Pepper talks about Drake the weretiger

In my last blog, I promised to tell you about Drake, one of my characters in Blood Fest: Chasing Destiny,
the book coming out on April 30, 2011 from Black Opal Books.

Drake’s one of my favorite characters. He a weretiger and the local pride leader in England. I created Drake from an Amur, or Siberian yellow tiger I saw at a zoo, and combined him with the leader of one of the teams my team occasionally worked with in Mexico. This guy, whom I’ll call Darrel, was something else. He was more than just gorgeous. On a scale of 1 to 10, he was easily a 12. He was tall—probably 6’5” or 6’6”—had rippling muscles, dark-blond hair that hung to his shoulders, and marvelous jade green eyes that seem to look right through you to your soul. To this day, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a more beautiful man, at least physically, than Darrel. And he radiated a kind of male sexiness that, if it isn’t legal, it damn well should be. He was just too perfect to exist, if you know what I mean. This is the photo I’ve chosen to represent Drake. Unfortunately, I can show you one of Darrel, since I promised not to. Sorry.

When I decided to make Darrel a weretiger, it seemed only fair to combine him with an Amur tiger I saw in a third world zoo. This tiger was massive and rippling with muscles, like Darrel, but he was wonderfully scruffy. His fur was disheveled. He had mud on his paw and on one side of his butt. And he didn’t seem to care. He was lazy and appeared perfectly happy to look like a rag-a-muffin. My friend and I were at the zoo in the early evening and got to see the tiger get his supper. When they dumped the meat in the cage, he yawned and stretched, got up, laid back down, got up again and wandered over to the meat. Then rolled in it! I’m not kidding. He sniffed it then laid on it and rolled. After which, of course, he looked scruffier than ever.

I don’t have any pictures of the actual tiger, but these will give you an idea of what he looked like.

I thought combining this Amur with Darrel was poetic justice since most of us can’t look as good Darrel even on our best days. And Drake turned out to be a great character. He’s not really scruffy, he just not all that concerned about his looks. As the leader of the local weretiger pride in England, the unmated weretiger pride leader, he’s been demanding his own book. So I’m curious to see who I’ll come up with for a mate for him. If any of you would like to volunteer, just send me a bio.

Visit my website: http://www.pepperoneal.com

Learn more about Blood Fest: Chasing Destiny at:
http://pepperoneal.com/blood-fest-series/
Read an excerpt of Blood Fest: Chasing Destiny at:
http://pepperoneal.com/blood-fest-series/excerpt-chasing-destiny/
Check out Sherry’s Duty Calls as well as other Black Opal Books publications at:
http://www.blackopalbooks.com

Pepper, Best wishes with  your new book and thank you for sharing another set of fascinating characters, stories and background in your new book Blood Fest: Chasing Destiny  ~ out on April 30th from Black Opal Books 

Today Pepper talks about Chase, Bumper and Cindy

Yesterday I promised to give some details on the tiger I used to create Chase, my heroine for my new book, Blood Fest: Chasing Destiny, which comes out on April 30, 2011 from Black Opal Books. 

Chase is half human and half tiger. The story of my inspiration for her is rather interesting. I created her from a white Siberian tiger, I’ll call Bumper, and her keeper, whom I’ll call Cindy. I encountered Bumper and Cindy at a private game reserve outside of the United States. At the time, I was working with a team researching the smuggling of wild animals into and out of third world countries. My team was granted limited access to the game reserve so we could view firsthand the suffering some of these animals go through. But as the owners of the reserve were involved in some legal battles with the country’s government, we weren’t allowed to take photos, videos, or tape record any conversations. We were only allowed to observe, ask questions, and take notes. We also signed a non-disclosure agreement, promising not to give out any information on the location of the reserve. I will say, however, that Bumper was not native to the country she was in when I met her. I’ve also had to improvise to come up with photos, but at least you’ll get an idea of what she looks like. 

Bumper was young, only about two years old, and was a newcomer at the reserve. She’d apparently been smuggled in to the country we were in and sold as pet to a wealthy land owner. The owner kept Bumper until she got too big and too hard for him to handle. Then she was turned loose in the wild to fend for herself, the man obviously assuming that since she was a cat, she’d be able to hunt for her food.

