Are Gargoyles the New Vampires?

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That's what I'm hearing. The next "thing" in paranormal fantasy/romance is going to be gargoyles. I'm okay with that. I really liked Anton Strout's Alchemystic (A Spellmason Chronicle) and its sequels. I also am a HUGE fan of Strout's Simon Canderous novels. They're really first rate urban fantasy.

It really is time for something new and different in the paranormal world. I don't mind vampires--there's something primal about the whole vampire thing and I get it. But I've never been that crazy abotu werewolves, and when the whole "shifter" sub-genre exploded a few years ago--dragon shifters, bear shifters, dinosaur shifters--I was somewhat bemused. No one ever seems to get the whole thing about how an average sized woman can't transform into a cat without losing some mass in there somewhere.

I'm really curious to know what writers will come up with. And meanwhile--thank you Goodreads--there's this list of nearly 50 books featuring gargoyles in urban fantasy and paranormal romance.

Shakespeare and Politics

A surprising number of Shakespeare's plays are about politics. The history plays, of course, and Julius Caesar, the first play every kid in high school has to read, thus turning them off to Shakespeare for the rest of their lives. Coriolanus is a play that has a lot to say about today's political climate. But the polotical play everyone forgets about is Antony and Cleopatra. This is what Antony has to say when Cleopatra brings up his wife back in Rome:  Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch of the rang'd empire fall! 

We've all encountered politicians like that, politicians who are ready to throw everything under the bus in order to follow their own hearts. It did not end well for Cleopatra and Antony.

Finders Keepers by Mark Bowden...a review

I was talking about non-fiction writers I admire the other day and I somehow left Mark Bowden (Killing Pablo, Blackhawk Down) off my list. This is the review I did of his book Finders Keepers back in 2002.

In Mark Bowden’s FINDERS KEEPERS, a South Philly loser becomes a folk hero when he finds $1.2 million that fell off an armored car. In 1981, the economy in Philadelphia was like a Bruce Springsteen song—jobs that have sustained families for years have disappeared and they aren’t coming back.  That puts people like 28-year-old JOEY COYLE on the streets without too many options.  Joey never finished high school, but on the docks, he was respected for his almost supernatural knowledge of machinery.  Unemployed, he just another speed freak.  And he’s getting into a downward spiral—using all his money to buy meth and then borrowing from his dealers.

This story really is kind of irresistible.  Joey is a natural born loser, although he has charm to burn.  (There’s literally no one with a bad word for him, even when he’s at his most “hopped up” from the drug he calls ‘blow.”)  There are moments in this strange saga where we’re almost doubled over laughing—from his manic search to find a suitable hiding place for the money to his attempts to shove money into his clothes at the airport before resorting to donning panty hose.

Enjoy a good Cinderella story? Fashionista is Free this week!

Last year I kicked off a series of bite-size, modern retellings of fairy tales. Eventually there will be ten, including Hunter's Kiss (due out in two weeks), a retelling of Snow White, Hero's Kiss (a retelling of Beauty and the Beast), and The Unknown Road (East of the Sun, West of the Moon).

I have a soft spot for this book. Like Bride of the Midnight King, the heroine has an intriguing relationship with her youngest sister, one of the stepsisters. When I write little sisters, I tend to think of my own who was a complicated person I loved dearly, even when she drove me crazy. I miss her and she often shows up in my fiction in various guises.

Fashionista takes place in Chicago, a city one of my best friends now calls home. I had a good time playing around with the fairy tale and if you like that sort of thing, you might like this book. (Did I mention it's free for the next five days?) And if you like the book, would you say a few nice words about it?  Thanks.

History Has Been Made

I think that even if Hillary Clinton is not the nominee of your party or of your heart, you must still recognize what a momentous, hinge of history moment this is. Women have had the right to vote in this country since 1919. It's taken nearly a hundred years to have a woman run for president as the nominee of a major party.

Golda Meier became Prime Minister of Israel in 1969. Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister of India in 1966 (and is to date the only female Prime Minister the country has ever had.) Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979. Isabel Martinez de Peron became President of Peru in 1974. Vigdis Finnbogadottir became President of Iceland in 1980. Corazon Aquino became President of the Philippines in 1986. Park Geun-hye became President of South Korea in 2013. Angela Merkel became Germany's first woman Chancellor in 2009.

