Over the next few weeks, Jet and I will be sharing the creation of our new romance series. The One I Want.
Jet has always been a supporter of my writing and helps me with plot points when I pester him enough. Then one day, he pitched a new series to me. He said, “Why don't you write a series about love at first sight? You can do a whole THING on it”…And then he pitched his vision for what would become The One I Want Series.
At first, his intention was to simply give me ideas. This man has so many ideas! But I turned it around on him and said…”Okay, a love at first sight love story, how do you see that going?”
He replied with, “Well, how about something with kickass, professional women who find their one? You always complain about romance novels where the woman is always needing to be saved. Turn that around. Write about strong, accomplished women in gender-bending careers. Women who don't need saving. Women who can do the saving. You know…like you.”
And that's what launched The One I Want series.
We tossed around several cool careers. Actually, we have an incredible list to pursue. The first is Ariel. She's an ex-Army Warrant Officer and combat helicopter pilot. Medically discharged from the Army, she now flies aeromedical evacuation missions out to Oil Rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, bringing wounded oil workers back to definitive medical care on land.
Ariel is a war decorated hero. She's badass. And, she's not necessarily looking for love. But that's the thing about love. It finds you when you least expect it.
Writing about Ariel led to Off-Shore drilling and research into what that life must be like. The above graphic displays all the different kinds of offshore oil rigs that currently exist. The rig Ariel's aeromedical evacuation mission takes her too is one of the Fixed Rig platforms. One of the issues with these is that they are literally FIXED to the seafloor, and therefore can't move out of the way of oncoming storms.
“Fixed platform: Anchored directly into the seabed, fixed-platform rigs consist of a tall, steel structure known as a “jacket” that rises up from the ocean to support a surface deck. The jacket provides the rig's sturdy base and holds everything else out of the water, while the drilling modules and crew quarters are located on the surface deck. Fixed platforms offer stability but no mobility, and today they're primarily used to tap moderately shallow, long-term oil deposits. They can drill about 1,500 feet below the surface, but they're costly to build, so they usually require a large oil discovery to justify their construction.”
In addition to research into helicopters and oil rigs, a hurricane takes center stage in this story. We'll talk more about hurricanes in our next post.
