The Midnight Queen is (Almost) Here

The Midnight Queen, the conclusion of the three-partstory cycle that began with Bride of the Midnight King, is in final edits. I wrote much of it while sitting by the bedside of my hospitalized best friend, who was mercifully asleep most of the time. (He's fine now.)

 The setting helped put me in the mood to write about witch kings and dark omens. (Hospitals at night are creepy places. There's a reason why Lars von Trier's The Kingdom was so eerily effective. If you've never seen it, check out the trailer here.)

I love my characters in this series and am sorry to leave them behind, but it's time. The book will be out later this month. The cover is by the wonderful people at Indie Author Services.

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.

Another Boxed Set! Be Witched

Lately I've been sampling boxed sets and as often is the case, once you go looking, you discover they're all over the place. This one caught my eye because the cover of one of the stories included uses the same image as one of my covers. (Yes, we all use the same five stock photo places.) I like my cover better because Indie Author Services did an awesome job of combining images, but still...

This one looks really interesting to me because as much as I like vampires and weres, I am ready for different kinds of magic. Looks like this collection delivers that. It's 99 cents and available for all ereading devicdes. You can find it on Amazon here. (I'm Kindle-centric, what can I say?)

I Will Make Wine of Your Blood

The heroine of my upcoming urban fantasy novel (Misbegotten)  is a paranormal crime reporter named Kira Simkins.  In the course of the story, I mention that "Kira" has written two true crime books, one about a syndiate of murderous mer-men (Poseidon's Stepchildren) and one called I Will Make Wine of Your Blood. My friend Joy Sillesen of Indie Author Services whipped up covers for the imaginary books and I've always planned on writing novelettes to give away to my so-far nonexistent mailing list. But as I get close to finishing Misbegotten, I find myself more and more intrigued by the premise of this paranormal "true crime" book. I really want to write it now, but that will play havoc with my schedule this year.
I love this cover so much.

Cover reveal: The Unknown Road

I've been writing a series of novelette-sized modernized fairy tales, and grabbing covers from various sources. The fabulous Ravven was running a Christmas deal on her pre-designed covers and I snagged that great Hunter's Kiss (Snow White) cover from her for a fraction of what her covers normally cost. (And believe me, when I can afford it, I'm going back to her for my series covers because she does gorgeous work.)
As does my friend Joy Sillesen of Indie Author Services, who created this great cover for my retelling of "East of the Sun, West of the Moon," which was always one of my favorite fairy tales. I love the color palette on this cover.
The novelette will be out later this summer, but I just had to show off the cover now.

12 Nights of Christmas--Shameless Self-Promotion

My collection of dark short stories based on "The Twelve Days of Christmas" is back, just in time for the holiday season. I've been all about the Amazon in the past, but with this release, I'm going wider. The book won't be on Amazon but you can find it at Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Tolino (if you happen to live in Germany), and a number of others.

Some of these stories originally appeared in Dark Valentine Magazine or on the website and it's a pretty eclectic batch of tales. I enjoyed writing them. The cover is by the talented Joy Sillsesen of Indie Author Services.

Steampunk fairy tales

Every year or so when I have a little discretionary income, I like to download images for use on my covers and in my blog and for personal projects that need to be jazzed up with graphics and illustrations and photos. I use various different places, but this month I'm taking advantage of a sale on Bigstock. One of the projects on my "to do" list is to put together a collection of fairy tales filtered through a steampunk aesthetic. I've never really written in steampunk but I enjoy it when I run across a well-done story in the genre.

Bigstock has a selection of great steampunk fonts and I'm slowly downloading them 10 images per day. I still don't make my own covers--Joy Sillesen of Indie Author Services does that--but I really like playing around with images and font and typefaces and graphics. And I love having these images to play with.

Shameless Self-Promotion Saturday

This is the summer I finally get all the bits and pieces of writing up and out there. Joy Sillesen of Indie Author Services has created a great new cover for me as I collect all the L.A. Nocturne stories and add them to new ones as a "teaser" for my Misbegotten novel. (Urban Fantasy, set in L.A. There are vampires and werewolves and shapeshifters but no chicks with swords or tramp stamps.)

Introducing: Mickey Cozart--cozy sleuth

One of the reasons I moved from L.A. is that I wanted more time to write. Now that I've been herein Bellingham six months, I've been able to go through my pending projects and start getting them into shape. Joy Sillesen of Indie Author Services  has been helping me with that--providing covers and formatting and other assistance. Check out Indie Author Services here.
I've been writing a lot of fantasy lately, which is fun, but my heart will always belong to mysteries. This is the first of what I envision as a three-book series about Mickey Cozart, a woman of a certain age whose best friend is an actress making the awkward transition from leading lady to character actress. (She keeps losing parts to Glenn Close.) She has a daughter whose best friend is a gay man who works as a production designer on a "pretty people" show on the CW. Mickey--which was my mother's nickname--is a no-nonsense type who was widowed early. She met her husband when she was waitressing at a pie place near JPL where he worked. He was 20 years older. He died when she was 37 and she still misses him, even though she has a full life. But there's this cop...
I have been working on this book on and off for a few years. Some of it even got written longhand during the hours I was sitting at the eye clinic waiting for the monthly shots of Lucentis to wear off. (And wasn't it a treat tramscribing those scribbles?) Unlike a LOT of the stuff I write, this is a book I think my mother would have enjoyed. I hope so anyway. It'll be out this summer. Finally.