If you want to be stunned by just how far behind the U.S. is in giving women a voice in politics, just check out this Wikipedia listing of all the places who have elected or appointed a woman to lead.

Where are the Mer?

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“O, train me not, sweet mermaid, with thy note, to drown me in thy sister’s flood of tears.” --William Shakespeare, A Comedy of Errors

I have a fondness for mermaids.  I've written a couple of mermaid stories and I would love to do a series of epic fantasies set in a fabulous underwater kingdom. (The Dark Mer series.)  Everyone I know is telling me not to do it.  (The smart money right now is on Gargoyles being the next big paranormal "creature" and that's fine. I think there are a lot of possibilities in gargoyles. And also, if it means an end to the endless procession of "shifter" stories, I'm there. But mermaids...There need to be more mermaid stories. Chinese filmmaker Stephen Chow (whose hilarious The God of Cookery is must-viewing for any foodie) wrote and directed made half a billion dollars with his movie The Mermaid. there's also a lovely movie about a mermaid and France's Sun King that's stuck in development hell. I read it for a film market a few years ago and there was even a star attached, but it seems to have fallen off the grid. Maybe it's time to reboot Splash!

 

A message from the King--Stephen King, that is

Shakespeare's famous Butterfly Line

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Since we were speaking of butterflies, I went looking for a Shakespeare quote about butterflies. I found this from King Lear:  "We will laugh at gilded butterflies." I don't know King Lear as well as I should--I've only ever seen adaptations of it, like Uli Edel's King of Texas (with Patrick Stewart)--but the play is crammed full of gorgeous lines. "Come not between the dragon and his wrath!!"  Love that one.

TBR: The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchison

Right now this book is number 1 in the mystery category over at Amazon. It is traditionally published and somehow I'd never heard of it until three days ago when I first spotted the cover. I'm not generally a fan of captive narratives, but this one sounds so off-the-wall intriguing that I'm going to have to check it out. It's got a 4.4 star rating on more than 2200 reviews.

Shakespeare in the Raw!

For a May 2016 staging of The Tempest in Central Park, according to production notes: The production uses semi- and full-nudity to celebrate body freedom and free expression and to dramatize the conflict between the visitors to Prospero's island and its inhabitants. 
You can read more about the production and see the pictures here. 
I just hope it was a warm night! 

Shakespeare's Prop Room: An inventory by John Leland and Alan Baragona

I don't know Alan or John but I wish I did because they are my kind of Shakespeare geeks. The idea of this book (inventorying every prop mentioned in dialogue, stage directions or implied in action. (Shakespeare was pretty sparing with stage directions. I only remember the most famous one, Exeunt, pursued by a bear, so I'm curious to know what they came up with. the book came out earlier this year and is available now, but at a price. (Even the Kindle version is nearly $35 which indicates a certain lack of clarity on the concept of digital copies.) The publisher is offering "early review" copies over at Library Thing this month so I signed up. But you know how Library Thing's things go...People click on everything, whether they want them or not. They're what a friend of mine calls "greedy grabbers." So wish me luck because I think it would be a ton of fun to leaf through this book.

And another book to be on the lookout for: Wolf Road by Beth Lewis

When you're marketing something, one of the things you aim for is "frequency" if you can manage it without driving people crazy. (There are those who claim that's actually not a bad thing either, but I disagree.)  The idea is that if you see something once, you might take notice of it, but you probably won't act. But if you see something THREE times, that interest turns to a click on a buy site.

I've seen something about Wolf Road three times now.  I know it was the title that first caught my attention because the cover is actually kind of meh. When I read the blurb, though, I was drawn in. It's 2020, a post-apocalyptic world, and a young girl begins to suspect that the man who calls himself her father is not only NOT her father, but a serial killer who plans to kill her next.  Yes, this book has three things I like:  a plucky young heroine, a dystopian future setting, and crime! the book will be out next month (July 5), so stay tuned!

