When the call came out for High Octane Heroes it was immediately obvious to me the sort of hero I had to write about: the man of the moment in my story drops down from the sky courtesy of a Mountain Rescue helicopter.

So, why do I have a thing about the men of the Mountain Rescue (and I certainly do!)?

No, it’s not because I’ve needed to be rescued myself, thank goodness.  It’s probably more to do with the fact that mountaineering runs in my blood.  By the age of six, I’d climbed Snowden, the highest mountain in Wales.  Okay, it’s not that high compared to a lot of other mountains in the world, but I was only six!  My rewards were to drink lemonade out of Sherpa Tenzing Norgay’s beer mug and the gift of a silver pin in the shape of a pick axe. I still treasure my silver pick, though now it’s a little tarnished and bent.  (Who was Sherpa Tenzing Norgay?  The guy who carried Sir Edmund Hillary’s pack up Mount Everest.  And who drank out of Hillary’s mug?  Why, my big brother, of course!)

Right up until my teens, I was a keen rock climber and though I don’t climb now, most of the men in my family still do.  Furthermore, I went to a school that ran its own Mountain Rescue team: the boys of the sixth form would be called out of bed in the middle of the night, usually in the worst weather conditions, to head for the hills in search of some unfortunate, or occasionally reckless, individual who’d gone missing.

And that’s probably the thing that gets me about the men of the Mountain Rescue.  In the UK and in a lot of other countries, the Mountain Rescue teams are made up mainly of volunteers.  These brave and experienced men put their lives on the line to find and rescue people they don’t know, who have often been the engineers of their own difficulties.  And what could be more reassuring when you’re trapped on a ledge in a howling gale than hearing the wap-wap-wap of the helicopter blades and knowing help is just moments away?

So it was simple really—think of a High Octane Hero and I’ll think of a man of the mountains—and that’s what my story’s called, Mountain Man.

About the Post Author

Tamsin Flowers loves to write light-hearted erotica, often with a twist in the tail/tale and a sense of fun.  Her stories have appeared in a wide variety of anthologies and she is now graduating to novellas with the intention to pen her magnum opus in the very near future.  In the meantime, like most erotica writers, she finds herself working on at least ten stories at once: while she figures out whose leg belongs in which story, you can find out more about her at Tamsin’s Superotica or Tamsin Flowers.