However, while it may or may not be true of domestic cats, big cats raised in captivity do not automatically know how to hunt. According to Cindy, when Bumper was brought to the reserve, she was a pitiful sight, little more than skin and bones. The vet at the reserve estimated she hadn’t eaten for several weeks, probably since the day she’d been abandoned by her owner. I can’t even imagine how terrified she must have been to be dumped out in the mountains, away from everyone and everything she’d ever known, unable to catch even small prey. It really makes me wonder what on earth her owner was thinking.

Despite what she’d suffered, Bumper was unfailingly cheerful and playful. I call her Bumper because when wanted something, she’d head butt you in the ass. Her way of saying, “Hey, pay attention. Or else.” When I met her, she’d been at the reserve for a month and had not fully recovered from her ordeal. She was still eager to please, delighted by the slightest attention, and had a wonderfully sweet nature. However, as Cindy was quick to point out, Bumper was a wild animal, not a pet. She should never have been kept as a pet, especially by someone who didn’t truly understand her needs. Still, we did get to pet her, and since my face was apparently too dirty to suit her, Bumper decided to give me a bath. Let me tell you, having a tiger wash your face is a very unnerving experience. Their tongues are like sandpaper. And their teeth are huge, especially up that close. Not to mention their saliva is sticky. Still, it was something I’ll never forget.

Cindy told us that Bumper had an indomitable spirit. She never gave up. Even sick and malnourished, when faced with larger, stronger animals, Bumper simply refused to back down or submit. Because of this, they’d had to move her to a separate enclosure to eliminate fights between her and the other big cats. Not that Bumper started the fights, necessarily, but if the other animals started hassling her, she’d take on all comers. Even getting the worst of the fights, most of the time, didn’t nothing to quench her fierce, warrior’s spirit. And as we studied this scrawny, undersized animal, there was a look in her eye that dared us to challenge her. I could almost hear her saying, “You want a piece of me? You think you can take me? Well, just come on and try!”

Tigers by nature are solitary creatures, only coming together to mate, after which the male abandons the female, leaving her to raise the cubs on her own. But Bumper was extremely gregarious. When they first separated her from the other big cats, she pined for company, finally making friends with a German Sheppard, I’ll call Bo, and a ram, I’ll call Tubby. Bo and Tubby (he was the fattest sheep I’ve ever seen) spent hours in the enclosure with Bumper, getting head butted in the ass if they stopped paying attention to her. However, neither dog nor sheep seemed inclined to retaliate. Which was probably just as well. I asked Cindy once why Bumper didn’t try to eat Tubby, and she told me that Bumper had always been fed raw meat, so she probably had no idea Tubby should even be considered prey. To Bumper, Tubby and Bo were just good friends.

Cindy was elfin—a tiny, delicate creature, who looked like she had no business handling wild animals. Shy around humans, she seemed fearless working with creatures that outweighed her by hundreds of pounds. She stuttered a bit while talking with the team, but I never heard her stammer around the animals. The animals loved her and accepted her unconditionally, which is probably why she was so comfortable around them. After all, unconditional love is pretty hard to beat.

So when I needed a heroine to go with Roman, Bumper was the first thing that came to mind. Combining her personality with Cindy’s gave me a shy American with an attitude—one who refuses to give up, no matter how hard the circumstances or how badly she’s treated by fate. Chase is basically a shy virgin (well, a virgin at the beginning of the book) willing to take on all comers. Pairing her cat with Roman’s wolf was fun, especially the first time Chase hisses at him.

For my next blog here at Sherry’s on April 25th, I’ll give you a preview of Drake. In Blood Fest: Chasing Destiny, he’s a Siberian, but in real life, he’s an Amur Tiger and one bad ass dude. I combined him with an overall bad boy human, to make a hot, sexy, pride leader. And wait till you see the photo I came up with for him!

Visit my website: http://www.pepperoneal.com
Learn more about Blood Fest: Chasing Destiny at:
http:www. http://pepperoneal.com/blood-fest-series/
Read an excerpt of Blood Fest: Chasing Destiny at: http://pepperoneal.com/blood-fest-series/excerpt-chasing-destiny/

Check out Sherry’s Duty Calls as well as other Black Opal Books publications at:
http://www.blackopalbooks.com

Don't miss Pepper's final blog on Monday 25th

Please welcome back Pepper O'Neal

Please give a warm welcome back to fellow Black Opal Books author, Pepper O'Neal.