BOLO: Ben Macintyre's Rogue Heroes

I have a writer crush on author Ben Macintyre. (I hope his wife, novelist/film critic  Kate Muir doesn't mind.) The first book of his I read was Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth. Worth was a fantastic, movie-worthy character and his greatest crime is actually motivated by passion (and not the murderous kind). Macintyre has a new book coming out in October and I cannot wait to read it. Rogue Heroes is a wartime story of Britain's SAS. I'm not necessarily one for war stories, but Macintyre's books Agent Zigzag and A Spy Among Friends, were enough to put me on his list of "followers" on Amazon. (And somehow I missed his Operation Mincemeat.  The subtitle is: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured Allied Victory.  Who is NOT going to read a book with that subtitle?)

Even if you prefer fiction to non-fiction, you owe it to yourself to sample Macintyre's work. He's on my list of best non-fiction writers working today. (Since you asked, some of the others are Sebastian Junger, Erik Larson, John McPhee, Joan Didion, Jon Krakauer, Susan Orlean, Barbara Ehrenreit, David McCullough, and Kathleen Norris.)

Shakespeare for the Soundtrack of Your Life

This is the Earl of Essex Galiard. The Earl of the title was Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex, who was the politically ambitious nobleman known to be a "favorite" of Queen Elizabeth I.

Obscure Mysteries with Shakespeare Themes

I love mysteries. I've been reading them since I was a child and I love them all--cozies to Nordic noir and everything in between. If someone's getting murdered and someone's trying to find out why and who did it, I'm there. So it's fair to say that I've read a LOT of mysteries in my time. And yet--how can this be--I have never read a Shakespeare-themed mystery. Not one. So I turned to Goodreads, my source for all things listicle. The site did NOT let me down. (I find Goodreads a PITA to deal with in terms of uploading books and changing covers and things, but the readers are spectacular resources.)

There are 60 books on the list--one a day for the next two months!! And the one that caught my eye was Interred With Their Bones. It's set in modern day, themed to Hamlet, and features a character who goes on to headline a series. My kind of book. And bonus, it's available used for a penny and postage, so $4,

For the TBR pile...We Are Not Such Things

I'm not a big fan of most true crime, but this book by Nadine Justine Van Der Leun caught my eye in my Net Galley newsletters. I remember reading about this south African murder case and wondering, "How did this happen?" I've read the author's magazine pieces and she's a fine writer, so I look forward to reading this book.

Anonymous--a star-studded riff on the Shakespeare authorship question

It's always fun to read the articles about who "really" wrote Shakespeare's plays. In one of the only fan letters I ever wrote in my life, I asked Isaac Asimov (whose two-part guide to Shakespare is terrific) if he had an opinion on the issue. He did not. (Yes, he answered my fan letter with a typed index card reply. Which I still have somewhere. Yes. Isaac Asimov!!!!) But I digress.

I'm a fan of British costume dramas. They're often a little on the slow side but they almost always make up for it with fantastic acting. Anonymous is the perfect example. It's an Elizabethan romp starring mother/daughter actresses Joely Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave as Elizaabeth One at various stages in her life.The premise of the movie is that Shakespeare's work was really written by an aristocrat and that Shakespeare himself was a nasty little man who acted as the aristocrat's "front" and killed Christopher Marlowe because he was about to out him.  (Speaking of fronts, if you love good acting, check out Trumbo.  The movie about the Hollywood Ten's most famous member is a feast of fine acting, with Louis C.K. and John Goodman outstanding in supporting roles and Bryan Cranston and Helen Mirren at the top of their game.)

Saturday Shakespeare Meme

I would believe you Morpheus!

If you've never seen Laurence Fishburne in the 1995 film version of Othello (with Kenneth Branagh as Iago), it's worth looking for. At the time, Fisburne was the first black actor to play the Moor in a major American movie; up to then, the role had always been played by actors in black face, including both Anthony Hopkins and Laurence Olivier.

Shakespeare Earrings

The last time I browsed Cafe Press it was all about the clothing--t-shirts and hats and tote bags and such. Also mugs. I didn't realize they'd gotten into Etsy territory with hand-made jewelry items until I saw these earrings for sale. You can buy them here, but be warned, they come with a warning that the earrings are not for sale to, or use by, anyone under 12.  I'm not sure why that is. I can see they'd be a choking hazard for very young children but surely kids grow out of that phase by the time they start going to school?

