In the Dark of Night Book Fair

 All kinds of spooky books are available here.

Whipping Boy, a new mystery novel with a touch of romance

 I originally wrote Whipping Boy when I was still living in Los Angeles, and it reflects my love/hate relationship with the city. Most of the action takes place in an apartment building where the female protagonist lives, and I repurposed another apartment building I knew pretty well (friends of my sister lived there) to be the location, right down to the little ornamental pool in the center of the tiny courtyard. I published it in paper first so that I could have a shiny copy on my bookshelf and also to give to friends, including the woman it's dedicated to, a mystery writer in her own right.

It's a short novel (only 42,000 words or so), so what Amazon calls "a short read." I've put it on KU in case someone wants to read it as part of their subscription. I am rather pleased with it. If you'd like to check it out, you can do so here.

Here's the blurb:  

Lark Riordan works long hours as a crime scene investigator. She does not expect to return home to find one of her neighbors murdered.

Max Switek is the decorated homicide detective who catches the case. He is familiar with the victim, as he is with all of Lark’s neighbors.

He spends a lot of time with Lark, and not just in a professional capacity.

This does not go unnoticed by either his father—a cop-turned-judge—or her mother—the ex-wife of a womanizing actor who’s just been nominated for an Oscar®.

Who just happen to be married to each other. Even for L.A., it’s complicated. But so is the case, and there’s no shortage of people who wanted Jimmy Morrissey dead, and the chief suspect out of the way. 

Lark and Max take the case personally, and with help from a surprising source, they’re going to solve it.

Now if they could only do something about their love life.

The first in a new vampire series

Here's the blurb for the evocatively titled, Dowry of Blood. It's a new take onthe classic work Dracula.

S.T. Gibson's sensational novel is the darkly seductive tale of Dracula's first bride, Constanta. 

This is my last love letter to you, though some would call it a confession. . .

Saved from the brink of death by a mysterious stranger, Constanta is transformed from a medieval peasant into a bride fit for an undying king. But when Dracula draws a cunning aristocrat and a starving artist into his web of passion and deceit, Constanta realizes that her beloved is capable of terrible things.

Finding comfort in the arms of her rival consorts, she begins to unravel their husband's dark secrets. With the lives of everyone she loves on the line, Constanta will have to choose between her own freedom and her love for her husband. But bonds forged by blood can only be broken by death.

"A dizzying nightmare of a romance that will leave you aching, angry and ultimately hopeful." --Hannah Whitten, New York Times bestselling author of For the Wolf.

You can follow the author here.

You can read an excerpt here.

A freebie vampire book

 

Publishers, both traditional and indie, begin pumping out the horror in October. Vampires are everywhere. Here's one that's free across all the ebook plaforms. This is specifically offered as a review copy, so it would be nice if you left a review.  You can follow author Kailin Gow on Goodreads. She's pretty amazing. Here's her website.

Apple

Kobo

Barnes and Noble

Google

It's also available on Kindle, but it's $2.99 there. It's the first in a new series, so if you like it, there are more to come!

Free Book for National Bat Appreciation Month

 The University of Chicago Press has a program where you can sign up to get a free ebook every month. This  month you can grab a book on bats. The link is here.

Did you know you could also snag some free and cheap books on Tor's freebie shelf on Goodreads? (Some of the books are not free, so it's a bit of false advertising, but some are, like Martha Wells' All Systems Red.) You can find the link here.

The month of Halloween is here!

 

I don't know about you, but I was never very good at carving jack o' lanterns. Every year I would get those little "carving kits" and every year I would just end up puttimg a pumpkin out on my front stoop to indicate that I had the Halloween spirit if not the skill to manifest my carving dreams. I'm constantly amazed when I see those articles with pictures of really elaborate jack o' lanterns. 

I remember the first year "ghost pumpkins" came on the market. I was in Los Angeles, working for Los Angeles magazine, and a rep from one of the local supermarkets came in with the white pumpkins. We were all amazed. (Now, apparently, they have blue pumpkins. I'd like to see a black pumpkin. I bet people would snap those up.)

