Cinderella stories--a new collection

 Do you like "Cinderella" stories?

Here are three very different takes on the beloved fairytale, two with a modern spin and one that's straight up romantasy.

Fashionista--set in present-day Chicago

Midnight Princess--set in modern France

Bride of the Midnight King--set in a mythical land run by vampires.

Three empowered women who just need a little magic to make their dreams come true. The romance is a bonus!

Collected for the first time--these retellings of a beloved fairytale were fun to write, and will--I hope--be fun to read.

The collection is part of a series of retellings that includes Three Beauties (Beauty & the Beast) and coming soon, Three Dreamers (Sleeping Beauty) and Three Towers (Rapunzel). The books join my stand-alone retellings, The Road Past Winter (East of the Sun and West of the Moon), and Wolf Bride (a romantasy version of Red Riding Hood).

I was lucky to snag the cover from Sharon Brownlie of Aspire Book Covers. I've bought a lot of covers from her in the past in all the genres I write, and this one fit the mood of the collection perfectly. 

You can find Three Dancers here. It's free on KU.

Don't worry, it's just saffron

When you're a cook, but you also write cozy mysteries, sometimes you can't help but look at your ingredients and see something that someone else might not see.

I was making a Persian sweet a friend is fond of, a recipe that begins with a simple syrup of saffron, sugar, and water. (As you can imagine, I don't make this often. A TINY bit of saffron cost me about $11 and while the recipe didn't need much (1/4 of a teaspoon), there was barely enough for a second batch later.

I dissolved the saffron in hot water first, and then dumped it into the pan with the sugar. And this is what it looked like.  And my first thought was that it looked a lot like blood on snow. Because that's how my mind works. 

And that got me thinking about the first time I wondered what the freezing point of blood was. I was writing a story for my own amusement in high school and it was pre-Internet. So I did what I always did when I was stuck on a question--I called the reference librarian at my local library. And I asked her at what temperature blood froze.

There was a LONG pause but she didn't ask me why I wanted to know. I've since talked to retired librarians who've told me some of the questions they got, questions that made mine look completely normal. 

Which got me thinking. do many people want to know the freeze point of blood? So I googled it. Here's the first answer I found, which is pretty thorough. Surprisingly, blood has a lower freezing point than water. Interestingly, because we're often taught that our blood is very similar chemically to seawater, seawater freezes at 28.4 F, wchich is almost6 three degrees lower than the freezing point of blood. Just in case you were ever curious.