Neon Noir and returning to my roots

My name is Katherine Tomlinson and I'm a short story writer.
There, I've said it.
Yes, I write longer stuff.
Yes, I still write non-fiction.
Yes, I write scripts and teleplays and web series episodes.
But in my heart, I am a short story writer. I say this knowing that even masters of the short story form don't really make much money from their work. Paying markets for short stories are few and far between, although the mystery, science fiction, and fantasy genres are putting up a valiant fight to keep the short story form alive.
I've been concentrating on longer work of late, trying to ignore the siren call of the short story. I'm writing something for Gerri Leen's "Dark Goddess" anthology, and every time the new "Dark Markets" comes out, I see one or two "calls for submission" that pique my interest. Most of the time I ignore that little tingle of electricity and go back to working on my novel. But every so often, I see an opportunity that I cannot ignore. Like the one for a crime fiction story that's "Neon Noir."  Inspired by the 80s with all the fashion and music and awesomeness that decade possessed.
I lived through the 80s.
I got this.

Beauty and the Beast retold in Christine Pope's Wolf of Harrow Hall

"Beauty and the Beast" is one of the most beloved fairy tales ever told. Right now there are two different film versions being developed. Christophe Gans' gorgeous French language version is available on YouTube. And if you go on GoodReads looking for a retelling of the tale, you're directed to a list with 1006 results, one of them my own novelette The Summer Garden. (There are 2611 retellings of "Cinderella" so that's even more popular as source material.)

Christine Pope likes "Beauty and the Beast." She retold it in her novella Breath of Life, which kickstarted her Gaia Consortium Series. And now she's used the story as a basis for a lush, snow-bound love story called The Wolf of Harrow Hall. Part of her Tales of the Latter Kingdoms series--all stand-alone fairy tales--Wolf has a gorgeous cover by Ravven, and an original new mythos that explains the nature of the beast. Buy it now at Amazon and on other publishing platforms.

Drunk on the Moon--Werewolf PI Roman Dalton is back

Roman Dalton, the werewolf PI created by Paul D. Brazill, first appeared on the pages of Dark Valentine Magazine, a orint and digital publication I published. We ran a second adventure of Roman's and soon after that, Paul invited me to join him and a group of other writers (Kate Laity, John Donald Carlucci, Allan Leverone) to contribute a story to his anthology of Roman Dalton stories, Drunk on the Moon.
It was a lot of fun playing in Paul's sandbox and I enjoyed writing my story, which included Persian fire demons, albanian gangster werewolves and a whole lot of weirdness.
There's a new eidtion of the anthology out now with a deliberately retro cover, and newly slicked up stories. Right now it's free on Kindle, so if you like urban fantasy and hard-boiled noir, you should check it out.

Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon, a review

In Joseph Kanon’s book, Leaving Berlin, an American Communist writer returns to Berlin as a spy and discovers that the woman he once loved is now a Russian spy. This is a nicely atmospheric, character-driven spy thriller set roughly the same time as Kanon’s previous book TThe Good German. We’re immediately dropped into the complex political and ideological situation that was postwar Berlin, and Kanon does an excellent job of introducing us to the various characters with a minimum of fuss. The city (as much a character as any of the humans) is haunted for Alex, and a series of flashbacks fills in his complicated relationship with his former lover . (All of Kanon’s books have a woman like Irene, even Los Alamos, and we’re reminded of the line from The Good German, “You should never have come back to Berlin.”)

This is Alex’s story and he’s an intriguing protagonist. He’s a man being manipulated, but he doesn’t come off as weak or passive. His friends—like the playwright Bertolt Brecht—and his admirers—almost everyone—respect his work, which is passionate and anti-Fascist and brave. But it’s not simple—nothing is simple in Berlin.

City of Dragons by Kelli Stanley

I have been a fan of Kelli Stanley's wonderful historical mysteries since my friend Cormac Brown gave me a copy of her "Roman noir" Nox Dormienda. When Kelli came to Los Angeles to sign the first book of her San Francisco-based historical mysteries, City of Dragons, I bought a copy and had it autographed. I loved the book and have since read two of the three sequels. The heroine is Miranda Corbie, a private eye with a past and a passion for justice.

I recommended City of Dragons to the book club I belong to in Bellingham--the Bellingham Mysterians--join us on Facebook--and it looks like this one is a winner. (We don't always agree on the books we read.) If you love historical mysteries with social issues wrapped up in the plot, you will LOVE these books. And if you love elegant book covers, the whole series has wonderful covers.