I have a bunch of October/Halloween-themed book reviews coming up. Stay tuned.

A new fantasy book fair

 I love book fairs. Always a chance to grab books from writers new to me, often free or at a discount. Sure, I have to sign up for their newsletters, but I ask people to sign up for my newsletters too.  Check out the fair here.

Talk Deadly to Me

 

Mystery books are my first love. My parents were big readers. My father favoried non-fiction--biographies, books about the Civil War, popular history. My mother was an insomniac and read a mystery book a night. My parents' bed had a built-in space for books (something I always tought was very handy) and while my father slept like a baby (I inherited his super-power of sleep), she would read. If she didn't have a book, she would read the small, digest-sized mystery magazines. Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. As soon as I was old enough to read, I started with Nancy Drew and Hardy Boy books but I soon graduated to grown-up books.

I started out writing in the mystery genre as well. Short stories that were dark and mean and full of the tropes I grew up reading. My brother was a lawyer by then and he would sometimes tell me stories about his clients. I remember one was about a guy who killed his aunt and a fellow resident at a boarding house. The cops found him sitting on the steps, waiting for them, a bloodied hammer in his hand. I didn't want to seem blood-thirsty, but I told him to keep the stories coming.

Weirdly, I have no interest in lawyer shows or true crime. Except for Homicide Hunter. I love Joe Kenda. I love that he always caught the bad guys. I LOVE his wry delivery. I love the way he tosses off observations about how dumb crminal behavior is, or just observations in general. "Nothing good ever happens at two a.m."  

I have written a couple of cozy mysteries in the past couple of years, but it's been awhile since I went full-on mystery writer. So hen I got the chance to sign up for a list-aiming boxed set called Talk Deadly to Me, I was all in. My story has been percolating for a couple of years and I've had the cover for it a long time. Inspired by a news story I heard on NPR, my story A WOMAN PRESUMED, is about a woman who hears the report of her own death.

I'm writing it under my real name, and I hope people will like it. It's a return to my roots. And you know what they say about roots being noursished by blood.  You can pre-order it here.

Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

 

A man whose brain has been altered creates his own reality for an afterlife. This work by Japanese author Haruki Murakami is a wonderful introduction to his work.

In a future world where people are known by their occupations or descriptions, a human data processor called a Calcutec is summoned to a meeting.  What happens next is a story that mixes a stylized reality with a dream world populated by people from the “reality.” 

It’s hard to categorize the genre of this book, which slipstreams between science fiction, hardboiled noir, cyberpunk, horror, and literary fiction.  (There’s definitely a little Franz Kafka here.)  The book will remind readers of China Mieville’s The City and the City, with its two different worlds existing simultaneously. 

It’s hard to nail down the theme of the book as well.  Murakami is working with a palette that includes ambiguity, consciousness, and self.  In both sections the hero is adrift a bit—an outsider who’s being kept off-balance.  

The book is also a dazzling romp through the tropes of pop culture, and cross-culturally (and self-consciously) hip, so it has that going for it as well. Find the book here.

Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi

 This is Emi Yagi's first novel--translated from the Japanese by David Boyd and Lucy North. It's a fast read with an intriguing presence. An office worker named Shibata is stuck at a dead-end job at a factory that makes cardboard cores for toilet tissue and paper towels. She actually doesn't mind it that much, but as the only woman in her section, she's ignored, dismissed, and exploited. If there's a mess to be cleaned, she cleans it. If there's coffee to be made, she makes it and serves it. She's everyone's general dogsbody and because she's a woman, no one thinks anythimg of it. 

Until the day she's finally had enough and tells her section head that she can't clear away the detritus of a meeting she wasn't in--coffee cups stuffed with cigarette butts. She tells him she's pregnant and the smell nauseates her. Her life changes immediately--for the better. For one thing, she's no longer expected to work hours and hours of overtime. The first night she goes home at a reasonable hour, she's shocked at how packed the metro is, and how bright and inviting the supermarkets are. (Usually by the time she gets there, all that's left are limp vegetables.) She has time for leisurely baths. She has time to cook. She begins taking aerobics class and incorporates stretching exercises into her daily routine. 

