dialogue is exploiting that delicious tension between what propriety allows characters to say, and what it is they truly wish to express. Austen was a genius at writing dialogue that could be understood on several levels. In Persuasion, for instance, Anne's words on the constancy of affection are mere drawing-room small talk to her companions, yet their deeper meaning inspires Captain Wentworth to pen those immortal words, "You pierce my soul." Both humor and poignancy can spring from dialogue that has multiple meanings.

How has your experience as a librarian influenced how you connect with readers as an author?
Overall, I think it makes me grateful, especially as a new author. I know how hard it can be to match the right book with the right reader, and I understand that it's a leap of faith any time a reader picks up a book by a new or unfamiliar author. These days, readers have a lot of entertainment choices and a lot of demands on their time. People are busy. So at the risk of sounding hokey, I feel honored when someone chooses to spend precious free time with one of my books.

Do you remember the first romance novel you ever read?
I'm not sure if it counts as a romance novel, but when I was in elementary school I picked up a discarded library copy of Kati in Italy by Astrid Lindgren. It's a young adult romance featuring a young Swedish miss named Kati who keeps "accidentally" bumping into the tall, dark and handsome Lennart during her tour of Italy. They flirt their way through Venice, Florence, and Rome before he finally proposes marriage to her while she's treading water in the Mediterranean. I must have read it a hundred times.

What are you working on next?
I'm delighted to say that Ballantine has contracted another historical romance trilogy from me, to be published in Summer 2010. The three heroes are members of a quirky gentleman's association known as The Stud Club. (The "stud" involved is a valuable racehorse, but naturally the heroes are all studs, too!) After the mysterious death of their club's founder, the heroes-a duke, a warrior, and a scoundrel-are united by chance, divided by suspicion, and brought to their knees by love. Longer descriptions and excerpts will be forthcoming on my website: www.tessadare.com.