Thanks for the comments, everyone.

Tere: Someone I know was guest editing a special issue of a magazine, with a theme of "Stormy Weather" , and I'd said I'd write her a short story for it. As I said in my blog, "there's something niggling at me about shipwrecks and caves and mythological beings. Merrow, I think, although I've already done a merman story". (Merrow are the Irish merpeople, who can change between fish and human.) I had also done a book with a different British/Irish shifter -- the silkie or selkie, which is a very old legend about seals being able to change into human form. (Elisa translated an excerpt from this book last year, in this post: http://romancebooks.splinder.com/post/10026384)

So I was thinking about some of the other old stories about sea creatures, and there are a lot of stories around the world about dolphins liking humans, sometimes because dolphins were once human themselves and were changed into dolphins by the gods. Some of the stories are about swimmers and fishermen caught in a storm being rescued by dolphins.

I didn't come up with a usable idea out of it in time to write a short story for the magazine, but I did have the idea of the scene in the cave -- that someone caught in a storm is rescued by two dolphins, who take him to a cave, then ask for payment. But when I started writing how they got there and what happened next, it was a bit longer than a short story. :-)

Antonon: There are no plans to have it translated into Italian, though obviously if an Italian publisher offered to buy the translation rights I would be interested. But the book is long (100,000 words), and from what Elise has said, and also two of my friends who have worked as translators for Italian publishers, that is too long for them to be interested. I know you've asked before about whether these sort of books might be translated -- I think that for many of them the answer would be that the rights are available if an Italian publisher wanted to buy them, but they are not likely to be translated into Italian by the American publishers.

Jules Jones