Pondering the paranormal

I write urban fiction and am about to release my L.A. Nocturne Collection of stories set in a paranormal-infested Los Angeles (with a handful of stories set in the Middle East.) Looking through them I see a ghosts, djinm, a succubus, a couple of mermaids, more than a couple of vampires, some fairies, but only a couple of werewolves (and one werebear and a couple of shapeshifters.) I even have some zombies. But I was thinking about werewolves. They're not my favorite and yet, suddenly they're everywhere. Especially billionaire shifters and step-brother shifters and seal shifters. (I find myself thinking how interesting it might be if a SEAL was actually a mer-man.) I was thinking about the werewolf books I've liked and only a few come to mind. They are:

Wolf's Hour by Robert McCammon. I'm a huge McCammon fan anyway, and I started reading his work when you could buy his paperback originals (like this one) for something like five bucks at the supermarket. (Remember those days when paperbacks were cheap enough you could chuck two or three in with the frozen vegetables and the ground turkey and never think twice?) This one features a spy who's also a werewolf during WWII and it's a treat.

Lycanthia by Tanith Lee. I so miss Tanith Lee. I have read almost all of her books, some of them so long ago that I could probably enjoy reading them again. This one was great with its decadent, Gothic deatails--old mansions and secrets. 

Those two books are the ONLY two werewolf novels I can think of off the top of my head. So I did a little Googling around to refresh my memory.
I like Carrie Vaughn's Kitty Norville stories but I put those in a different category from "real" werewolf stories. Ditto Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series (which I loved, loved, loved, when i first started reading them). I've never read Patricia Briggs' popular Mercy Thompson series, although Moon Called has been on my Kindle for forever.

I saw the movie Blood and Chocolate, which is based on a novel by Annette Curtis Klause, and it made me curious to read the original. I looked up a list of werewolf novels on Good Reads and out of the first 50 of 725, I hadn't read ANY.

But i have an idea for a series that might work with werewolves and I'm wondering if I can bring something fresh to the "canon," something beyond silver bullets and full moon madness. It's going to be interesting to see. Because it's clear that readers want more shifters!

A Vampire a Day: Laurell K. Hamilton's "Anita Blake" series

The first book in the series, Guilty Pleasures, is the very first urban fantasy novel I ever read. I LOVED it, despite the cheesy cover. (I looked for an image of that original cover but could not find it, but more about covers in a minute.)

I loved that Anita lived in St. Louis and not in the over-used locations of New York and Los Angeles. I loved that Anita initially thought of all the creatures she encountered as monsters. (Well, she was willing to make an exception for Jean-Claude, the vampire master of the city.) Anita had a lot of powers. In addition to being a kick-ass vampire executioner, she could also raise the dead. And the series had a lot of intriguing supporting characters, which helped make her universe seem real.

I stopped reading the books about the time that Anita got "torn between two lovers." (The other is a werewolf.)  The writer was veering off from the kind of crime-type plots you see in other UF books (like Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden/Dresden Files series) and exploring other dimensions of the character. Anita's her character, Laurell K. Hamilton can do what she wants. But I was kind of disappointed. Because I loved Anita just the way she was. Sigh.

It wasn't just the stories that evolved, though. Hamilton's publishers put the series' covers through a series of upgrades. When I bought the first book, it had an illustrative cover and the vampire on the cover looked like someone had just drawn a couple of triangular fangs sticking out of his mouth. Seriously. I remember my brother making fun of the cover.

Once the books started to sell--and they've sold a lot, according to Wikipedia, the covers started looking a lot more uptown. check them out.

I like the cover font on the cover to the left but pretty much HATE the imag. the artsy one was the redo around the time the book Obsidian Butterfly came out, or at least, that's the first time I noticed the new covers. I thought they were elegant, very "lit fic" in feel.

I'll have to go back to the series sometime, just to catch up with Anita. I'll always be grateful to Laurell K. Hamilton for introducing me to urban fantasy, which wasn't even really a genre when she started chronicling Anita's adventurs among the undead.

F is for Fairy

Fairy. Faery. Faerie.
The Fay. The Fey. The Fee.
There aren't nearly enough fairies in urban fantasy to suit my tastes.
There's Wicked Lovely, of course. And there's Tinkerbelle.  Throw in Oberon. And there's Laurell K. Hamilton's Merry Gentry series (which I'm about to start reading). But otherwise?  I'm coming up blank. Anyone know of any good fairy stories?

Feminist Fiction Friday

I'm not much for labels. Defining a person by religious beliefs, political affiliation, sexual orientation or age has always seemed much too simplistic for me. One of the most liberating things about writing for the internet is that you can define yourself, circumventing any artificial limitations that might be placed on you in real life. Which brings me to gender.
I've occasionally written fiction under a male pseudonym, not to hide my gender in specific but to cloak my identity in general. I did it on the Dark Valentine site, for example, so that it didn't look like I was writing every other story in one of our flash fiction challenges.  I never really gave it that much thought, frankly. My writing is pretty gender-neutral and I write equal-opportunity criminals and victims.

Laurell K. Hamilton

Lately, though, I've been thinking about gender a lot. I think about it every time I read a script that refers to a flight attendant as a "stewardess" or worse, as a "stew," and every time a female college student is described as a "coed."
I think about it every time someone says "male nurse," as if the job description is gender-exclusive, like "mommy." I think about it when a woman refers--without irony--to her gender as the "fair sex." And I think about it every time I read a story that's set in a future where women apparently don't exist and if they do, it's in a role that has been outdated for at least 60 years. I think about gender when I see news stories about couples about to spawn their 20th child; stories about celebutants famous for their sex tapes; stories about a movement to outlaw abortion for any reason--including rape and incest. (I can't help but think of the famous feminist quote by Ti-Grace Atkinson--"If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.")
I know this is a cranky-pants rant but bear with me...I'm getting to the point.
Yesterday Sandra Seamans posted a link to a blog entry by Kat Howard about the invisibility of female  heroines in speculative fiction. (Read it here.) I commented on it and Sandra commented back and the next thing I knew, I was scribbling lists of women writers whose books are driven by female protagonists. And I decided that today was a good day to kick off Feminist Fiction Fridays--mini-celebrations of women who write women.