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.)

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.

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.

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.

Nightfalls anthology

The Nightfalls anthology is in its final editing cycle and it's a terrific group of stories. The anthology will be priced at $3.99 (a bargain for 29 stories), with all proceeds going to Para Los Ninos, an organization that helps at-risk kids and their parents succeed in education and in life.
The cover design is by Joy Sillesen of Indie Author Services, who donated her work to the project, She will also be designing both the ebook and the print version.  The stories range from speculative fiction to horror to humor with side trips to science fiction and noir-flavored lit fic.

Everybody I asked to participate in this anthology said yes, and then they gave me wonderful stories (and one poem). It's been a pleasure to work with everyone and I hope to do it again soon. More details to come, but just to whet your appetite--here's the TOC:

Acapulcolypse

            Thomas Pluck

Some Say the World Will End in Fire

            Sidney Anne Harrison

Forward is Where the Croissantwich Is

            Chris Rhatigan

Somebody Brave

            Kat Laurange

Our Lady

            Dale Phillips

Greene Day

            Nigel Bird

Isabel

            Megan McCord

The Memory Keeper

            Sandra Seamans

Bon Appétit

            Barb Goffman

Déjà vu

            Christopher Grant

It's Not the End of the World

            Matthew C. Funk

A Sound as of Trumpets

            Berkeley Hunt

Supper Time

            Col Bury

Blackened

            Dellani Oakes

The End of Everything

            AJ Hayes

Last Shift

            Steven Luna

Into the Night

            Veronica Marie Lewis-Shaw

Blackout

            Richard Godwin

Amidst Encircling Gloom

            Scott J Laurange

Devotee

            G. Wells Taylor

Princess Soda and the Bubblegum Knight

            R. C. Barnes

The Last Wave

            Kaye George

The Dogs on Main Street Howl

            Allen Leverone

Call the Folks

             Alex Keir

The Knitted Gaol Born Sow Monkey

            Peter Mark May 

Crossfade

            Christian Dabnor

The Tasting

            Jesse James Freeman

The Annas

            Patricia Abbott

Night Train to Mundo Fine

            Jimmy Callaway

When characters take on a life of their own...

I have been speaking to an agent (squee) about my WIP Misbegotten and he strongly suggested I put together a biography of my main character--paracrimes journalist Kira Simkins. I had bits and pieces of her in folders and files and notebooks and sticky pads, but when I started pulling it all together, I realized that she had taken on a life of her own. I invented two true crime books for her and Joy Sillensen, my go-to-gal for covers, whipped up a couple of dummy covers for me.
I like the covers so much that at some point, I might actually write the books that go along with the covers. 
I never actually intended for my paranormal Los Angeles to be the setting of so much of my fiction. Kira was just a character I conjured up for a story I wrote for John Donald Carlucci's Astonishing Adventures Magazine.
There's a comfort zone there, though. I've lived in Los Angeles longer than I have lived anywhere else in my life--though for an Army brat who moved every year as a child, that's not much of a boast. My first job here was working at Los Angeles Magazine at the same time I was a cityside reporter for the now-defunct L.A. Weekly.  I know my adopted city and am inspired by it every time I leave the apartment. Putting the magical overlay on top of the city amuses me, and the settings I use the most often--Griffith Observatory, Hollywood, Malibu Creek Park--have a magic of their own even in their mundane state. 
When Patricia Cornwell first started writing her Kay Scarpetta stories, she disguised details of the Richmond, Virginia setting. (They were thinly disguised and it was easy to pick out the neighborhoods where the crimes were taking place.) By her second book, Cornwall's depiction of the city was so accurate a reader who found herself stranded in the city would not have needed a road map to get to downtown, where the Medical College of Virginia (location of the morgue) is located.
I can think of other writers who have picked a city and made it their own--from Matthew Funk's New Orleans stories to the adventures of Janet Evanovich's quintessential Jersey Girl Stephanie Plum.
I'm curious--how often do other writers return to a favorite city? Is it their own city or a place they consider their spiritual home town?  Do they ever set a story in a particular city but leave it anonymous?

