About Immersed
“Despite what Hunter had told her, and shown her, and what she thought she’d accepted, fear and adrenaline jangled through Skye’s body. Her heart pounded. This was real. She had fallen into a fairy tale. One of the dark ones.” – Find Me
He is cursed, bound to the ocean. She is human, afraid of the sea. Falling for each other might be irresistible. And deadly.
The story and how it began
When Skye, a teenage girl traumatized by the drowning of her mother, returns to the scene in search of answers, she meets Hunter. He is mesmerizingly beautiful, but never seems to leave the water. What is he? Their intense connection draws them to each other, and Skye begins to uncover his secrets.
When their two worlds collide, they are both irrevocably altered, with incredible, terrifying consequences. Can love really conquer all?
Skye and Hunter’s story unfolds over four books of the Immersed Series, Find Me, Follow Me, Free Me and Forget Me.
Heart-breaking challenges face them and their friends in the series conclusion, Forget Me.
The two inspirations for this series came one on top of the other: re-reading a tragic fairy story, and reading for the first time a unique love story that changed YA paranormal romance fiction forever…
….The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen, and Twilight by Stephenie Meyer.
Spoiler alert! The Little Mermaid is a little too true to life for the escapist in me. Consuming love, total sacrifice, and loss. Love didn’t win her the Prince. And if it had, with the price she’d had to pay for the chance, could she ever be truly happy with him in his world? I’d read it as a child, but this time it saddened and angered me. I found myself trying to work out what a happy ever after would have looked like. And what if the roles were reversed – a princess and a merman? Or no mermaid or merman at all? Who would that ocean-bound person be? My imagination began to create Hunter.
The working title for Find Me was Come With Me. If you’ve read the story, you understand why.
It took me over six years to write and revise the first book, one year to write the second, not counting all the work on it during the writing of book one. The free prequel Find Me Begins (available to News Letter subscribers in the back of Find Me) was first completed during the writing of book two Follow Me, the revision during book three Free Me, which took nearly two years. Before finishing the final edits of Free Me, I defied most practical suggestions to leave Find Me alone, and revised and republished Find Me as a better-paced second edition (check the internal title page of your copy for ‘version 2’).
Forget Me could be the best of the series, where the price for Hunter saving Skye and drawing her into his cursed existence is called in for payment. This novel was challenging to write, tears were shed, but I love how Hunter and Skye’s story found its conclusion.
Learning my craft, figuring out who the Nemaro were, and beginning to understand how profoundly the connection between Skye and Hunter would shatter the status quo not just for them but for others, especially those closest to them: all of this took time and my fascinated, focused attention. What a ride.
I hope readers will be drawn deep into the Immersed love story and uncover the theme at its heart.