Under a Mermaid’s Spell

Have you ever seen a mermaid? I hadn’t when I started to write my mermaid tale, but I was eager to learn more about mermaids and maybe even see one. Since I couldn’t drive to the ocean and invite a mermaid to lunch in order to dish about her salty lifestyle, I needed to get creative with research. So I embarked on a quest for mermaids.

I wanted to go beyond Disney and Andersen fairytales, to uncover real stories about mermaids. My first stop was Google. I found a list of names for mermaids, including “Dinny,” “Loreli,” “Merrow” and double-tailed “Melusine.” Also, there were many art, gift catalogs, legends and movie references. But none of these worked for my book about sixth-grader Cassie and her Strange family adventures. Cassie had already played brain marbles with an alien on a space ship in Oh No, UFO! and sprouted wings in a magical underground paradise in Shamrocked! To bring a mermaid tale to life, I needed a real happening — something truly weird.

Then I found a picture of the Fiji Mermaid — an authentic “fake” mermaid on display in the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum in Oregon. The picture was ghastly. It was revoltingly disgusting. Disney can have sweet mermaids, but give me a hideous bunch of hairy bones and I’m happy. When I saw Miss Fiji, I was not disappointed. She was monstrously perfect!

This discovery led me on a twelve hundred-mile road trip. “Mom, want to see a mermaid with me?” I asked my mother. She enthusiastically agreed. So we packed my car and set off north from Northern California. Destination: Newport, Oregon.

Our road trip was fun! We stopped at the outlet mall in Anderson, ate at the scrumptious Black Bear Inn in Mount Shasta, soaked in a Jacuzzi in Roseburg, went to bookstores in Corvalis and finally arrived in the scenic town of Newport. There we went to Ripley’s Undersea show, the wax museum and the Believe It Or Not museum.

While I explored, I channeled my character Cassie Strange, visualizing her reactions and thoughts so that when I finally wrote this scene in Sea Switch, I was able to mix reality with imagination.

In Sea Switch, Cassie is excited to have her best friend Rosalie along for a family trip to the Ripley’s museum in Oregon. Cassie has decided that it’s time to reveal all her magical secrets to Rosalie and is waiting for the perfect moment. Only Rosalie makes a new friend, and feeling lonely, Cassie wanders off alone down the beach — where she encounters a wicked mermaid named Galena who fires off a magic spell.

Suddenly Cassie is floundering in the ocean with fins while Galena walks off with Cassie’s body. Cassie is left adrift in the wrong body — and her family doesn’t even know she need help!

Trouble multiplies when Cassie is chased by surfers, but she’s rescued by a cute merman named Astor who mistakes her for Galena and leads her to a hidden community with a mysterious energy source called Heartlight. Instead of finding help, Cassie winds up in a sea jail. Will she get her body back? I won’t tell.

My research road trip took five days. Writing the book took nearly five months. I kept rewriting and changing things, impatient to finish. I was going through a spell of frustration when I had just three more chapters to write. I emailed my editor and said, “I’m getting impatient, so I think I’ll just leave Cassie a mermaid and write: Then someone pulled the plug on the ocean, and they all went down the drain. The End.”

Of course, that’s not what happened. I think readers will enjoy seeing Cassie work her own type of magic. Also, Cassie’s little sister tried once again to smuggle a pet on this trip. In Oh No, UFO! she took a duck and in Shamrocked! she hid an alien pet. In Sea Switch, Amber sneaks a pet which isn’t alive, yet isn’t dead. The babies grow in water and have three eyes when they mature. I’ll send a bookmark to anyone who guesses the answer. Contact me on-line at: www.LindaJoySingleton.com.