Happy Birthday Zora!

Google honored Zora Neale Hurston on the occasion of her birthday. (Never mind how old she would be--you never ask a lady her birthdate.) Hurston is famous for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (one of four novels and countless short stories she wrote). I had not read the novel when I ran across this quote from it:Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.  I thought those two sentences were just stunning and they drove me to the novel. Plus, I thought she had the coolest name ever.  And the lady knew how to wear a hat.Anthropoligist, folklorist, author--she was a (Harlem) Renaissance woman.

Oh Snap!!

I work a lot with baby boomers who are leery of social media. Many of them are having a hard time transitioning into the digital age. Some of them have a distinctly, "You kids get off my lawn" attitude toward all things new and shiny and even faintly techno. Today one of my clients asked me what Instagram was. And I explained it. And I was feeling pretty on top of it because I know about Flickr and Photobucket and Photorocket and even SmugMug.  And then one of my clients mentioned SnapChat. I missed the memo on that one.
Sigh.
You have to keep up or you fall behind.
Ready or not, here comes tomorrow.

Book Bub and Me

one of the things I really like about having a Kindle (and the Kindle app on my phone and my desktop) is that I have access to a HUGE library pretty much any time I have a minute to read. And the number of volumes on my virtual shelf increases pretty much every day, thanks to Book Bub. Book Bub is a service for both writers and readers, sending out daily emails (I even got one on Christmas) offering free and discount deals on ebooks in a variety of genres. When you sign up, you choose your genre(s) and the email you get is customized for you. I almost always click on the freebie, but I often buy the books available for 99 cent. Today's horror selection sounded particularly intriguing, an Exorcist-ish mystery called Gates of the Dead. It has more than 30 five-star reviews and knowing how hard it is to get even a quarter of that, I figured it was worth checking out.
If you haven't signed up for Book Bub (it's free), you can do so here.

The Horror! the Horror!--a new blog for scary film

And it's called, appropriately enough, Scary Film.  They also cover scary books and TV, which is where I come in. I'll be writing for Scary Film occasionally. Come check it out.

Noir Bling from Red Hot Kitten

It's no secret that I am all about the Etsy. This year I discovered a shop called Red Hot Kitten run by artisan/jewelry maker Michelle Tichota, whose motto is, "Takin' over the world, one bad-ass Bettie at a time."
I love her store. She creates great jewelry out of images of pulp novels (noir, sci fi, fantasy) and sells it for a very nice price.
I am particularly fond of the stretch bracelet I bought myself made out of old mystery novel covers for $8. (See picture.) Seriously, if you have a love for pop culture, whether atomic-era design or bad-ass noir, you need to check this woman's shop out here.

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. 

An unsolicited testimonial for the Kindle paperwhite

A few years ago my best friend gave me a Kindle and it changed my reading habits forever. I was just starting to cope with some vision problems that made it harder for me to read print books. For someone who reads as much as I do--for business as well as pleasure--the idea of not being able to read was horrifying. The Kindle, with its ability to bump up the font (and I don't need it huge, just bigger than the average font in a book), made all the difference in the world.

I got a Kindle Paperwhite for Christmas. I'm already in love with it. It's so bright and easy to read. It's so intuitive to use. It's just the ereader of my dreams.