Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu

I read Ken Liu's "Paper Menagerie" for Brian Lindemuth's "Short Story a Day" challenge a few years ago. The story made me cry. I was putting together the Nightfalls anthology at the time and I wrote to Liu and asked if he'd be interested in writing a story for it. He sent me the most gracious "no" I've ever received and I would love him for that even if I hadn't read this lovely, lovely story.

"Paper Menagerie" won pretty much every award out there and it's no wonder at all. it's readily available online, so if you haven't read it, go do so now here. And then go out and buy this collection. You owe it to yourself if you love good writing.

Parabormal Sisters Under the Skin

I'm watching Lucifer, which I'm enjoying despite the in-your-face, on-the-nose soundtrack--it's Castle with the devil!--and I can't help noticing how much series star Lauren German looks like Yancy Butler, star of another of my  guilty pleasures, Witchblade. They even have the same sexy, smoky voice.
See what I mean?

It's interesting to me that both series are based on comic books/graphic novels. Lucifer has been teasing viewers with the possibility that German's character (a cop) has some sort of super-power, but we don't yet know what it is.

I like that Lucifer is set in L.A. The  show gives it a candy-neon gloss that makes it look like a glittery wonderland at night.It looks like they also do some shooting in Vancouver, and you can always tell when they switch from L.A. to Pacific Northwest exteriors because of all the green. Witchblade was set in New York and my favorite scene in the whole show was one filmed in a snow-drifted cemetery with stone angels. I like shows that are based in real places and not in some anonymous "Metro" that's clearly Toronto (like the setting for Forever Knight.)

Anyway, I like that these two shows offered something different in paranormal.

Vampires in the Church

What if there were a vampire pope? What if there wer vampire priests? I googled "vampire priest" and got a lot of hits for the Paul Bettany movie Priest, which has a plotline about "vampire wars" and "priests." As far as I'm concerned, the more Paul Bettqany movies the better, but I've seen this one and it's a dark, comic book-y sort of fantasy and not what I was thinking about.

Untapped in Urban Fantasy

Now that I've started thinking about urban fantasy and how it's not really being exploited beyond the shifter tropes, I can't seem to turn it off. I once wanted to write a story about the OSS interacting with a vampire in Eastern Europe, and I may have to pull out those notes (yes, they predated my computer) and play with them. Because it occurred to me that if you were a werewolf or a vampire, you would make a most excellent spy.

Googling around with "vampire spy" led me to the Nathaniel Cade series by Christopher Farnsworth. The first book in the series, Blood Oath, sprang from the seed of a story that Farnsworth heard about President Andrew Johnson pardoning a man who was accused of being a vampire. There are apparently three books in the series to date and producer Lucas Foster has plans to turn the "President's Vampire" series into a movie. Sounds good to me.

Paranormal Politics

So, I'm watching the smackdown that has become our political process and thinking to myself, you couldn't make this up. And then i found myself wondering if there are any urban fantasies about politicians. I've seen books with vampire Mafia and the like, but what about vampire politicians? Or other paranormal creatures. Has anyone written such a book and if they have, why haven't I heard of it?

So I went a-Googling and let me tell you--there's not much out there. First hit was a definition of "poltical fantasy" that basically sounded like it was describing Brave New World or Animal Farm, which is not what i had in mind. I also got a link to PG's Ramblings, a really cool blog that talks about books (especially SF and fantasy) and movies and tech. (The author works at CERN, which is as cutting edge as cutting edge science goes. He seems to have really eclectic tastes and I look forward to reading it regularly. But still not what I was looking for.

How hard is it to find a paranormal politician in a book??? If you type in the search term "vampire politician," it takes you to a Wikipedia page about Jonathan Sharkey, a professional wrestler with politial aspriations, and a story about another candidate who likes to LARP who accused his opponent of being too liberal. Sigh.

I clicked around for quite a while--a most excellent distraction from what I was supposed to be doing and I never found what I was looking for. Which makes me ponder the eternal chicken/egg question. Are there no political paranormals because no one's interested in them or would readers read them if they were there? Inquiring minds want to know. And the wheels of my imagination are turning. Because what a spectacular game of chess it would be if there were paranormals in the political arena.

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.

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!