She starts taking care of herself and as the lie lingers, she comes up with all sorts of strategems to maintain the ruse, including using an app that tracks pregnancy. Along the way she interacts with a large cast of characters, from co-workers to other mothers, and the book becomes a reverie on loneliness that's bittersweet and incredibly affecting. 

Yagi knows human nature. Shibata is a wonderful character and working women will completely sympathize with her frustration at being the only woman in an all-male environment. There are bits and

pieces of Japanese culture that readers may not be familiar with. For example, pregnant women can get little badges to hang on their purses to show the world their state--thus entitling them to courteous treatment on trains and other benefits. It's a heart-shaped medallion with the caption, "There's a baby inside me." 

Diary of a Void is a lovely book. You can find our more here.

Twelve Rooms with a View by Theresa Rebeck

 If you're a fan of Only Murders in the Building, as I am, you know there's a dark side to living in those beautiful old buildings that have names. Rebeck's book shares some DNA with that project, mostly because it's told through the snarky point of view of Tina, the youngest of three sisters who may or may not have inherited an apartment in an historic building called The Edgewood. But the chain of events leading up to that inheritance is a little murky (there's another family involved) and then there's the matter of the building's Board. They never liked Tina's mother, or the man she was married to either, who inherited the apartment from his late wife. 

The story of what happens when Tina's bossy older sister Lucy (scarily efficient and not empathetic at all) installs Tina in the apartment to establish residency while she and the other heirs fight things out in court is more about Tina finding her self-esteem (and love) than anything else. 

There's a lot of fun to be had with the quirky characters, the plot full of twists and betrayals and the little side trips into such topics as moss. Tina is a wonderful character and we cheer for her as she finds allies and learns how to deal with her enemies. There's a particularly delightful little girl named Katherine who figures into the mix, and also a gorgeous socialite the doorman is in love with. Rebeck winds everything up in a very satisfying way, in a way that will send you searching for her other books. She really knows sibling dynamics, and it's a pleasure to watch her move her characters around. The apartment sounds fabulous, and so do the contents of that hidden room!!

Fairytale Retellings...

 

I love fairy tales, way beyond the ten or so that are in heavy rotation. (You know the ones I mean--Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Snow White, the Little Mermaid, The Snow Queen, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Rumpletstiltskin, the Snow Queen.) I have rewritten a number of fairy tales, including East of the Sun, West of the Moon (The Road Past Winter) and Beauty and the Beast (The Summer Garden) and Cinderella (Fashionista and The Bride of the Midnight King), and Sleeping Beauty (Spite and A Dream of Sun and Roses). I also wrote a version of Snow White called Hunter's Kiss. It's currently only available as part of a book promotion but I'll be putting it out on Amazon shortly.

For this new collection of rewritten fairy tales I've gone back to Beauty and the Beast. My story is called The Dragon's Pearl, and it's a retelling set in a setting that's modeled after the Han Dynasty in China. The "beast" is a dragon and I've made a number of changes to the story, including the heroine's relationship to her father. (Spoiler alert:  He's a scholar and a jerk who does not value her.) 

I'm also rewriting Beauty and the Beast for my story in a billionaire collection that's a charity anthology. That one's called Hero's Kiss, and it's about a military veteran who returns from war scarred by an IED. I bought a cover to use for it years ago, but it now seems rather old fasioned. My story is going to be a bit tamer than a lot of the stories--it does have a "billionaire" cover after all. My heroine is an activist lawyer named Ruth (after RBG) and she loves her father but it turns out that he's an unlucky

gambler who has been embezzling from his boss to cover his losses. Billionaire Fling is a boxed set with proceeds going to breast cancer research. You can preorder it here.

I've also written a really dark YA version of The Little Mermaid, called Blue. That was one that I bought the cover for and then had to write a story around it. I knew from the beginning it wasn't going to be a fluffy version of the story, but then, the original story is so tragic before it was Disneyfied. I did change the ending but it deals with some pretty tragic story elements.