Feminist Friday and Shakespeare

Over at the Conversation, a website that celebrates "Academic rigor and journalistic flair," there's an essay on how Shakespeare helped writer Germaine Greer shape her feminist masterpiece, The Female Eunuch. It's a long-ish piece and if you're someone who tags blog posts with TLDR, then you'll want to skip down past the photo of Greer speaking at Sydney University in 2005 for the good stuff. My favorite takeaway from the article was this quote: "Greer cites Shakespeare’s poem The Phoenix and the Turtle, as an example of the fullest expression of the ideal of love “as a stabilizing, creative, harmonizing force in the universe'."

I don't even remember that poem--my knowledge of Shakespeare's poetry is mostly limited to a few of his well-known sonnets. So I looked it up. Wikipedia, bless their hearts, has an entry on the allegorical poem.  they call it one of Shakespeare's "most obscure works" (making me feel better for not having remembered it), and one that is open to multiple interpretations. The one thing I do remember is that the "turtle" of the title is the "turtledove," not the reptile everyone used to have as a pet before fears of salmonella made ownership of turtles a health risk.

The "Phoenix" portrait of Queen Elizabeth I

Some scholars have identified "the Phoenix" as Queen Elizabeth 1 and the turtle as John Salisbury, who was a married courtier from a powerful Welsh family.

The language of the poem is gorgeous:

Here the anthem doth commence:
Love and constancy is dead;
Phoenix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence

but you'll need footnotes all along the way. The Conversation essay makes a persuasive case for a Shakespearean influence on Greer's work, and it's just one more example of how Shakespeare's work continues to resonate almost half a millennium later.

Shakespeare and Guns

Today is National Gun Violence Awareness Day. Yesterday, there was a shooting at UCLA. Not long ago, there was a shooting at the college where my brother got his law degree. On Thanksgiving, there was a shooting at the college where a friend's son goes to school. We all remember the Virginia Tech shootings, and I have ties to there as well--my father, my brother, my aunt, my uncle, and a cousin all spent time there.So today we're supposed to wear orange to show our solidarity and support for the victims of gun violence and their families. It's a start, I suppose. I remember when the red ribbons first started showing up at celebrity events to promote awareness of AIDS.  And the ribbons spread. And with the awareness came the benefits and the research.

I really hope that the orange t-shirts do the same. Guns have been around a long time--longer, probably than you think. We know Shakespeare mentioned them in his plays, but so did Geoffrey Chaucer two hundred years earlier. Guns and Ammo magazine online has an interesting article that argues William Shakespeare was a "gun writer." The article is well worth reading and the citations are right on the money.

Behind the Scenes of Shakespeare's Stories

I always read the Afterwords in books. I like knowing what bit of stray inspiration sparked a novel, or what random collision of events spawned a tale. (I remember reading Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box and thinking he'd read the same eBay listing I had, a listing where a woman was offering her father-in-law's suit for sale because her kid was afraid of his ghost. I've never seen an interview where he talks about it, but I'd bet that's where he got the idea.)

In school we always get the bare bones explanation for where Shakespeare got his plots but they never explained that King Lear is actually related to Cinderella, as Shakespeare's Storybook does. I read that in the book blurb and now I HAVE to get this book.

Shakespeare-inspired cocktails? Why not?

Over at Shakespeare & Beyond today, there's a little background and a link to a podcast interview with Caroline Bicks and Michelle Ephraim who have put together Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dreams, a whimsically illustrated collection of drink recipes "inspired" by Shakespeare. (The drinks have names like "Caliban's Wrong Island iced Tea.") You'll find a couple of the drink recipes there as well. (If you enjoy this sort of literary/liquor match up, you should check out Tim Federle's books, Tequila Mockingbird, Gone With the Gin, and Hickory Daiquiri Dock.)

Free Frantasy...Bride of the Midnight King

Free for the first five days in June, my vampire version of Cinderella, the first in a three-book series. Check it out here.

Shakespare's Money

I am interested in money. My father had a coin collection that wasn't really worth much but I loved looking through the old coins, many of them European.

