Bookpleasures.com welcomes as our guest Ella Rose, author of Stealing the Selkie’s Heart.

Ella Rose is a paranormal romance author who loves kink, ink, and cake, and hopes you do too. She is a bi-sexual author writing through a Bi-Polar Disorder lens and thinks representation and mental health matter. She is the author of The Selkie Seas series, which includes Losing the Selkie’s Skin and Stealing the Selkie’s Heart.

Her latest selkie short stories will appear in Dark Rose Press’s Worlds Apart and Dragon Soul Press’s Beyond Atlantis anthologies.

She is a member of Romance Writers of America and the Paranormal Romance Guild.

Bee: What is your favorite scene in the book? Why?

Ella: My favorite scene is Ronan and Una’s first kiss. He’s already planning on seducing her to get his sealskin back, but he hasn’t yet made a move on her.

 But after visiting with the town mayor, Ronan sees his chance and pressures her into kissing him to uphold the farce that they are a newlywed couple. Afterward, Una says, “Do that again, and I’ll break your hand.” To which he mischievously replies, “If I get to do that again, it’ll be worth it.”

Bee: Where do you get the names for your characters?

Ella: Since the Selkie Seas series is set in historical Scotland, I reference a lot of Gaelic language to identity character names. For minor characters, I Google “Scottish boy names,” or something similar, and snatch whatever name sounds good to me. For major characters, I look up the Gaelic word for some adjective or noun that embodies the character (e.g., Ronan is based off the word for “little seal” and Prion is derived from the Gaelic for “prince.”)

Bee: How completely do you develop your characters before beginning to write?

Ella: A fellow writer turned me on to enneagrams, specifically the book Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery, and before I sit down to start a new project, I meditate on what significant things my creative consciousness is seeing about that character.

Next, I open my enneagram book and flesh out the “healthy,” “average,” and “unhealthy” actions for that enneagram. If my character is a main character/hero, I look at what “average” personas act like and then how their actions change to become more “healthy.”

For villains, I do the opposite: I examine what they look like starting as “average” personas that then shift closer to “unhealthy” actions. 

Bee: How does being a mother impact your writing?

Ella: It really just means that I write on a time budget. When my kids are home, my attention is on them, not my work.

And when they’re at school, it means I need to utilize my available time to max efficiency. So, to that point, I rarely write on the weekends—I see that as family time—, so I make the most out of week days for work productivity.

Bee: Tell us about your cover. Did you design it yourself? 

Ella: I did not design it myself because I am very aware of my limitations. Deranged Doctor Designs did all the covers for my books.

They sent me a questionnaire and I filled in pertinent information, like how many main characters should appear on the cover? What do they look like? What is the weather like in the cover scene?

What elements HAVE to appear, and which would be nice to appear? They took a relatively small amount of information and ran with it, and I couldn’t be happier with the results.

Bee: What writers have you drawn inspiration from?

Ella: Sarah J. Maas for action and unique love scenes; Nalini Singh for world building and how to handle the Fated Mates trope; Stephen King for character arcs and personalization. 

Bee: Can you tell us about  selkies? Where they originated, etc?

Ella: Selkies are essentially just seal shape shifters. Found primarily in Scottish folklore, they differ from other shapehifters in that when they change from their seal form to their human form, they keep their sealskin—it's like a cape that has small hooks down the stomach that have to be fastened or unfastened in order for them to change forms.  And the sealskin must be kept secretly safe—if another person gets hold of the sealskin, the selkie is bound to that person indefinitely until the sealskin is returned.

Bee: What was your first job?

Ella: At my first ever job, I was a cashier at a popular grocery store chain, Kroger.

As an adult, I was a Technical Writer for the government, making six figures and owning my own freelance company.

Then the day came when I was offered the chance to take the leap into being a full-time author, and I’ve never looked back since!

Bee: What do you do when you are not writing?

Ella: I’m a huge reader, so my spare moments are usually taken up with a book in hand. But I have two small kids who are one video game away from being domestically feral, so wrangling them takes up a lot of my time.

Most of my non-writing time, in fact, goes towards maintaining a cohesive family life.

Bee: What book/s are you reading at present? 

Ella: Currently I’m rereading Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Mist and Fury because I like to punish myself with All the Delicious Feels TM. And I’m simultaneously reading the psychological horror Bird Box by Josh Malerman as a palate cleanser between my Selkie Seas Books 1 and 2.

Bee: What are you currently working on?

Ella: Currently I’m working on Saving the Selkie’s Heart, Book 2 in The Selkie Seas series. It’s off to the editor for critique, which means I’ve bitten my fingers to the bone waiting on the results. My plan for it is for a December release.

Bee: Where can our readers find out more about you and your books?

Ella: My WEBSITE

Follow Here To Read Bee's Review of Saving the Selkie’s Heart