I've ssigned up to write a contemporary version of Rapunzel that will take place in a luxury high-rise apartment and feature a thief with our modern-day princess. I haven't worked out all the little ways in which the new story will have the old story embedded in it.  

I'm also writing a version on The Snow Queen called The Ice-Bound Heart. I'm trying to decide where I'm going to set it. Frozen set it in a mythical kingdom based on Norway. I'm thinking of something more along the lines of Russia. I'm still working that one out. 

In the meantime, if you've never seen the gorgeous fairytale retellings and illustrations by artist Kinuko Y. Craft, check her out here. She has an absolutely stunning 2023 calendar on sale.

Just look at her Sleeping Beauty.

Or her Cinderella.

Or her Beauty and the Beast

Or her Cupid and Psyche

Grady Hendrix is a genius!

 

One of the things that makes my day job so interesting is that in addition to reading scripts, I also read books. Even a bad book is often better than a mediocre script, and in the course of my job, I've been introduced to a number of wonderful writers. I still can't believe I get PAID TO READ. My grandmother never understood this job. "So you're paid to write book reports?" She didn't think a job was a real job unless you dressed up in a skirt and jacket outfit (accessorized with heels and discreet pearl button earrings, which she called "earbobs") and sat in an office all day with maybe an hour off for lunch. I work way more than 40 hours each week--112 hours on average. I work from 8 a.m. to 12 a.m. seven days a week, but that counts breaks for social media or watching YouTube videos or whatever. Anyway, my job is wonderful and that's where I first read Grady Hendrix's My Best Friend's Exorcism. (Which I didn't know had been turned into a television series. I haven't seen it yet, but it's on my TBW list.) 

If you haven't discovered his writing, please let me introduce you to him.

Here's his website. His tongue-in-cheek "About" section on his site is hilarious.

Here's his bio on Wikikipedia.

Here he is on Goodreads.  

Another new boxed set...

 

Hexes and Heiresses. 

The call for submissions had me at "Witch Queens." I once wrote a historial novella about Catherine the Great being a queen, and I keep thinking about giving QEI the same treatment. I like research, so that would be fun. But it woul also be fun to set a witch queen story in my mythical fantasy worl of the Twelve Realms. I even have a cover for it. I like the cover for the anthology. You can preorder it here.

Boys and balls!

 

Balls, Bats, Pucks, And More.

It’s all part of the game.

Watch as these guys battle the biggest game of their lives. Winning the hearts of the ones they love.

Some of your favorite authors have come together to celebrate two of our favorite things: love and sports.

Whether it's friends to lovers, brothers best friend, or midlife romance, these couples are going to score -- on the field of love AND in the bedroom.

Preorder Bases loaded now. Exclusively on Amazon.

 

Happy Birthday Stephen King

 

The first book I read by Stephen King was not Carrie. I'm not sure what it was. Maybe 'Salem's Lot. I do know that I was reading It by my dying mother's bedside (she died a couple of days after my birthday and the book had been a birthday present). I read The Stand and was blown away. And the experience was even more bizarre because I think I had the worst cold of my life while I was reading it. I loved the original miniseries that was made from it. I didn't see the remake. I thought the first one was perfect. The casting was superb. Terrible wig on Laura San Giacomo. Jamey Sheridan was terrific. The late, great Miguel Ferrer was great. Ruby Dee. Ossie Davis. Matt Frewer. Gary Sinese.  Kathy Baker and Ed Harris in cameos. Just so much fun.

I think King is the Dickens of our time. And I say that even after reading Insomnia. The less said about that, the better.  I hope he lives to be a hundred.  

More promos...

 If you're watching House of Dragons and just can't get enough Dragons, then this is the promo for you.

Urban fantasy (dragon shifters), fantasy, epic fantasy. It's all there. And with an extra helping of romance to make the books extra tasty.

There's even an alien dragon king. (And those three key words together probably ensure the author gets a lot of traffic!)

