Background Notes

Come to Me...

The genesis for COME TO ME was some reading I did a couple years ago about sleep paralysis.  It may seem a long way between an area of psychological interest and a medieval/paranormal romance about a dream demon, but stay with me...

Sleep paralysis is when your brain tells your body not to move, while you're sleeping and dreaming.  Sometimes, though, we half-wake while still in this motionless state, and then all sort of interesting things happen.  People report feeling a 'presence' in the room with them, a sense of terror, and a feeling of a heavy weight on their chest, keeping them from breathing.  Sometimes there is a feeling of floating, as if being taken from the room.

You can imagine what beliefs this has contributed to through the centuries:  visits by ghosts, by aliens, and of course by succubi and incubi. 

Once I read about succubi and incubi -- which are supposed to be demons who have sex with sleeping mortals -- I thought, "What a great premise for a romance novel!"  But I'm weird that way.  It wasn't long, though, before I'd worked out a story about a succubus and incubus who, after one fateful visit to a dreaming king, find their very existences changed forever.  The idea became two books:  COME TO ME and DREAM OF ME.

To research COME TO ME and DREAM OF ME, I took a trip in the fall of '03 to Romania.  I chose Romania because for the story ideas I had, I needed to find a region in medieval times had had three neighboring, independent principalities, none of which were necessarily friendly with the others.  I also needed a region whose history was not so familiar to readers that they would instantly say, "But that's not what was going on there in the early 1400's..."  Romania fit the bill, and the principalities I used in my story are Transylvania, Moldavia, and Wallachia.

 
Photo Copyright Bill Yeaton, 2003
One of the entrances to the medieval citadel town of
Sighisoara, in Transylvania. This photo was used as
inspiration for the cover art for Come to Me.

Photo Copyright Bill Yeaton, 2003
This picture was taken outside a restaurant in Bucharest. The dragon
was used on the cover of the book, on the right edge.

Romania turned out to be much more interesting and beautiful than I ever expected.  It even inspired a third book, a contemporary comedy that I am writing for Pocket, and which will likely be released in the summer of '06.  And perhaps there will even be one more historical/paranormal. 

You can see more pictures of my trip to Romania HERE.