Shameless Saturday Self-Promoton--Bride of the Midnight King is Free

In between the crime fiction I write, I dabble in fantasy and speculative fiction. A couple of months ago I got the iddea too set fairy tales in a world of vampires and I wrote a novella called Bride of the Midnight King under my nom de fantasy Kat Parrish. The book has turned out to be a lot more popular than anything else I've published and I'm now in the middle of writing the sequel, which will be published later this year. The cover was done by Joy Sillesen over at Indie Author Services, one of the last she created before going on a hiatus to concentrate on her own work. Friday was my birthday and to celebrate, I've put Bride of the Midnight King on a freebie promotion. From now through monday morning, you can snag the novella free. I hope you enjoy it.

Friends don't let friends use lame covers...

I showed the cover I created for "Death of a Fairy" to my friend Joy Sillesen of Indie Author Services and instead of saying, "Wow, that is one fugly cover," she said, "You know, that palm tree isn't doing it for me. And promptly whipped up a new cover for me. And then she formatted the innards for me. And then she pointed out that since it was a story that fit into my Misbegotten world (collected in the L.A. Nocturne anthologies that I really needed to "stick to my brand" so she changed the byline from mmy 'sudo back to my real name.
I'm lucky in my friends.
So here it is--the new cover. The beautifully formatted insides and all.
Thank you Joy!

Find her at Indie Author Services.

And just to stay with the theme--Here's a Shakespeare quote about friendship courtesy of Shakespeare Online:

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel.
(Hamlet 1.3.62-3), Polonius to Laertes

And p.s. thanks to John Donald Carlucci--artist, writer, and friend who  also offered to save me from my own misguided attempts at making a cover.  Thanks JDC.

Coming Soon...Bride of the Midnight King

In my spare time I write for fun and profit. I use my own name for my crime fiction and horror, but I use my pseudonym, Kat Parrish for the fantasy stories. I've been writing more and more fantasy lately, and one of the results is a series of reimagined fairy tales I refer to as "Grimm Blood Tales" because they involve vampies.
Yes, I know. The world is full of vampire stories.
the world is also full of fairy tales and at some point, fairy tales and vampire stories just had to collide. (Probably already have, actually, I'm not arrogant enough to think I'm the first to think of it.)
I found myself thinking of different ways fairy tales could be woven into vampire stories and the first result is this novella, a Cinderella story in which a mortal girl becomes the bride of a vampire king.
I'm already plotting the next story in the series, Midnight's Daughter, which is a Sleeping Beauty story.
The cover for Bride of the Midnight King was created by Joy Sillesen of Indie Author Services. The book will be out at the end of June.

Judging a Book by Its (Pre-made) Cover

I love the covers that Joy Sillesen of Indie Author Services does for me. I've also bought a number of IAS pre-made covers over the years. But I also like looking at other sites offering pre-made covers and today I hooked up with the UK-based Cover Collection via Twitter. Their covers are very affordable (they seem to be in the 30 pounds and up range with sale covers offered at 20 poumds) and they offer covers for many different genres. More than a couple caught my eye. Maybe you'll find something there for your next project.

Cover reveal: Christine Pope's Darkangel

Cover by Indie Author Services

My friend Christine Pope--aka the hardest working writer in romance fiction--has a new book coming out this month and I can't wait. It's called Darkangel, and it's the first in a new series for her.
Here are the details:

Finding the man of your dreams can be a real nightmare….

As the future prima, or head witch of her clan, Angela McAllister is expected to bond with her consort during her twenty-first year, thus ensuring that she will come into her full powers at the appointed time. The clock is ticking down, and her consort has yet to make an appearance. Instead, her dreams are haunted by a man she’s never seen, the one she believes must be her intended match.

But with time running out, and dark forces attempting to seize her powers for their own, Angela is faced with a terrible choice: give up her dreams of the man she may never meet and take the safer path, or risk leaving her clan and everyone in it at the mercy of those who seek their ruin.

Darkangel is the first book in the Witches of Cleopatra Hill, a paranormal romance trilogy set in the haunted town of Jerome, Arizona. 

If you've read Pope's Sedona Trilogy, you know she has mad love for the area, and the setting here is Jerome, the funky little town that neighbors Sedona. For more about Christine Pope and her books, go here. The latest book in her Gaia Consortium series is now available here.

Another Cover Reveal: Unsanctified, a horror novella

This is the year I finally transcribe all the short stories and half-based novellas and bits of novel-writing and refine them into something I can actually publish. Joy Sillesen, of Indie Author Services, has been incredibly generous in supplying me with fantastic cover art, and I'm using those covers as inspirations.

