Ruby Fielding...Hunted!

We like shifters here don't we?
Well, in that spirit, I'm so pleased to welcome author Ruby Fielding. Ruby has a wonderful new paranormal called Hunted, and she's here to answer a few questions about this hot release and the paranormal world!

Interview with Ruby Fielding

 

Ruby Fielding is a widely-published author in multiple genres. She has worked with multinational publishers and indies, big movie companies and art-house independents, and regularly writes for national newspapers. Her most recent paranormal romance is Hunted, part of the Shifters’ World series.

 

Why paranormal romance? What’s so hot about werewolves, vampires and ghosts?

I love that extra frisson of danger and risk: if a story doesn’t have that, then it’s just a romance. This is fine – I’m a sucker for a good romance – but I want my paranormal romances to get under my skin. There should be thrills, risks: genuine tension that heightens the romance, and makes any happy ever after hard-earned.

 

Writing about tension and fear is very similar to writing about passion: if it’s done well the author uses all the senses and never misses an opportunity to cast that spell. Put the two together and it really is magical: setting danger against desire heightens everything.

 

It’s an animal thing, too. It’s about those raw, intense passions and needs. You don’t get much more alpha-male than a shifter hero, a man who can just sweep you off your feet and possess you. As a writer it lets me explore intense attraction and giving yourself up to desire. It’s fascinating, and damn me, but it’s hot.

 

Romance or erotica?

I love both. I love the immediate gratification and focus of erotica; I love the storytelling and the irresistible build of romance. But I don’t really get romance that shies away from, well, the big climaxes, shall we say?

 

Girl meets wereboy. They fall in love and face any obstacles to that love together. They don’t then just hold hands and gaze into each other’s eyes. Not in my books anyway, and not in the books I like to read. My characters are adult and they do a lot more than just holding hands. And shifter fiction highlights this: all those animal urges can make it so much more intense.

 

What do your friends and family think of your writing?

Mostly they’re very proud and supportive. They know how tough it can be to actually support yourself as a writer. They’re also intrigued. I write all kinds of things, under a variety of pen-names and much of my work involves ghost-writing books for mostly minor celebrities, all covered by non-disclosure agreements. It pays the bills and it sure does give me lots of material. But I do stick by those non-disclosure agreements so my friends and family don’t know what I spend most of my time actually writing. They probably think I write that Fifty Shades stuff or something...

 

When you're not writing, what do you like to do?

Watching movies – anything from horror to the lightest of chick flicks; there are very few films that are so bad I can’t watch them. I like long walks in the wilds – I love the White Mountains. And people-watching, which I find endlessly fascinating (it’s only stalking if you follow them home).

 

You’re widely traveled and you’ve lived in lots of different places. Why the wanderlust and will you ever settle?

I guess I’ll have to stop at some point, but ever since I went freelance a few years ago a big part of that was the freedom to up sticks and move around. The wanderlust was a sudden thing, in my mid-twenties. Up until then I’d read lots of travel books, and my friends had all had their exotic gap years but somehow I’d never thought it was me. Then I realized opportunities were passing me by and it was about time I seized them. So I moved to Kerala and wrote until my savings ran dry, and just took it from there. Lots of adventures, and no regrets.

 

Tell us about your latest release.

Hunted: a Shifters' World novella is my new book. It started off as a short story (published as Lone Wolf). The setting and the characters took a powerful hold on my imagination and pretty soon I’d written three more stories in the series. Rather than just collect the four stories together, I rewrote them into a single narrative, Hunted. It was important for me to do this extra work, as it gave me the opportunity to tighten the writing and expand on some parts, and to remove the inevitable repetition you need as each separate story reintroduces the world and characters.

 

Here’s the cover description:

 

Should she struggle to survive alone or give in to desire and risk the - perhaps deadly - company of others?

 

In a world where plague has swept civilization away like leaves in a storm, where viruses that cause people to shift and change have altered what it is, for most, to be human, a few survivors hold out in a desperate attempt to save the human race. Selene lives alone in the forest, protecting herself from human and shifter alike until one day a stranger turns up: a young man called Skinner, out on a quest to hunt down and destroy any shifter he can find. Torn between desire and fear, Selene must confront her true nature and make some impossible choices if she is to survive this harsh, post-apocalyptic future.

