Shameless Saturday self-promjotion

At midnight tonight, a count-down deal goes into effect for my short mystery novel Whipping Boy. You'll be able to snag it for 99 cents for a limited time as it makes its way back up to its normal price. I loved writing this book and am about halfway through the sequel (A Taste for Strange, which tells the story through the point of view of the cop who was the "co-star" of the first book). When you're a writer, you love all your books, but this one is close to my heart. I love writing the fantasy and the horror and the SF, but I really love my mysteries. It's got a 4.6 rating!! Bookmark it here and snag it at 12:01!

Whipping Boy and Shakespeare

Both my parents liked words. My father was a lawyer and he early on discovered the delight little kids take in repeating words that sound like nonsense words. I knew how to pronounce posse comitatus before I could spell "cat." And I wasn't that much older when I learned what it meant, which put me way ahead in civics class. My mother favored archaic English phrases like "dogsbody" and "whipping boy" and "dog in the manger." These were phrases my siblings and I learned as kids and I freely used them in conversation until I moved to L.A. and found that people were giving me blank looks, so I stopped. But I still love those words and I chose "Whipping Boy" as the title of my mystery novella because the plot revolves around a murder of a scapegoat. Shakespeare, of course, used all those phrases (and more). Or so I thought until I started searching for the phrase and none of my usual go-to sources could find it. (Plenty of places where one person or another was whipped, and also a reference to "Whipping Boy" in Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, but no joy on Shakesperae. Sigh At any rate, I'm offering my novella free for the next five days in case you'd like to read it. There are 10 reviews now (almost all of them by people I don't actually know) and eight of them are five stars! You can snag a copy here.

Preview of A Taste for Strange

I published the first book in my Lark Riordan/Max Siwek mystery series in March (Whipping Boy) and I'm closing in on the final draft of the sequel A Taste for Strange. (The third book in the series is called Raw Dog.) I offered this is the intro to the book, which is told from Max's point of view this time out. He's an LAPD homicide detective and his stepsister, Lark Riordan, is a forensic tech. She's also his lover. It's ... complicated.  

A TASTE FOR STRANGE

They found her hanging from a hook in the ceiling, twirling like a broken piñata. Her body was so bruised and boneless it had lost its shape, but her killer had not touched her face, which was flawless except for some cuts in the corner of her mouth where her perfect lips hung open.

Max felt a cloud of depression descend on him. The victim was young, so very young. And so very beautiful.

Free book and More!

I'm running a free promotion on Whipping Boy, so if you'd like to snag a free digital copy, go here.

But this is not just a shameless self-prootion post.  I used to review books for the paranormal romance site Bitten By Books. One of the features that now shows up regularly is a massive "Free Read Friday" list of books in all different genres.  Here's the link to last week's list, which gets updated and augmented weekly.

If you write in the genre (or just love it), you really need to check out Bitten By Books.  They're constantly running contests and promotions and author launch parties. It's a great place to hang out.

Pictures that are worth 80,000 words

I did not think ahead when I purchased the images used for the cover of Whipping Boy. I had already planned several sequels, but for some reason, it didn't occur to me that I should buy several images of the same models at the same time so that the covers images would be related. Now I'm going through hundreds and hundreds of photos and it's kind of like looking at books of murder suspects. It was pretty easy to find the female model in a variety of poses that will work. The male model though? He's proving to be a challenge. For one thing, when you type in key words like "handsome, dark-haired man in suit" you get back images of teenage boys in t-shirts twirling red umbrellas like they're auditioning for a remake of Singing in the Rain.

If you type in "handsome businessman," you get pictures of en with bags over their heads (!) as well as pictures of guys contorted in ways that their bodies were never meant to contort. (That's true of the female models as well, but we're kind of conditioned to women in unnatural poses thanks to years of photoshop and Jessica Rabbit-style images of impossible body proportions.)

I used to oversee cover shoots for a magazine I edited, so I'm used to working with photographers and models who turned out fabulous work. A lot of what I'm seeing on these sites reminds me of Derek Zoolander's "looks" in the movie Zoolander. It's like the photographer told all the guys to give their best "Rico Suave smoldering glance.  The results are ... not pretty.  Sigh. But I press on. There are worse ways to spend an hour or so than looking at photographs of good looking men.

Criminal Element runs a promotion for Whipping Boy!

I've been working as a "Fresh Meat" reviewer for Criminal Element," the crime fiction blog hosted by Macmillan publishing for a little over a year now. (And I learned about the paid gig via Twitter, which is something I tell my clients who see no value in social media because they don't think "anyone wants to know what I ate for breakfast.")

I am a proud indie author but it's still kind of fun to drop the phrase, "My editor at Macmillan," into casual conversation.  The editor in question is Clare Toohey, and she is awesome. She set up a great promotion to celebrate the publication of my debut mystery novella, Whipping Boy, and is running it in conjunction with an excerpt on Criminal Element today.  She's also helped me hone in on a description of the book that fits my brand of crime fiction, which is not that easily defined. Did I mention she's awesome?  Here's how she describes Whipping Boy:

Whipping Boy by Katherine Tomlinson is a California cop mystery novella, the debut of a female criminalist whose strange existence swings from the darkest crime scenes to life among Hollywood royalty--no wonder she has such a bad attitude (available March 12, 2014). 

 

If you love crime fiction in all its varieties, you should be checking out Criminal Element. And you should definitely stop by today because if you leave a comment about the excerpt, you can win excellent swag! Here's a link to the excerpt.

Best Book Promo Item Ever!

I'm always looking for items I can use as promotional tools for my fiction and for the release of Whipping Boy (due out in February from my alter-ego Kat Parrish), I snagged this fantastic Police Line Do Not Cross scarf from Barbara Perelman of "Blazing Needles" on Etsy. (Find her shop here.) I like this scarf so much that I really, really wish it got cold here. (It's been in the 80s this week and if I started wearing a scarf I'd look like one of those eccentric old ladies who wears three layers of sweaters in the middle of the summer.


Barbara provides customized knits, crochet cacti and novelty knits.
And in case you were wondering what a crocheted cactus looks like--here's one. (There are several varieties.) Isn't it adorable?

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.