Swan Prince

by C. Margery Kempe

I sent off the latest erotic romance fairy tale to my editor at Noble Romance. It's a modern take on Hans Christian Andersen's The Wild Swans, called simply "Swan Prince" — although the hero in question isn't actually a prince. It's set in London's Kensington Park — home of the Serpentine and of course, Peter Pan — but it was really inspired by all the swans in Galway. There's so many! They don't always want to pose as nicely as this one did for me. Some can be quite rude.

Galway has a lot of different birds. Every day in the square outside my townhouse the gulls and the rooks fight it out for prime territory in the park. Eyre Square has a lot of people passing through it day and night, many of whom leave behind their food and wrappers, which the birds scavenge through in hopes of finding something good. Wherever I walk in the city I see the little wagtails — cute wee birds! And of course I have feral pigeons who often sit on my sill and coo.

As I head out to Nimmo's pier and the walk along the bay, in addition to the swans there are a variety of gulls. Until my friend Wendy visited I didn't realise how many different kinds of gulls there were from the common and herring gulls to the Mediterranean and black-backed gulls. By the water's edge, too, I usually find the jackdaws and hooded crows. I'm still getting over mistaking all the rooks for crows — more common in the States, they're actually rare here. Rooks are everyone though. They have shaggier legs than carrion crows and their beaks are a bit different, too. The hooded crows are black and grey. I see them all the time on the beach, flying up and dropping mussels to break them open. I love corvids: they're so clever. My favourites of course are the magpies: one of the main characters in my forthcoming novel (under my given name) is a 300 year old magpie.

I'm envious because my sweetie has an owl near his house. It may be the escaped eagle owl that's sent local birdwatchers in Dundee into a tizzy. I hope it's still there when I get back to Scotland in a couple weeks. It would be so cool to see it!

Here's my dramatic rook picture. I'm using it as the lock screen image for my new iPad and continuing the tradition by naming it Rook. My MacBook is Jackdaw and my Android is Mobile Magpie. See more of my photos from my wanders in the Ireland album (although you might also want to check out the Dublin and Dundee albums).

Filed under: C. Margery Kempe, contemporary romance, erotic romance, fantasy romance, Kit Marlowe, mythology romance, Noble Romance