I have a fantasy series in which I've worked out various systems of money and the names and denominations of the coins. Working out your own monetary system really gives you insight into how things work. Why is one thing worth a dollar while another thing is worth five dollars, or fifty dollars?

One of the oldest "stories"' there is concerns the thirty pieces of silver Judas was paid to betray Jesus. I've always wanted to write a story about those coins.

This book caught my eye and it is just so annoying that the Kindle price is ore than you'd usually pay for a trade paperback. (There's a REASON why there are no customer reviews yet.) There are only five left in stock, and I suppose if I were the TRUE Shakespeare geek I claim to be, I'd snap one of them up. Maybe I'll put it on my Christmas wish list.

Shakespeare + President = Meme

Here's the only Shakespeare presidential meme I could find that's nonpartisan. I suppose as the general election approaches we'll see more, butfor right now, there's not much.

Summer of Shakespeare #3 Begins!

Shakespeare and politics...when the bard got political, people died. He would have appreciated our current election cycle, I think.

And so, the third annual Summer of Shakespeare begins!

Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler --a review

Like The Devil Wears Prada and Debt and other books about coming of age in New York, this debut novel introduces us to Tess, who is a fish out of water in her sundress and cardigan, trying to bluff her way through an interview when she’s way over her head. We like her, and we enjoy being educated along with her, introduced to the nuances of taste—you will develop a palate—and the intricacies of food service where meals are works of art and presentations like little pieces of theater. We also love the vision she has of her New York self—a sophisticated, better-dressed, better paid version of herself who lives a life filled with art openings and concerts and love and excitement. We KNOW that vision because we’ve all had a version of it. 

Tess is an “Everywoman” who is relatable, not just to Millennials, but also to anyone who ever followed a dream from a dusty town where the residents were obsessed with football and church to New York or Los Angeles, or any other glittering metropolis where the possibilities seem limitless and even the reality is better than the reality left behind. When she first arrives in town, it seems like she’s always being wrong-footed and judged, and her thoughts about the people she meets are bemused and sensible and endearing. She is an OUTSIDER who wants to be an INSIDER in the worst way and if there are few readers alive who can’t remember that feeling, even if they won’t admit it. When she literally “earns her stripes” (the servers all wear striped shirts while the back waiters wear white button-downs), we’re pleased for her.

A Fairytale retelling

The Twelve Dancing Princesses is one of my favorite fairytales and you don't really see it retold. I love that this version, A Branch of Silver, a Branch of Gold, went the old fashioned route with the cover. I had books that looked like this when I was a child; they'd been my mother's and they were frayed on the bindings, the fabric worn away at the corners and showing the boards beneath.the author, Anne Elisabeth Stengl, has rewritten other fairytales. She has a story in Five Enchanted Roses (a collection of Beauty and the Beast stories) and another in Five Golden Slippers (five Cinderella stories.)

She has also created her own fanciful world, Goldstone Woods," and there are a number of books in that series with "please read me" titles like Moonblood and Dragonwitch. I can't wait to explore that landscape, which she describes as "an ever-growing world of knights and dragons, mystical forests and hidden demesnes, unspeakable evil and boundless grace."You can read more about the series on her website.

Cover Reveal...Beauty Sleep

Yet another entry into my "Modern Magic" series of fairytale retellings. I saw this pre-made cover by Sarah Beard on the Book Cover Designer and snatched it up over the weekend. It is, as you might be able to tell from the cover, a retelling of the classic story "Sleeping Beauty." This one is longer than the other entries in the series, which are mostly novelettes. I really love this cover and have not seen the model on a bazillion other covers.  I also love the color palette.

Aixa and the Shark

Part two of my three-part La Bruja Roja series is free for the next five days. Check it out here.  It's urban fantasy about a witch who lives in a border town that's not just on the border between Texas and Mexico, it's on the border between life and death. The final story, Aixa and the Spider, will be out next month. I'm fond of the Aixa stories.  Maybe you'll like them too.

Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterson

This smart book about a young protagonist taking on dark forces owes a lot to the Harry Potter series.  She’s an orphan whose father and mother perished under peculiar circumstances and she now lives with a woman who may or may not be her aunt, but who is certainly rather abusive.  Mrs. Rokaby is bad enough but her evil rabbit Bigamist is a real villain! 

