A Romance for St. Patrick's Day

I found myself wondering if there were any fantasy romances out there involving leprechauns and as it turns out, there's a really good one, Kathy Bryson's Feeling Lucky. The book won all kinds of awards when it was published in 2014, and earned a ton of praise from reviewers for being sweet as well as sexy and also for being something different.

Kathy Bryson has written several more books and I wish she lived in the PNW instead of Florida, because her author profile says she's a Shakespeare geek too and I'm looking for someone to go to plays with. You can follow her here.

the Best Urban Fantasy Short Story You'll Read Today--and it's free

I found this short story listed in "The Best Short Stories You've Never Read" from HuffPost Books and it sounded so engaging I immediately clicked over to it. King Oberon and Queen Tatiana in the modern age. Look for "A Tiny Feast" on the New Yorker's site.

What is it?

There are times when I can't buy a creative idea and there are times when I honestly can't turn it off. (Mostly when I'm on deadline for some chore I find tedious.) But there's been something going on in my backyard for a while that is just fascinating to me.

The house we rent was built in the seventies, but we live in one of the oldest neighborhoods on this side of the city. So who knows what was here before we were. (Pretty sure it's not a graveyard but hear me out.)

About a week after we moved in, we found a single rusted razor blade lying in the grass. So ... was someone out here shaving one day, letting the rain wash off the lather? About a month after that we found a small, olive green "plastic soldier" of the sort made memorable in the W.D. County short story "Plastic Soldiers." (If you haven't read "Plastic Soldiers," you need to spend 99 cents right now and go buy Speedloader, an anthology that also contains stories by Nigel Bird and Matthew C. Funk, whose writing is also always worth reading. But "Plastic Soldiers?" It's a one-of-a-kind story. Brutal to read and absolutely unforgettable. I've read a LOT of short stories, and it's probably in my top five, right up there with Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" and Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and "the Rockinghorse Winner" by D.H. Lawrence, and Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder." "Plastic Soldiers" should be taught in high school English classes.) But I digress.

Over the year we've lived here, various things have shown up in our lawn, sort of like dinosaur skeletons uncovered by scouring winds in the western states. Today this thing showed up.  It's made of wood and about the size of a gobstopper candy. It's made of wood and the spikes unscrew.  It's hard to tell how old it is but the scientist in the house thinks it could be many decades old. Wood decays at different rates. It'll take a downed pine tree 200-300 years to decompose, a spruce tree (what you find a lot of in the Pacific Northwest) will only last 50-100 years. So--what was this thing? A child's toy? Nowadays, we'd keep something like this out of a kids' hands for fear of choking hazards. But it doesn't seem strong enough for any industrial application.
But what it DOES seem good for is a story prompt.
"The Yard of Lost Things."
What would you do if things suddenly started appearing in your yard, dug up by your dog, or revealed by a hard rain? Would some of those items be valuable? Would some of those items be dangerous? Would some hold clues to murder? Or a wedding ring lost by a woman gardening 100 years ago?  I find the possibilities endlessly seductive. I want to write that story. But as it happens ... I'm on deadline. So it's going to have to go into the file for now.

Woman in the Rain: A Picture is worth a thousand words -- or more

One of the things I do on a regular basis is shop for images on sites like Bigstock, Dollar Photo, and the like. Sometimes I'll buy a month long subscription and download tons of images I think I might like to use for the blog or for one of the various content-provider jobs I have, or as the basis of a book cover.

I've been playing with the idea of a new paranormal series about a woman who can bring the rain. I have one novelette in the series (Let It Rain, see cover below right) that will publish this summer, and if people like it, there will be more stories.

I'm fascinated by rain. I grew up in a place that was ravaged by two hurricanes when I was in high school. I know how destructive water can be when it's unleashed on land, whether it's a tsunami or a hurricane, or just a flash flood. (In fact, WATER is the most destructive force on earth.) I lived in Los Angles for decades and the whole time I was there, the state was in a state of drought. Meteorologists promised that this, an El Nino year, would bring relief. It hasn't so far, not really. Instead, it's dumping water on Seattle, which has had its rainiest year in more than a century.

Define irony. Bringing more rain to the Pacific Northwest is like bringing coal to Newcastle. And I can't help but think that if there WERE such things as water witches, they'd be in high demand in L.A. I'm talking about people with powers beyond water diviners and water dowsers, a character who could literally make it rain. Where would the rain shadow be? What land would suffer drought in the wake of her magic-working? 

March Mystery: Time of Fog and Fire

Another for the TBR pile, the lastest in Rhys Bowen's Molly Murphy mystery series. Don't you LOVE the cover? Criminal Element has posted an excerpt here.

Fairy Tale Retellings: Five Enchanted Roses

I really like "Beauty and the Beast" and I'm always up for new versions. (The gorgeous movie version by French director Christophe Gans is available on YouTube. You should check it out here.)
This is a book that's on my TBR list. Five different retellings of the classic story.

A Book to Watch Out For: THE LOST PROPERTY OFFICE

One of the things I do for a living is work as a "reader." This is the best job ever and reading great books before they're published is one of the perks. I've just read a debut novel by James Hannibal. It's terrific. It will remind you of everything from Suzanne Collins' Gregor the Underlander to Time Bandits. The young hero has a great talent/power and his adventure is filled with twists and turns and dollops of really intriguing history and magical artifacts. The characters are nicely drawn, especially the hero's pesky little sister. The book is available for pre-order now, for publication in November. Mark your calendars and mark my words--this is a terrific book and, I suspect, the start of a terrific new series.