Next up is shifter romance. I am still bemused that werewolves morphed into "wolf shifters" at some point. They were a lot more frightening back when they were werewolves but they're a lot sexier now. I'm an outlier, I know, but I prefer the scary version. You can find the books here.

I am curious though. What are the favorite shifter aniimals? Wolves. Bears. I've written a tiger shifter and a lion shifter as well as the usual wolves.

In my novella Reszo, my character belongs to a clan of Russians who can shift into creatures called byks, which are a sort of Minotaur-like bull creature.

Fae romance is a lot of fun. I'm in a couple of boxed sets with fairies as the main characters and I realized that we don't really know what fairies can do. Or elves, either, for that matter. They seem to be creatures that protect the woodlands. And we all know about the Fairy Godmother, but how powerful are they? Find out in the books collected here.  

I'm actually in four of the box sets promo'd here. A lot of them are available for 99 cents, some are on preorder. This is another mixed bag with everything from sweet romance to paranormal romance to alien sf (blue abs!)  

Book Promotions for September

 I love book promotions because they're always a great way to grab a bunch of new books at once. Sometimes you have to enter your email address, sometimes you can just snag them. As a writer, looking at promotions is a fabulous way to see who else is writing the kinds of books you're writing. It's a chance to evaluate your cover next to the other covers out there. I like to study blurbs and keywords to make sure I can maximize my own work. But basically, I just really like getting books.  Some of these book promotions feature books that are pruced $2.99 and lower. Find them here.

Here's another promo that's more focused on sci fi.  I'm writing a sci fi novella for Aliens on Earth this year and am excited to see the books in this one. 

Sespite the banner, the books here are an eclectic mix of genres, from straight up sci fi, space opera, fantasy, epic fantasy, and beyon. You can browse through them here.

And finally, here's a promo of books that are all action/all the time. I am particularly drawn to the apocalyptic Los Angeles ones. I love L.A., I truly do, but it's the kind of city where you expect an apocalypse to start. Check the books out here.

Kleopatra with a K

 

Kleopatra by Karen Essex is the first in a series of juicy historical novels giving us a new take on everybody's favorite Egyptian queen. This one focuses on the child who became that queen and she lives in such a treacherous world that it's a wonder she made it to adulthood. The story opens with the death of Ptolemy's wife--even a blind Armenian healer cannot prolong his life--and three-year-old Kleopatra sitting vigil with her sister and half-sister. The little girl is her father's favorite--he calls her his "piece of joy"--and up until this moment, her life has been charmed. But the queen's death is going to unleash a bitter contest for his empty throne, with the other contenders playing ruthlessly. 

This first book has everyting a reader could want--history, pageantry, sex, betrayal, great characters. The only thing its missing is dragons. (And you won't miss them.) Kleoatra's time was so far in the past that even the ordinary feels magical. This is an extremely satisfying book.

It's almost autumn

 

Fall is my favorite season. Summer is nice but Fall has it all. Stephen King's birthday (Next Wednesday, the King will be 75). Halloween. Thanksgiving. Most of the run-up to the winter holidays. I grew up in Washington DC where the autumn color is pretty nice, but my paternal grandmother lived near the Blue Ridge Highway and Skyline Drive, which is one of the premiere places to find Fall color. Lately, the foliage hasn't been quite as spectacular because ofthe droughts everywhere but it can be glorious. The Pacific Northwest, where I lived for five years, does Fall even more spectacularly. In Bellingham, in a little plaza right beside my grocery store, was a trio of trees, one golden, one scarlet, and one brilliant orange. They were spectacular. This is a picture from Deposit Photos but there was a park near where I lived where the trees looked just like this. 

Vote as if your life depends on it, because it does...

 I don't make a secret of my politics. Bu telling you to register to vote has nothing to do with who I vote for. It's one of the duties of being a citizen. The country doesn't ask much of you. Occasionally you might be summoned for jury duty. And every so often, they ask you to vote. If you aren't registered, visit this site. The mid-terms are important. The presidential election is important. The city council elections in your home town are important. VOTE!

