Without a Nose There'd Be No Sex. Who Knew?

      Rogue-Phoenix press will release my new novel, Love in a Small Town, in October. Learning how to make a perfume is an important part of the plot. Since Professional Perfumer was one of my job descriptions in one of my former lives, I decided to write a few blogs on perfume making and the important role scent plays in our lives. We all know about how smell protects us from fire and spoiled meat, but few know the important role it plays in human procreation.

The following quote is from my book, Accidental Alien, wherein aliens, who are plants living on the planet Agra, which contains only plants, are trying to understand animal (Earth) behavior. The whole matter of human sexual activity amazes them. As one alien, a moss, explains:

"The human male has little choice in the matter. His nose controls him, though he is not aware of it, because, although his body can detect female sex hormones, he is not aware of the odor. His hormonal makeup forces him to act at any opportunity. The female has scent glands behind her ear. When a fetal egg has ripened, she emits a scented hormone called 'Copulin.' Sex glands in nearby males are stimulated by this odor to produce another hormone, testosterone, in their saliva. He coaxes the female to allow him to put his mouth on hers, Earthlings refer to this action as kissing, and the saliva arouses the female, encouraging further male mating activity. Fertilization takes place."

We’ve never been able to incorporate hormones into commercial fragrance, but our desire to smell good to others supports a billion dollar industry. Creating a fragrance isn’t difficult. It requires scented oils and grain alcohol, available at the local liquor store. The fragrance Sarah makes in my new book is one I made and sold in my store as “Shakespeare’s Flowers.”

This week I’ll explain the different materials used as scent. Next we’ll discuss the various scents you might want to start your own collection; then we’ll go on to possible mixtures. There are three materials generally available on the retail market. The first, essential oils, are distilled from living plant material: wood, leaves, stems, and flowers. They’re generally found in health food stores or online, and are the oldest, historically. They were made by simple distillation, a process discovered in the Middle East, as early as 3,000B.C., by men attempting to discover “the essence of life.” They roamed the desert, distilling everything in primitive pots, down to the tiniest part, hoping they’d discover the key to everlasting life. The oils use for fragrance and healing became important later on. Today a similar process, called extraction, but less expensive is used. The Romans were crazy about roses and scented everything with rose oil.

Many flowers cannot be distilled, so most fragrance today uses perfume oils, which and are not nearly expensive as essential oils, and are manufactured in a laboratory. They are generally available online and are recommended.

The other fragrance source comes from chemicals that have no counterpart in nature. They are simply compounds found to have odor useful in perfume manufacture.  I’ll only mention aldehydes, which are compounds with one carbon atom and attached oxygen atoms. Aldehydes go by names such as C 12, which means one carbon atom and twelve oxygen atoms, and smells like fresh air, or C 16, which is like peach. One chemist, on the other hand, described aldehyde C 10, as “ten nights on a troop train.”

Don’t worry about these; just know that most fruit scent is an aldehyde. Coco Chanel was the first person to use one in Chanel #5. I think it was Aldehyde C 12MNA. The French, who only, at that time, used “real” oils, were scandalized.

For a complete biography and a list of my books go to: http://joycezellercom.weebly.com

Aliens and Killer Wasps

There’s more than one way to kill a Protagonist.

It had been a couple of months since I’d finished my romance novel, Maddie’s Choice—coming out later this year from Coffeetown Press—and I was casting about for ideas for my next book. A member of my writer’s group was a naturalist and an entomologist who spent most of his time in the woods, and each week he’d read about what he’d learned. He told about a South American wasp whose venom was so lethal one drop could put a human into a coma. There was no antidote. The Department of Defense had been trying to copy this venom for years to use it as a weapon.

Wasp’s do not eat dead food. They paralyze their victims and keep them alive in the nest until they get hungry. Sounded like a murder mystery to me, but killing by hypo is pretty boring.

But wait. What if the killer was not human? Maybe she’s a beautiful woman, part wasp, who killed by injecting victims with poison stored under her fingernails? An alien, maybe, but why is she here? She’s been sent to Earth to destroy another alien—a plant who looks like a man, my alien, Daniel. He was a seedpod, now hatched, and left behind by mistake by an exploring party from the planet Agra, a world inhabited entirely by intelligent plants that have learned to clone human-like beings that are capable of doing labor. He’s roaming around and he must be destroyed before the humans catch on. Aine is physically a plant, but she looks human and she’s been sent to kill him.

I decided that her weapons, all made from natural earth-borne plant or mammal DNA.  A swamp plant, duckweed, makes it possible to inflate her cells and become airborne. She has a lethal electric charge from an Amazon River eel. For the heck of it, let’s give her a set of human female hormones so she falls in love with her target, Daniel.

I’m an aromatherapist so I used that knowledge to make Daniel a natural healer. To protect himself, he can duplicate DNA from any thing living and become that thing. He changes his shape at will into an insect, a bush, a bird or, a wolf.

I’m off and running. I’ve got a superwoman female assassin who loves to kill, a gorgeous man who can’t harm anything unless he becomes murderously angry. Throw in some gangsters who become the dirty guys, indulging in human trafficking. set the book in Las Vegas, where Daniel learns how to play Texas Hold’em. add some confused detectives who are suddenly surrounded by maybe dead bodies, and rumors of werewolves. All this while Daniel is trying to make sense of human behavior, which is the most illogical, confusing mystery he can imagine.  He concludes that Earth would be paradise without the humans.  Daniel is a peaceful person until he gets very angry, which happens. He slips into killer mode determined to destroy the criminal element in his town. To do this he must change into some lethal creature, but what?

I admit the search for the must deadly living thing was a hoot.  Top of the list is a tiny frog, about two inches long, the Yellow Dart Frog from South America. Its skin is so toxic that to touch it means instant death to any human.  There’s a beetle in New Guinea whose bite brings death instantly. Clearly, those two won’t work. Being attacked by a tiny frog or a beetle is not scary enough.  I needed something terrifying enough for anyone. I settled on the Indian Taipan, the world’s most deadly snake.

Offing that gang of murderers was most satisfying.

Accidental Alien is an e-book available on Amazon.