Hi! It’s so nice to be here. Thanks for having me. I’m Stephanie Julian and I write erotic romance for Ellora’s Cave, and my current book is Seduced By Magic. My stories are based on an Etruscan mythology that is part history and part pure imagination on my part.

I didn’t originally set out to write stories with an Etruscan mythology. I had a story brewing in my head about witches and fairies and hunky protectors and mostly I wanted to write about magic. So I started researching the Sidhe, because all witches and fairies are British. Right?

Well, no. Almost every culture in the world has legends of magical races. Beings with wings and pointed ears, men with goat legs and Gods and Goddesses who control the world. I’m Italian on my dad’s side and German on my mom’s. There’s no trace of British blood to be found in my system and I wanted to write a story that played off my family origins. But Roman mythology was almost too pedestrian and way too regimented for me. I wanted something new and different, something I could play with and adapt to my needs.

One day, reading a book about Italian magic, I came across a reference to the ancient Etruscans. Most of their writings had been destroyed though we do know they had a full pantheon that predated the Romans. They performed magical rituals and made predictions based on the flights of birds. They had underworld demons and goddesses who wore pointed red shoes. And their women held as much power as men.

Now this I could work with. I started collecting research books, designed mainly for college courses about the Etruscans. Books that might seem like dry reading, but that offered me a wealth of information I could incorporate into this secret, magical Etruscan society I was building. A society that survived into modern times and lives among us now.

I picked up tidbits such as those red shoes worn by Goddesses and evidence of blood sacrifices and the practice of hammering nails into a temple wall to sever the ties of the past year. All these things wormed their way into my brain and became part of my fictional world.

I wove in Italian folklore then drew on my own childhood growing up with a huge Italian family in modern America. And the Magical Seduction series was born. Stories filled with folletti, linchetti and salbinelli (fairies, elves and satyrs), magic and hot, steamy sex.

I’ve been building this world for a few years now and I’m hopeful that you’ll get to read about the streghe, grigori and lucani, as well. I’ve had so much fun playing with the details that I don’t know that I’ll ever want to go back to the real world. There’s just not enough magic.