The characters are rooted in the real world, which makes the time tornados and time traps really work.  They’re more magical fantastical than science fiction, and we are very interested in how things are going to play out.  (That opening is really tasty and very visual.)

In some ways, we can see the derivation of a lot of the ideas here.  In particular, the story reminds us of John Bellairs’ trilogy of books that begins with The House with the Clock in its Walls.  The young protagonist of that book (a chubby ten year old) has to track down the clock by solving a mystery, and saves the world thereby.  This book is just as complex and just as satisfying, and young Silver (named after her father’s favorite pirate, Long John Silver) is a kid we can really sympathize with and really like.  She is just little (sort of like a hobbit) but she has to do a brave thing because it’s the thing to do. 

The Devil in the White City

If you love true crime, you've probably read this by now; if you haven't read it, you should. Erik Larson is a terrific writer and from the first book of his I read, Isaac's Storm, about the devastating Galveston hurricane at the turn of the last century, I was hooked. I haven't read his most recent book, Dead Wake, about the crossing of the Lusitania, but ... it's on my TBR list.

Here's my review of The Devil in the White City, still Larson's most famous work:

The true story of two great events that occurred simultaneously in Chicago—the extravagant World’s Fair honoring the 400^th anniversary of the discovery of America; and a series of heinous murders.

This is a tremendously entertaining book for fans of 19^th century architecture, the city of Chicago, and true crime.  Larson has taken on a couple of interesting stories and interwoven them in a way that’s not quite totally successful, but which always engages us. His non-fiction prose style is so graceful that it’s a pure pleasure to read.

Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Giveaway

Who doesn't like the opportunity to win some goodies? Books. Gift cards. And the opportunity to encounter new writers and new books. I'll be interested in reading the Dragon  Born Awakening series from Ella Summers that's part of the package. You can enter here.

Where have all the women gone?

One of the things I hear a lot is that women don't write epic fantasy.  Kameron Hurley (a double Hugo Award-winner) talks about that and many other topics in this new book, due out next week. Tor.com has posted an excerpt. you can read it here.

All Involved by Ryan Gattis...a review

This novel, inspired by the events of the L.A. Riots in 1992,  interweaves stories and points of view in a cinematic way (think CRASH or SYRIANA) with the authenticity of actual events told the lens of Gattis’ multi-cultural cast. It makes a wonderful copansion piece to Anna Deavere Smith’s TWILIGHT, her one-woman, multi-character theater piece about the L.A. riots that erupted in the wake of the verdict in the Rodney King case.

 And while much of the L.A. riot coverage focused on the clashes between the African-American and Korean communities, this novel also gives us a snapshot of one complicated extended Hispanic family (both blood family and gang affiliations). Gattis has done a terrific job of getting inside the heads of his characters, particularly Lupe (aka Payasa). .

The characters here are complex and mostly sympathetic, and the adage “Live by the gun, die by the gun” has never seemed so apt.

There’s not a whole lot of story here, but what there is, is absorbing. The plot has a lot of different threads that are woven together, with unexpected connections every step of the way. This is a lot like CRASH, and it’s visceral.  No one group is singled out as the good or bad guys and Gattis does a terrific job giving us viewpoints from all different directions.

For the TBR Pile--THE GENE

I love popular science as a genre and this book caught my eye in a newsletter from Simon & Schuster. Muhkherjee also wrote the amazing The Emperor of All Maladies (subtitled: A Biography of Cancer), so I have high hopes for this book about what it means to be human when we can write and overwrite our own genetic code.

I like the cover too--it's clean and graphic and stands out in a thumbnail. (When you're an indie writer, you tend to notice things like that.What I didn't realize is that this cover is actually the cover of the audio book. The book has a slightly different cover. It's got much the same feel but it's not, at least in my opinion, as eye-catching or appealing.

The Beast Prince

This retelling of Beauty and the Beast popped up this morning when I went to Amazon to see if anyone had left a new review for The Summer Garden. I'm always interested in what other writers have done with the story since I'm so fond of the story myself. (And while the Disney version of the story looks pretty, I Cannoot. Wait to see the Guillermo del Toro version with Emma Watson. It was a really smart script and it will look fantastic.)