The Angel Artifact

Sometimes you get a story bunny that just will not leave you alone, no matter how often you push it aside. The last time that happened to me was when the "Vampire Cinderella" idea pushed me to write Bride of the Midnight King.  I know where this one came from--hours spent refining my entry into the "Be James Patterson's co-author" contest, along with thinking about under-used supernatural beings in paranormal books.
The idea is that a little kid, a girl, I think, finds an angel feather in the woods. It's big--bigger than she is, anyway, and looks like a piece of brushed steal sculpture until you touch it. She brings the angel back home and takes it upstairs to show it to her little brother, a kid with some congenital and fatal disease who is bed-bound. And when he touches it,he's healed.
And consequences ensue.
I figure there are several of these angel feather artifacts scattered all over the world and some have been used for harming as well as healing.
How do you destroy such an artifact? It's not like you can throw it into the fires of Mt. Doom.
And of course, word of this object would get out.
And the government would probably get involved.
Maybe now that I've written this much down, the idea will be happy to sit in the back of my unconscious.
i know there's something there, but not sure what to do with it.

Sunday Shakespeare Goodness--Helen Mirren's TEMPEST for free

I've seen a lot of productions of Shakespeare's The Tempest. I've seen a Comnedia dell'arte production iperformed solely n Italian during the a cultural "Olympics" that accompanied the 1984 L.A. Summer Olympics, I've seen a production in San Diego with three oversized seashells as the only set (Ellis Rabb played Prospero) and I've seen two more traditional versions, one with Anthony Hopkins and Stephanie Zimbalist and one with Christopher Plummer as the vengeful mage.

When I found out Helen Mirren was going to do a female version of the play with Julie (The Lion King) Taymor directing, I was intrigued but somehow I never managed to catch the 2010 production. But now, thanks to YouTube, I can see the whole movie for free! It was worth the wait. Djimon Hounsou plays Caliban, who has the best line in the play (and one of my favorite lines in all of Shakespeare) when he says, "You taught me language and my profit on't is I know how to curse." 
This was Shakespeare's last play, the culmination of a career, a master at the top of his game.
Enjoy it here.

Finding Clarity, Setting Goals

Yet another book for the TBR pile. I'm always looking for ways to map out the path of my life because there have been long stretches where it feels like I've been wandering down random paths in search of something. This book has been recommended to me by a number of people, so my first goal is to sit down and read it.

Nuclear sun over Bellingham

Photo by Shay Y. Roberts

Most of the time, Bellingham is silver and green. But sometimes, when the light is just right, the city is bathed in molton gold.

Henry Rollins has something to say and it's worth listening to

One of my favorite Henry Thoreau quotes has to do with not wasting time--"as if you could waste time without injuring eternity." Who knew that Henry Rollins and Henry Thoreau were brothers under the skin? Wonder what kind of a tattoo Thoreau would have gotten if he was the kind of guy who got inked?

Angelfall by Susan Ee--a review

In a post-apocalyptic world, a human joins forces with an angel to rescue her little sister as a resistance movement launches its first mission against the supernatural creatures.

Definitely in the dystopian tradition of Hunger Games, this story of a world in which paranormal creatures rule the night has a fine, feisty heroine, an intriguing anti-hero angel without wings and a quest. It’s well-written but derivative (especially for readers of the genre in general and Hunger Games in particular).

PENRYN YOUNG is 17 and basically in charge of her family—her mentally ill mother and her disabled sister PAIGE—in the wake of world-wide apocalypse involving angel attacks. Everyone on earth saw GABRIEL, the Messenger of God, killed in Jerusalem and since then, angels have hunted and killed humans for their own uses.

            Penryn is uniquely suited to protect her family since her paranoid mother signed her up for a series of self-defense classes. That’s good because her mother is off her meds and unpredictable and her sister is useless. The family has been hiding out on the top floor of an apartment building, but the bands of roving gangs have been scavenging closer and closer for days. Penryn realizes it’s time to move and despite her mother’s terror of the night (when the streets are empty of humans but filled with all kinds of predators), she wants to move at night. With her mother pushing a shopping cart and Penryn pushing her baby sister in a wheelchair, the trio sets out.

A picture is worth 1000 words #2

THIS IS WHAT MY WORLD LOOKS LIKE WHEN I THINK OF DONALD TRUMP BECOMING PRESIDENT.

I don't often get political. It says right on my blog header that I identify as a feminist, and so I don't feel the need to hit people over the head with it. And I'm pretty passionate about a couple of things--free speech, sane gun laws--and have posted about those issues a few times. I don't think that political beliefs are ever simple. I was brought up by an Eisenhower Republican and a die-hard Democrat who once voted for John Anderson and I would have to be stranded on another planet before I skipped voting.  My father died three days short of an election day in 1985 but it didn't matter beause he had voted by absentee ballot the week before. Yes, my father voted on his death bed. He would have been appalled at the political circus we now call presidential politics.
I am appalled.
I am old enough to remember George Wallace's hate-mongering campaign.
I saw the infamous anti-Barry Goldwater "daisy/nukes" ad in a political science class in college. (This ad was so memorable and potent it practically won LBJ's election single-handedly. And it's now available on YouTube. But it only ran ONCE.  That's how powerful it was.) 

So this election cycle is not my first. I was 19 the first time I voted, one of the first of a generation that was allowed to vote before we reached our "majority" of 21.  That was during the Vietnam War when the rallying cry for lowering the age to vote was, "Old enough to die? Old enough to vote."
Western Illinois University, which has successfully predicted the winner of the presidential election for the last 40 years has released their prediction for 2016. They think it's going to be Bernie Sanders. Which means they think it is NOT going to be Donald Trump. And that is good news to me. Because this country does not need the fear-mongering, hate-filled, "I got mine "message Trump is preaching.

