June 2011

You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June 2011.

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The Society of Secret Cats

by De Kenyon

Lost in dreams, Ferntail must rescue his human girl from nightmares.  Will a mysterious and beautiful cat from the Society of Secret Cats lead them home…or further astray?

Mice are delicious. But even more delicious are monsters, ghosts, and things that go bump in the night. Your mother or father might tell you that they are all in your head and that you’re just imagining things. In a way, they’re right. Monsters are all in your head.

But you’re not just imagining things.

I was inside Jaela’s head with a tasty monster called an Aranea, which was dribbling slime and trying to skitter out of the way on its spider claws, when the entire world of dreams shook, as though being shifted around by an earthquake.

The Aranea crawled up the wall of Jaela’s dream-bedroom, clinging to the ceiling, too scared even to spit acid at me, as I tried to keep Jaela from waking. It is bad when a dreamer wakes before you have eaten the monster, because the monster might be able to escape the dreamer’s head, sometimes for a short time, sometimes for a long time, and cause mischief.

When I was a wee kitten, I let one of her monsters get out, and it threw a tantrum in her room, only disappearing when her parents appeared to find out what was the matter. Jaela hid in a corner and screamed, and wouldn’t stop screaming even when her parents asked her what was the matter.

She was punished for breaking toys and writing in crayon strange words in letters and languages that none but those who walk dreams could ever read.

But, even as a kitten, I could read them: Stupid cat.

I was so insulted…and ashamed…that I had to lick my tail for an hour, afterwards.

 

It suddenly occurs to me that I can brag about getting nice reviews!  I mean, I’m not the brightest lightning bug in the woods, but it does sink in eventually…

The folks over at Bab’s Book Bistro reviewed Death by Chocolate.  Is sooo nice :)

If you’d like to check out the book, it’s at SmashwordsAmazon, and Barnes and Noble.

 

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Tales from the Pirate Moon, Epsiode 1:  The Coffin of Infinite Time

by Kitty Lafontaine

A tale within a tale within a tale…

Jackson, a human bounty hunter, wants to bring Miklos Orosz to justice, dead or alive.  Indigo Grey, owner of the Hundred Hive bar on Pirate Moon through right of conquest, wants to escape the life she’s built for herself, even if it kills her.  Miklos, small-time smuggler, wants to be a pirate whose name lives on in infamy wherever tales are told…first to attack, last to die.

When the Hive tries to take its revenge on Indigo, unleashing a power that will trap her forever, Miklos sees the chance to take the power for his own, either destroying or saving her in the process, and Jackson sees his chance to trap Miklos for his own…until the Hive unites them all.

Episode 1:  The Coffin of Infinite Time begins the tale.  Look for Episode 2 in July 2011.

Indigo reached across the masticated-fiber-and-cement balcony to turn her fingers over and over in the starlight. The Hundred Hive buzzed with voices across its twenty-seven levels, full of aliens and humans, none of them attacking each other for the moment.

Noon, with its bright, dust-specked column of starlight magnified through the upper lens, always seemed to bring a moment of peace.

But no more than a moment. The moon Turul shifted underneath them, something heavy (probably the door) crashed behind her, and a quiet puff of air passed by her, making her hair dance on the breeze. Glass smashed somewhere below her as the needler dart that had almost hit her crashed into another level.

“Nobody move, or I’ll kill you all,” a man yelled in a deep voice filled with quavering bravado.

Indigo sighed contentedly and turned around. She’d been so bored this morning.

The reason for the new pen name is that this is a story within a story–the characters within it show up inside YOUR SOUFFLE MUST DIE as part of a movie within the story.  So here is the book that will become the movie that will show up in a silly cooking mystery.

It’s also a present for my brother Andy, who, when I told him I was broke, said, “That’s okay.  The best presents have always been books.”

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Lanes of the Living Dead

by DeAnna Knippling

It ain’t easy being divorced. But Bart’s ex-wife’s lawyer, also a voodoo priest, didn’t make it any easier.

People say I’m an optimist, Mr. Half-full-of-it, but I like to think of myself as practical. As I like to say, “Don’t see problems, see opportunities.”

Take Bart, for instance.

Bart don’t talk much, but he’s a hard worker.  As I like to say, he works the job, not the clock. Oh, he has a temper, and he’s a bit literal-minded, but everybody’s got their faults.

The only real problem we’ve had with Bart is with potlucks. After the first couple of times of asking him what was in his chili or cassaroles, we told him he had to bring chips instead.  Nobody likes to find out they’ve been eating calf brains after the fact.

 

Now at Smashwords, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.

Need help putting one foot in front of the other? No point in giving up writing; you’ll just give up on giving up on it, and you’ll be back.

How to Fail & Keep on Writing

Kill your excuses,
Combat naysayers with facts & figures,
& Mail your stories like a pro

by DeAnna Knippling

Afraid of rejections?  So afraid that you never put your stories in the mail?  This book will show you how to overcome fear of failure when It comes to writing, submitting, and publishing your fiction.

Warning:  This book will help you combat feelings of failure, humiliation, ennui, depression, and writer’s block.  It contains math, including facts and figures you can use to shut up people who want to know when you’re going to get a real job.  This book will take away your excuses to whine about how well you write, how much time you have to write (and lack thereof), how slowly you write, and how much more editing you have to do before you can possibly think about submitting.

If you intend to keep sabotaging yourself as a writer—don’t read this book!

I was having a bad week this week, going, “What am I doing with my life?”  In the course of editing this, I got it pulled back together again.


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The Debt:  A Zombie Tale

Death costs more than you can afford…

He hired Dr. Skalos to put his brother to rest.  He paid and paid and paid, yet still his brother walks, and hungers…

As I hid under the bridge, I noticed there was a sliver under my skin that had come from the coffin of the last grave I dug up for Dr. Skalos. Dr. Skalos is the kind of doctor that you hope you never have to consult, but somehow you always do. And then you have placed yourself in his power.

I had had to consult him on the matter of my brother, who had not yet died, even though he was dead. I had tried everything from bathing him in milk and attar of roses to hitting him on the head with a shovel, and still he moved and hungered, even after the sickness stopped his breathing.

I had finally tied him up and stuffed his mouth with rags to keep him from moaning, and brought him in a cart to Dr. Skalos’s back door.

Dr. Skalos took him inside, chanted and waved burning feathers over him, and laid in him stone-dead in a coffin within the hour. I assumed guardianship of the two brats that my brother had not consumed and the debt of having him put, finally, to rest.

And so I dug up corpses when Dr. Skalos requested it. Oh, he paid me, just as I had had to pay him to lay my brother down, but there were debts other than money that neither of us had yet deemed paid.