This is the cover for Unsanctified, due out in October from Dark Valentine Press. It's an old school horror story, my version of a Stephen King kind of tale. The story takes place on Halloween (of course) and I hope it scares people.

Coming Soon...the Frontier Trilogy of YA Science Fiction

some people get books for Christmas, I get book covers.
Thanks to Joy Sillesen of Indie Author Services, I now have covers for my upcoming YA science fiction trilogy, tentatively titled Frontier. Set in a future where a Chinese corporation (The Double Fortune Trading Company) has colonized the known universe, the books follow the adventures of a young colonist who takes on the corporation on behalf of the colonists. I'd love to reach the readers of the Hunger Games books, of course, but I had the original idea almost a decade ago when I was developing television series for my then-boss at Warner Bros.
The books are: Frontier, Beixing, and Zhanghai. Frontier sets up the conflict and takes place on the planet of the same name, which was named by the colonists. Beixing is the planet that houses the corporation's political power
for the galaxy, as well as the most prestigious university in the sextor. Zhanghai is a planet-sized trading post of sorts, a place that sits at the crossroads of intergalactic travel and attracts human and alien traders.
The first book is nearly complete and I hope to finish the sequels and have both out by the end of the year. I'm writing them under my "Kat Parrish" pseudonym to keep them separate from the mysteries I write under my own name. 

Free fiction--L.A. Nocturne II

I'll be publishing MISBEGOTTEN early in the new year and I'm giving away my collection of short stories, L.A. NOCTURNE II to get in the mood. You can get it here. There are ten stories of urban fiction inside, some of them first published on A Twist of Noir and Eaten Alive. Cover by the talented Joy Sillesen of Indie Author Services.

Whipping Boy--My Mystery Novella debuts next month

I write short stories.
In fact, I write SHORT short stories.
Up until last month, the longest story I'd ever written was my entry in Paul D. Brazill's Drunk on the Moon compilation of stories set in his Roman Dalton world. I think it topped out at a little ore than 5K. I am in awe of my friends who find it easy to whip out 70 or 80K in a month or two, and think nothing of writing a novel every few months or so.
For me, writing at length is hard. (Well, I suppose if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.)
But Whipping Boy is a story that's been percolating for a long time. The protagonist is an L.A. criminalist named Lark Riordan, whose father Jack is an actor who has recently been nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in a "come-back" role. Lark's low-key love interest is a homicide detective named Max Siwek, who is also her stepbrother. Yes, it's complicated, but the book isn't a romance, it's a mystery. It's also a longish novella, coming in around 45K right now as I begin my final edit before handing it over to beta readers. I'm rather pleased with the book, and now that I know I can actually write something that's longer than 1200 words, I am back to working n Misbegotten, my long-in-development novel about paranormal L.A. and the crime reorter who chronicles illegal doings in the city.
i have a few thousand words to go before it's a novel, but it's getting there. the cover is by Joy Sillesen of Indie Author Services.

Coming Soon: Destiny Knocks

There's a world I've been playing with for some time, a story about a mother and daughter I call Soul Searchers. The tagline is, "What if destiny knocked and the wrong person answered the door?" The idea came to me as I was watching a Witchblade episode. and I thought--why should hot young woman have all the fun? What if the "chosen one" turned out to be someone unexpected? Like, say, the call to destiny came for Alexis Bledel of Gilmore Girls but it was her mother, Lauren Graham, who ended up doing the ass-kicking, paranormal stuff?

It's been a really, really (REALLY) slow summer for freelance work so I spent some time re-packaging what had been a television pitch into a novella. The book will be out next month. The cover, as always, is by Joy Sillesen of Indie Author Services.

If you're not the predator, you're the prey!

There are a lot of people who dream of selling a script for big money and seeing their work turned into a movie starring Ryan Gosling, Angelina Jolie or Seth Rogen. There are even more people who dream of exploiting these people, trashing their dreams by lying to them and misdirecting them and charging a lot of money for their services. I often cross paths with these predators and they make me angry. I also often cross paths with their victims and that makes me sad. Because people who trample on other people's dreams and take their money under false pretenses are scum.  This morning I ran into a writer on Craig's List who was looking for someone to format his script properly.He didn't know what he needed was someone with access to Final Draft software.  He'd been told " If it was in the correct script format for submitting to the "Writer's Guild he'd have a script that was a movie."
I don't know who this "reputable script advisor" (the writer's words) was, but I'd like to shake her until her teeth rattle.  the writer also admitted that he wasn't a professional writer in the ad, which raises even more warning flags for me. I breifly worked for a service that provided notes for would-be screenwriters and while I saw several promising scripts, I never saw one that simply needed re-formatting to "be a movie."
It's an insanely competitive business.  Being told all you need to do is reformat your work and you're good to go would be like an agent telling me all I need to do is change the margins on my novel manuscript and I'm on my way to a seven figure sale at Simon & Schuster. JUST. NOT. GONNA. HAPPEN.