I never understood the Adolf Hitler cult of personality or how anyone could have voted him into office. But now, when I look at Trump speaking (and watch with the sound turned off) and the cynical way he manipulates crowds--I sudddenly see just how easy it was. It's all fun and games until a demagogue gets elected. And if Donald Trump wins, he will take this country down a very dark path.
I now return you to our regularly scheduled blog about food, fiction, and France. 

Dragon Rose by Christine Pope is FREE!

Isn't this a beautiful cover? It's by Ravven, who also designed the covers for my novelette Hunter's Kiss and the first of my Time Flood novels (see sidebar). Dragon Rose is one of the books in Christine Pope's series "Tales of the Latter Kingdoms," which are stand-alone retellings of various fairy tales. Dragon Rose is inspired by Beauty and the Beast, and it's a lovely version. You can find Dragon Rose here.

Aixa and the Scorpion--an excerpt and a freebie

I'll be giving away part one of my three-part urban fantasy series  (La Bruja Roja) for the next five days.  I originally wrote the series under the pseudonym Delia Fontana and over the year or so it's been available, Joy Sillesen has played with the covers, trying out everything from a neat grunnge graphic to the current trio of very paranormal covers. I've loved all the covers and wish I could use them all. This excerpt is from the opening of Aixa and the Scorpion. If you'd like to read more, go grab the freebie on Amazon. And I would LOVE a review if you like it.

   AIXA AND THE SCORPION

When you live in a place called Sangre de Cristo, it almost goes without saying that sometimes not-so-ordinary things are going to happen. In the years I was growing up here, Sangre was mostly just a sleepy little border town straddling the line between Texas and Mexico.

Americans crossed the border in search of cheap drugs and cheap booze and donkey sex shows and Mexicans traveled in the other direction looking for jobs and opportunities and green cards.

We didn’t get many tourists in Sangre de Cristo, so while we weren’t entirely immune to the problems faced by people in Matamoros or El Paso, we were mostly insulated from the bad stuff.

At least we were until 2006 when the drug wars exploded and the fallout left towns on both sides of the border radioactive with cocaine and machismo.

By then I was already living in Austin, taking classes at UT, and trying to figure out my place in the world.

I am a modern woman, but I am heir to an old, old tradition. And the power that I have skips generations. It’s why my mother, who was born in Brownsville, fled the U.S. in the final weeks of her pregnancy, determined that I should be born in Mexico so that I’d be a citizen of both nations. Both nations and two worlds.

She died giving birth to me, which is like something out of a 19^th century novel. My father, who had loved her very much, never forgave her for leaving him and basically abandoned me in Sangre de Cristo to grow up in my abuela’s house.

For my 14^th birthday my father sent me a present—a Bratz doll—and then two weeks later showed up in Sangre de Cristo knocking on my grandmother’s door with more presents and a sheepish smile.

Friday Freebie--Hyde by Lauren Stewart

I'm always up for a re-imagining of the old horror classics--I've watched more bad Frankenstein reboots than you can imagine--so this book caught my eye. It's the first of a three-book series (isn't everything a trilogy these days?) and it comes with a 4.3 rating on Amazon (from 318 readers). I like the cover of Hyde, and think the trio of covers work well together. the author makes it clear this is a sexy book with dark themes and I'm okay with that. It's described as an urban fantasy and that's still one of my all-time fravorite genres. I can't wait to see what Stewart has done with the Robert Lewis Stevenson classic.

Dear Mr. You by Mary-Louise Parker

I've always liked actress Mary-Louise Parker. She's done so many different kinds of parts and has always been relatable. (I found her adorable in Red.) But it wasn't until a year or so ago that I discovered she's also a writer, and a very good one.

Dear Mr. You is a collection of "letters" Parker has written to the men who entered and departed from her life with varying degrees of damage and joy. It's a book any woman will relate to. By turns funny and bittersweet--she is REALLY hard on herself sometimes--Dear Mr. You might be a great present to give your mother for Mother's Day--especially if she's a fan of Weeds.

For a sense of her personality, check out this interview from the Washington Post. It also deserves shelf-space next to Carrie Fisher's memoir Wishful Drinking.

Apocalypse Sky

Years ago, I submitted a story called "Monochrome" to an anthology with the premise that suddenly all the color was leached out of the world and writers were asked to explore how that would affect them. "Monochrome" wasn't a great story and it didn't make the cut but I think of that story often when I see the apocalyptic chiaroscuro sunsets we get here in the Pacific Northwest.

Say what you will about the pollution in Los Angeles, it made for some extraordinary, Technicolor sunsets. Here we get sunsets in black and white--gorgeous dark blacks and whites like some heavenly cinematographer was shooting the world in black and white. It's another kind of beauty but it's taken some getting used to.

And I want to write a story about it.