Several people have asked me where I get my ideas for the animal characters I use in my books, as I always have at least one character that’s not human. So I thought I’d use this blog to explain that.

Basically, I take the animal characters from the same place I take my human ones: from real life—from the friends and acquaintance, both human and non, I’ve met throughout my travels. Only with the animals, I don’t have to ask permission first.

I’m a sucker for animals. Always have been. As a child, growing up on a farm, I learned that animals have personalities, just like people do. Now, I’m not saying that animals—other than humans—are sentient beings, but they do all have unique personalities and seem to display many of the emotions we do. I’ve seen animals express happiness, anger, grief, depression, cleverness, shyness, and downright sneakiness. When I was younger, I assumed (you should never do that, you know) that this was only true of domestic animals. It seemed reasonable to me that if the animals lived around humans, they’d pick up some of the human mannerisms and habits, good and bad. But when I started working for a company doing educational documentaries and research in third world countries, I discovered that wild animals also had distinct personalities and gave the appearance of having those same emotions and mannerisms.

One night around our evening campfire in rural Mexico, I expounded on this theory to the team I was working with at the time. The team leader—a gorgeous hunk who was a former CIA officer I’ll call Jake—raised one eyebrow, which he was very good, at by the way. After a few minutes of thought, he stated that while he could see why I would think that, his opinion was that since animals weren’t really sentient beings, while they might experience a facsimile of human emotions, it was unlikely they could experience the same degree of emotions that humans could. This was an opinion I was quick to disagree with some three weeks later when the team was being chased out of an area by an extremely pissed-off wild burro who took exception to our invading his territory.

As we hauled ass down the trail with the burro literally nipping at our heels, I pointed out to Jake that, while I’d encountered some very angry people in my life, I’d yet to see one go ballistic quite as fast as that burro. To which Jake succinctly replied: “Shut up and run, damn it!” We can laugh about it now, but at the time it wasn’t all that funny. Especially since we had to trek back up the trail to collect all our scattered gear once the burro gave up and went away.

I saw all kinds of wild animals during my travels, but I especially loved the wolves. There’s just something so haunting about a distant wolf’s howl late on a moonlit night. Toss a few clouds around the moon and you go from haunting to chilling. Wolves are mostly extinct in all but a few places in the northern hemisphere, so most of the ones we saw were on reserves or in wild animal parks. But there was one when we were in Southern Mexico who used to sneak into our camp to steal tuna fish sandwiches. I don’t know where he came from, whether he’d been someone’s pet, or if he’d escaped from a breeding program somewhere. He was young, skinny, and hungry. He would come just so close and no farther, letting you almost touch him, but not quite. One of our team named him Wiley Wolf, because he reminded us all of Wiley Coyote on those old Roadrunner cartoons. I don’t know what happened to the pictures I took of him, so this is as close as I can get to what he looked like.

When I created the main character for Blood Fest: Chasing Destiny, the book that’s coming out on April 30, 2011, from Black Opal Books, I combined Wiley with another one of my team members whom I’ll call Ryan, to come up with a Vampire/Lycan half-breed, named Roman. Since Ryan was definitely an alpha male with—as the whole team agreed—a little too much testosterone at times, by combining Wiley’s sweet and gentle nature, with Ryan’s not so much one, I got an alpha male with a sensitive side, who has tremendous control over his animal nature but struggles with his emotions.

When I emailed Ryan a bio of the character, he responded that he’d always wanted to be a vampire, so he was cool with it. And he figured Wiley probably would be too. Though neither of us has been able to contact him to find out for sure. Since I promised my friends and associates not to use real names or photos, I’ve had to improvise. So this is a picture representing my hero, Roman, not a picture of Ryan.

My heroine in Blood Fest: Chasing Destiny is a half-human/half-tiger named Chase. Both she and the tiger she’s combined with have a story all their own. But I’ll get into that tomorrow.

Visit my website: http://www.pepperoneal.com

Learn more about Blood Fest: Chasing Destiny at: http:www. http://pepperoneal.com/blood-fest-series/


Read an excerpt of Blood Fest: Chasing Destiny at: http://pepperoneal.com/blood-fest-series/excerpt-chasing-destiny/

Check out Sherry’s Duty Calls as well as other Black Opal Books publications at:
http://www.blackopalbooks.com