 

Hunted: a Shifters' World novella - a shapeshifter erotic romance of survival and desire in a deadly future from the co-author of Seduced by Moonlight and The Touch.

 

How do you make plague and the apocalypse sexy?

Danger and tension get the heart pumping and the adrenaline flowing, just as sex does. Danger reaches something primal in us: if we’re at risk we need to take every opportunity to procreate and so risk and sex always go hand in hand. The post-apocalyptic setting of the Shifters’ World series is all about survival, and that pokes those primal instincts until it gets a response.

 

In this setting, viruses can turn humans into shifters, and these viruses are passed on in bodily fluids. So a shifter’s bite will infect its victim, but so too will sex. Shapeshifting as a sexually-transmitted disease? I hadn’t really seen it that way until I started writing, but it makes perfect sense within the story; what’s more the best way for an STD to spread is if it encourages risky behavior – yes, this is Shapeshifting as an STD that also acts as an aphrodisiac!

 

Do you have a favorite character or characters you feel especially close to?

Selene in Hunted fascinates me. She’s packed full of determination and spirit, surviving on her own in the wilds, but also she’s lost: her memories are vague; just as she gets insight into her past that memory is snatched away. So frustrating for her! And she’s clearly special: not only a survivor, but someone who has a past, and someone who is different now. I’m looking forward to taking her story further in the future.

 

Do you have an excerpt from Hunted you would like to share?

The cage was not high enough for her to stand, so she sat in the middle, her knees drawn up to her chin, as if huddling into a fetal ball might somehow protect her.

At first there was no sign of them, but eventually they came. As the shadows grew longer and the sun fell below the tops of the trees, they came.

First, a man. Naked, his body scrawny and white, almost luminously so in the growing twilight. Dark hair matted his chest, and the silvered hair on his head was long and his beard thick and unkempt.

He came to stand by the bars of her cage, making no attempt to cover himself so that inevitably her eyes were drawn to that thick knot of hair at his crotch and the semi-hard shaft of his manhood.

“Please...” she said softly, eyeing the cage’s bars warily. “Please don’t...”

She started to rock back and forth and all the time the man just stood there, studying her.

So close, his scent was almost overpowering, an intense, sweaty musk. An animal scent, one that reached deep inside her and started to wake something primal.

“No, please don’t.” She shut her eyes tight, fighting the thing, the beast within.

After a long silence, she hoped that he had retreated. When she opened her eyes she saw a beast, fully in wolf-form, charging towards her, and then throwing itself at the cage. The impact was like an explosion. The bars clanged and groaned, and for a moment she thought the cage was going to topple over or collapse under the onslaught, and then the beast fell back with a yowl of frustration.

After another long pause, the thing rose to all fours and snarled, shook itself and then trotted up to the bars, sniffing.

“Go, please,” she whispered, but the thing stayed there, following the perimeter of the cage, sniffing all the way round as if it might find a weakness.

That was when she felt that shifting again, and a painful clicking of her spine as her body tried to settle into a new form.

“No. Please, no.”

She had to fight it. Had to resist.

Had to deny that beast within when with every breath she could smell the shifter circling her cage, and the distinct scents of others, not too far away now.

“I am human. I am Selene.”

Another shifting, an easing. I am Selene.

 

Ruby Fielding is a British author, currently living in the heart of a New England forest. She travels widely, and has lived in England, Scotland, the US, France, India and Australia. Wherever she happens to be living, you're likely to find her at the nearest wifi hot spot with her laptop and a large mug of coffee.

She writes mainly paranormal erotica and romance, sometimes in collaboration with her old friend Polly J Adams; their joint stories are published separately and collected together into the single volume, Seduced by Moonlight.

 

All the latest news on Ruby's writing and publishing can be found on her website and on her Amazon author page; also, why not join her mailing list, or hook up with her on Facebook?

 

Hunted: a Shifters' World novella is currently available from:

• Amazon.com
• Amazon.co.uk
• Barnes and Noble
• Kobo
• Google Play
• ...and it will be available from Smashwords and All Romance eBooks soon!