I am cheered to see that celebrity influencers are geting involved too. Normally I just roll my eyes when I see a TikTok star or an Instagram influencer talking politic. But the lousy turnout of millennials shows that the regular messages are reaching them. So pieces like this are welcome:  https://youtu.be/V2cYnsYqlZE

I love book covers and I cannot lie

 One of my favorite things about being an indie author (and I've been traditionally published) is hat you have control over what your cover looks like. In trad publishing, even heavyweights like King and Patteson don't have that much say. But as an indie, you can have exactly the cover you want. (That doesn't prevent a lot of indie covers from being awful, but you could say that about a fair number of trad published books as well.)

A cover will make me want to pick up a book. The cover of Mexican Gothic, for example, is so beautiful it looks like a piece of art I want to put on my bookshelf facing out. (It's a wonderful book, but that cover is what snaggedme.) If ou haven't seen it, I urge you to look it up. I couldn't post the cover because it's protected by copyright, and I couldn't. 

When I started publishing 11 years ago, you could buy a lot of covers for under $50.  There were a couple of designers who specialized in inexpensive covers. They all used the same photo sources--Deposit Photo, Shutter Stock, Dreamstime--so you started to see the same faces over and over. (I have the same model on several books. His name is Gunther, and his images are up at a site called Period Images. Another of their models, Karl, is on a couple other books. 

Prices have gone up, but you can still snag some bargains if you cruise the sites. The one I use most often is Book Cover Design. They have tons of designs and one of the things I like about them is that they don't accept covers that use AI-generated images. I've seen a lot of posts touting how writers can make their own covers quickly and freely using sites dedicated tojust that. Right now, honestly, they mostly look awful but in a few months, who knows? (This is different from covers using characters that designers have patiently created on their own.) But the way AI images are created involves a kind of "sampling" from other images, that are the property of the designers who created them. In other words, depending on how you look at it, it's sketchy or it's stealing.  

Designers have to make a living too. Both my mother and my sister were artists. They made a living from their commercial art (working for department stores and thelike). I would hate to think that someone was stealing their art. (Piray of books is also a huge issue. I've seen my work on pirate sites. A lot of people say, well--I don't have the money to buy your book. Except, they're mostly all on KU, so you could spent $10 and get thousands of books for free. And don't tell me you don't spend at least ten dollars a month buying fancy coffee.Onw of my books has been downloaded so much that if I actually got royalties, I could actually cover my monthly expenses with my writing.) But I digress. We were talking about covers.

I have stockpiled a lot of covers, which turned out to be a good investment when prices started going up. A lot of designers I bought when they were just starting out are now in the $200-$300 range per cover. But there is one drawback. Styles in covers change and what looked like an awesome cover back in the day looks hopelessly dated now. Or you bought covers for a series you planned and now find yourself writing in another direction. (I have a number of covers for horror stories and I don't really write those that often.)

Man Chest Ahead...but my story is sweet

 I write a lot under the pen name Katherine Moore. "She" is my most successful pseudonym and the one with the best accolades. (I worked hard to get that USAT bestselling author, yes, I'm goig nto mention it often.) Her brand is sweet, cozy, feel good stories and while I'll occasionally get a little spicy (and it's very little), I mostly stay in the Hallmark zone, if you know what I mean.

But I also contribute to a lot of anthologies and in general, the covers are geared to an audience that's looking for more heat. I often feel like "which story is not like the others?"  But the thing is, I don't really read the sexier stuff. I'm not a prude--sex is awesome in movies--but when I read it, it often sounds really clinical and I get distracted by the words. Rod, shaft, manhood, cock.  Or pussy, cunt, mound, vagina.  It's not that I want to say "thing" and "ya-ya" but I'd rather take you up to the bedroom door so you can imagine what happens then.

Which brings me back to those covers. Basically, if you see I'm in an anthology with a Man Chest cover, it means that I've been invited to play along even though my story isn't as sexy as my fellow writers' fiction. If you like your romance across the spectrum, you will be a happy reader. (As Kat Parrish, I have done some Man Chest--the Rezso novels are sexier.)