Cover Reveal Dark Dream

This is the cover for the first book in my new series The Dreamer's Daughters, which will publish this fall. It focuses on a trio of sisters, all who have the ability to work dream magic because I've been fascinated by dreams my whole life. Mostly because I rarely remember mine. I do dream in color, and I did once have that anxiety dream about being in college and having an exam in a class you never attended. (For me, the class was advanced calculus and even in my dream I knew it was a dream because I am math-challeged.)

The designer is Veronica R of IndieElaborates and I purchased it from The Book Cover Designer.

Once Upon a Curse--17 Fairy Tale Retellings

I just bought Once Upon a Curse (it's a boxed set selling for 99 cents on Amazon) that's chock full of fairy tale retellings. The only story I've read before is Christine Pope's "The Queen of Frost and Darkness," a Snow Queen retelling that originally ran in Dark Valentine Magazine. 

It's a fantastic collection. Here's the review I just posted on Amazon:

 Witches and warriors, demons and darkness, brave women and true love, and a vampiric take on a classic fairy tale—it’s all here in this boxed set, and more besides. Because many of the stories have layers to them that remind us of other stories and folk tales and ballads, like the silver dagger Yarrow carries in the collection’s opening story, “Yarrow Sturdy and Bright,” by Devon Monk. This is a fierce, feminist take on “The Pied Piper,” and it sets the tone for the stories that follow.

The stories run the gamut from reimagined Celtic folklore like Anthea Sharp’s “Fae Horse,” a wild ride on a NightMare to Christine Pope’s lyrical Russian take on “The Snow Queen.” C. Gockel’s urban fantastic version of Cinderella features a wildly sympathetic stepmother, a “stepsister” who’s a 15-year-old gay kid exploring his own fabulosity, and a whiny “princess” whose diva antics are consistently amusing.

The teaser trailer for Beauty and the Beast

Disney has just released the teaser trailer for their live-action Beauty and the Beast. And it looks lush.

Bite-sized Beauty and the Beast

My retelling of Beauty and the Beast, The Summer Garden, is free this week on Amazon. Because we all need a free fairy tale every once in a while.

Summer of Shakespeare #3

Yes, it's that time of year again--Summer of Shakespeare time. This will be SoS number three, and there will be Shakespeare geekery coming out your ears by August 31. The festivities begin June 1, so "brush up your Shakespeare" as Cole Porter urged you to in his musical Kiss Me Kate, based on his play The Taming of the Shrew (one of my least favorites).

Freebie Fairytale Fiction

A Dream of Sun and Roses is still free on Amazon, so if you're looking for a short, futuristic fairy tale (based on Sleeping Beauty) you can get it here.  I like rewriting fairy tales, not so much because I don't have ideas of my own, but because I like telling the stories in my own way. But at a certain point I realized that everyone picks the same five fairy tales--Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and maybe...Red Riding Hood.  When I started my "Modern Magic Series," I knew I wanted ten stories in all, so I had to go beyond the obvious. (Plus, outside of doing a werewolf take on Red Riding Hood, I didn't really see much I could do with the story)

Here's what I came up with:

Fashionista (Cinderella)
While My City Dreams (Rapunzel)
Hunter's Kiss (Snow White)
Hero's Kiss (Beauty and the Beast)
Beauty Sleep (Sleeping Beauty)
Unknown Road (East of the Sun, West of the Moon)
Hideous (Ugly Duckling)
Midnight's Daughter (The Twelve Dancing Princesses)
Lady in the Water (The Little Mermaid)
Soul Kiss (The Snow Queen)

I have covers for almost all of the stories--some women buy shoes, I buy covers. The amazing Joy Sillesen of Indie Author Services created some, and I bought the others as premades from various sources. Hunter's Kiss was created by Ravven, whose work is exquisite. I bought two of her premades last year as a Christmas present to me. I also picked up a couple on The Book Cover Designer. I know people can be sniffy about pre-mades, but there's some gorgeous work there.

The Time Traveler's Almanac

I am a fan of short stories. I'm a fan of time travel stories. So this collection of short stories (edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer) sounds like it's right up my alley. And I would never have known about it if I hadn't stumbled across the cover in a review. I love this cover. I love that the butterfly is a call out to one of my all-time favorite short stories, Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder." I remember reading that story for the first time and just being stunned by it. It was my introduction to Ray Bradbury and, most likely, the beginning of my life-long love of the short story form.

