L.A. Nocturne Collection--Urban Fantasy short stories set in Los Angeles

One of the first short stories I ever wrote for Dark Valentine Magazine was "Tired Blood," a tale of a vampire so old he'd developed dementia and forgotten he was a vampire. I liked the setting of the story so much that for the next few years, I kept writing stories set in my version of Los Angeles where the normal and paranormal co-exist. This fall, the novel based on that story, Misbegotten, will be published. (Better late than never.0 And as a run-up to that publication, I have released this colleciton of the "Misbegotten" short stories.

Some of these stories originally appeared in the collections L.A. Nocturne and L.A. Nocturne II, others have never been collected; a few were written just for this volume. I'm happy because the stories run the gamut. There are ghosts, shapeshifters (and not the usual kind), djinn, mermaids, sorcerers, demons, angels, and a were-bear. Also fairies. And unicorns and a centaur.

There are also vampires. Lots and lots of vampires. And a werewolf or two.  But not, I hope, your standard issue alpha wolf guys.  I hope you'll check out the collection. I had a great time writing these stories.

Building a new vocabulary

Writing my urban fantasy stories has required putting together word lists of paranormal slang and names of objects that don't currently exist in the real world. Because the Misbegotten stories are set in Los Angeles, the epithets for para-creatures are often taken from the Spanish. (I use the Spanish word for "leech," which literally means "blood sucker." to describe vampires, for instance.)
New word of the day: faeblin. That's a mixed race character who has one goblin parent and one fairy parent.
The idea is that the fae blood counteracts the goblin genes in terms of physical appearance, so what you get is a creature with the size of a goblin and the physical beauty of a fairy. Think...Dwayne Johnson. (It's my world, I can cast the parts.)
I'm going to have to get something like Liquid Story Binder, the software John Donald Carlucci has been championing to keep all my notes in one place, though, because I've got scribbled notebook pages, post-it notes and all sorts of disorganized thoughts that need to be in one place.