To celebrate the release of my new book, Coral Were His Bones, I’m going to be posting a month’s worth of things about selkies. Coral is a m/m paranormal erotica novel about Finn, a selkie who’s in love with his childhood sweetheart Devon, but bound in a magical contract to a cruel master. It’s a story of modern magic, snark, sex, and how to heal when everything hurts.

It won’t surprise you at all, I’m sure, to learn that there are plenty of Irish stories about sea-dwelling people and shape shifters. Merrows are not exactly like Scottish selkies. Caps of red feathers, webbed fingers, pig-like features, or sealskin cloaks all figure into the legends–in some versions, they’re more like what we’d think of as mermaids. But there are more stories of seals too, whether they’re called selchies, selkies, silkies, or roanes. At the blog Leprachauns Shout Out, you can read the story of The Seal Woman’s Croon.

Once again, not seal-related, but fantasy and SF author Diane Duane (I knew her best for her Star Trek novels and the Young Wizard series), also is an avid cook and baker and had a series of posts on her Tumblr around St Patrick’s Day on real Irish food. If it’s getting close to lunchtime where you are, and your mind might be drifting food-wards, too…)