This is not the first cover this book has. When I went searching for it on Amazon--because to see it is to buy it--an older cover came up. And for me, the older cover was not as inviting. Maybe it's the background color. I used to work in print magazines and one of the things we were always doing is gathering data on which covers sold the best. (Covers with white backgrounds were not that popular.) For me this alternate cover looks like it might be a work of popular history or popular science. It doesn't say "fiction" to me the way the butterfly cover does. But either way, this book is on its way to me and I can't wait.

Freebie Fiction

I'm going to be running free promotions for various books all the rest of this month and into June. I'm staring with A Dream of Sun and Roses, a long short story which was originally written for an anthology of future fairy tales that never happened. It's a version of Sleeping Beauty. The other freebie availale right now is Unsanctified, a horror  story with spiders and other creepy stuff.

Weekend Flash Fiction

                                DARKLING      

                       by Katherine Tomlinson                                 

The sun didn’t rise on Thursday.  The blogosphere, which never sleeps, outpaced the news channels in reporting the situation, but CNN had posted a graphic (Black Thursday!) by 11 a.m.  The parade of pundits began that afternoon, with self-styled experts throwing out phrases like “Little Ice Age” and “global hydrological cycle.”

Dr. Nicholas Solarz, whose theories on nuclear winter had been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, seemed to be everywhere at once, basking in his moment of geek glory. He talked a lot about the surface temperature of the earth being 300 Kelvin and predicted that without sunlight, the temperature would drop by a factor of two in weeks.

When these statements were met by puzzled looks from anchor-people who couldn’t do long division without a calculator, he explained that 275 Kelvin is the freezing temperature of water and that in a month; the planet’s surface temperature would be down to 150 Kelvin.  Then he had added, somewhat unhelpfully, “You do the math.”

But to do the math, people needed to know the difference between the Kelvin and the Celsius temperature scales and have a passing grasp of the concept of “absolute zero” and most everyone had enough problems just converting Celsius to Fahrenheit.  Also, a fair number of viewers thought Dr. Solarz was saying “Kevin” and wondered who he was and what he had to do with anything.

Shakespeare Fan Fic--Macbeth

Weirdos

by Katherine Tomlinson

 

The cops eventually showed up at school. Cate knew they would. When a guy like Kingman Duncan gets killed, people pay attention. Questions get asked. The police want answers. So we were expecting them and we had answers ready.

It was a week after Homecoming but the posters were still up all over the school.

Go fighting Scots!

Dunsinane H.S. rules!

As far as the cops were concerned, they had a whole high school full of suspects, kids who might have stabbed Duncan. Studies have shown that popular kids get bullied as often as the misfits do. My experience suggests they probably deserve it.

I wasn’t going to shed any tears over dead Duncan and neither were my sisters.

We didn’t do it, but we knew who did.

We weren’t going to throw him under the bus.

Unless we had to.

The cancer you've never heard of...

I had never heard of Angiosarcoma until just over a year ago when a friend of mine collapsed in pain while at work and soon after learned that his spleen had essentially exploded as a result of the disease.

What is Angiosarcoma?  Angiosarcoma is a cancer of the inner lining of blood vessels, and it can occur in any area of the body. The disease most commonly occurs in the skin, breast, liver, spleen, and deep tissue.

Cancer of the inner lining of blood vessels. Who even knew there was such a thing? Seriously, there aren't enough major organs for cancer to infest, it has to invade the inner lining of blood vessels?  Even the Wikipedia article on the disease is really brief. By the time my friend knew he had this aggressive cancer, it had already spread all over. He fought it as hard as he could with heart and courage and humor. But it killed him anyway.

There used to be a tagline for American Cancer Society PSAs. "Help fight cancer in YOUR lifetime." It's too late for my friend, but maybe not too late for someone you know. If you have a spare dollar and don't know where to put it, here's a place.

Angiosarcoma Awareness, Inc.
P.O. Box 17421
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33318
www.cureasc.org

400 Years Later--William shakespeare is still relevant!