Judging a book by its cover--Toxic Reality

Sometimes you can just be a little too subtle. I was happy with the cover of my book Toxic Reality, but despite great reviews, it just wasn't selling. Over the weekend, Joy Sillesen at Indie Author Services whipped up a new cover for me and within minutes of it going up on Smashwords and Amazon.com, I'd sold more copies than I had since I first published it. 
Being able to swap out a cover in minutes is one of the reasons I love indie publishing. You can do A/B cover tests. You can goose sales with a new cover. You can play around with multiple covers the way magazines sometimes do. (I remember TV Guide testing covers with Star Trek captain covers--clearly meant to entice collectors.)
I admit it--I'll pick up a book because I'm intrigued by the cover. (But I'll also buy a book that intrigues me even if the cover is awful. And if you were an early reader of Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake novels, you know just the ugly covers I mean.)
I like this new cover. There's nothing subtle about it. But then, the stories aren't subtle either.

L.A. Nocturne II--More Tales of the Misbegotten

My collection of short stories L.A. Nocturne II (More Tales of the Misbegotten) is now up at Amazon. There are nine stories in this collection, some of them written just for the collection and not previewed anywhere else.

Joy Sillesen did the cover through her Indie Author Services, and you should check out her current promotion because she's offering $10 covers for ebooks all month long.  Joy has already created the cover for Misbegotten, which should be out in September.  (Hold me to that deadline.)

One of the stories in the book, "Bear Baiting" introduces two of the characters who are part of the cast of characters of my novel--Detectives Lee Park and C.J. Bowe who work in the paracrimes division of LAPD.  Lee's second-generation Korean-American, C.J. (named for two of my friends) is his long-time partner but they've recently realized there might be something else there. (You know what they say about proximity.)  I really liked writing their relationship.  I'm interested in knowing what you think...  (The two briefly appear in "Fairy Story," which is another "Tale of the Misbegotten.")

Drunk on the Moon--werewolf PI Roman Dalton adventures

Last year, Paul D. Brazill, creator of the werewolf PI Roman Dalton, asked a number of writers to participate in a "shared world" project. The idea was that each writer would write a story using his characters, and those "chapters" would be released as ebooks on a monthly basis, then everything would be gathered into one anthology for print and ebook.
The publisher for the project was Trestle Press and you may have heard about what happened next.  If not, you can read the details here. At any rate, Paul pulled the project from Trestle and it has found a new home at Dark Valentine Press.  I'm very pleased about that because I have a story in the mix ("A Fire in the Blood") and being a part of the anthology reunites me with a number of writers who appeared in Dark Valentine Magazine.
It also means that the incredibly talented Joy Sillesen, my co-publisher, has redone the cover through her Indie Author Services.
Drunk on the Moon will be out in spring. Watch for it!

L.A. Nocturne II is coming!

My new collection of stories from the Misbegotten universe will be available next month and Joy Sillsesen has designed a really "hot" cover for it.  Joy's "Indie Author Services" is about to offer a steal of a deal on indie book covers so if you're looking for something eye-catching and elegant, check out her site herehttp://indieauthorservices.com/blog/.

Judging a Book By Its Cover...

I am surrounded by talented people who create wonderful book covers and one of my favorites, Joy Sillesen, is offering New Year's discounts for indie authors who need covers (and overall book design too). This is her latest creation, the cover for the debut fiction collection of writer Berkeley Hunt, whose work was first published by Dark Valentine.
If you'd like to talk to Joy about doing a cover for you, contact her here at indie author services.

Toxic Reality...The Cover

Here's the cover. Designed by Joy Sillesen of StonyHill Productions, published by Dark Valentine Press. The core image was a photo of an oil spill taken by photographer Valeriy Kirsanov.