Welcome to the February 2024 issue of my newsletter, “News from the Crypt,” and please visit Carter’s Crypt, devoted to my horror, fantasy, and paranormal romance work, especially focusing on vampires and shapeshifting beasties. If you have a particular fondness for vampires, check out the chronology of my series in the link labeled “Vanishing Breed Vampire Universe.”
Also, check out the multi-author Alien Romances Blog
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For other web links of possible interest, please scroll to the end.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
N. N. Light’s Book Heaven gave “Bunny Hunt” a wonderful 5-star review. “A touching springtime story, Bunny Hunt will move you.”
There’s an excerpt from “Bunny Hunt” below. Heroine Melanie is responding to a mysterious plea for help she hears in her mind.
For Valentine month, I’m interviewing Katherine Tomlinson, a multi-genre author whose works include a cozy romance series.
*****
Interview with Katherine Tomlinson:
What inspired you to begin writing?
I always made up stories, pretty much as far back as I can remember. My father used to read to me (giving my mother her “me” time after dinner) and he always made the stories “interactive.” Like, when he told the story of Red Riding Hood, he would ask me what she put in the basket she was taking to her grandmother. “Peanut butter sandwiches,” I’d say. Or “rice pudding.”
I also lived in a three-generation home for a number of years, and my grandparents told a lot of stories about “the old days.” My grandmother had been a traveling sales lady for women’s lingerie, and I loved those stories.
When my little sister was born, we shared a room and even as a baby, she was an insomniac. I used to tell her stories to lull her to sleep. When I grew up, I had a vague notion that I would write novels, but in fact, I started out as a magazine journalist, and it wasn’t until 2011 when I wrote my first real piece of fiction and entered it into a contest. I won second place (and $100), and I thought I can do this!
What genres do you work in?
I started out writing crime fiction because I’ve been reading mysteries since I discovered Nancy Drew. I wrote a ton of those stories, and they became my first collection of short stories, Just Another Day in Paradise. A lot of those stories are pretty dark because I was going through a trying time. My little sister was dying, I was working insane hours in my show business-adjacent day job (I was a “reader” for studios and production companies—a gig worker in one of the most expensive cities in the country) and I was eating badly and sleeping poorly.
I also wrote horror, which I still do occasionally. Sometimes, life is just so horrific you can either scream, or you can write.
I use my real name for those crime and horror stories. But one day I had an idea that felt like an urban fantasy story. “What happens to a long-lived vampire who gets age-related dementia?” That story kick-started my whole Misbegotten universe of vampires and werewolves in Los Angeles. I wrote a bunch of stories set in that world, and then my first novel, a shortie of a little over 40,000 words. (It’s available permafree in the collection After Midnight: https://www.amazon.com/After-Midnight-Paranormal-Featuring-Creatures-ebook/dp/B07Y3ZDCN4
You can also read my werewolf novel The Howl (three adventures of Simon Arvai, a globe-trotting investigative journalist who is a reluctant werewolf) in the same collection.
I used the pen name “Kat Parrish” for those stories/books. My middle name is my father’s middle name and was his mother’s maiden name. I originally started using it when I edited a magazine that didn’t pay its contributors, so I wrote around six stories a month. I didn’t want them all to be under the same name.
I met a woman who’d been crushing it self-publishing who was at the time writing romantic fantasy. I had an idea I called “Vampire Cinderella,” and emailed her telling her the idea, and she liked it and encouraged me to write the story. So that became a trilogy—Bride of the Midnight King, Daughter of the Midnight King, and The Midnight Queen. I have a whole “Realm” of stories that grew out of that, and I’m building it out.
I also write science fiction as Kat Parrish. But about seven years ago, I was living in Bellingham, WA when a tree blew down an electric line and we were without power for nearly a day. To avoid going absolutely bonkers with boredom, I started writing a story in long hand about a group of characters living in a similar place who worked at a hotel. That became The Christmas Experience, the first of my “Silver Birch” stories. I’ve since written some sixteen novellas in the same world and have around 20 planned for this year. They’re all cozy, clean romances and most are set around holidays. I use “Katherine Moore” for those stories. (Katherine Moore was my maternal grandmother’s name. Her mother was also named Katherine, as were her grandmother and great-grandmother. And there were a few others in there as well. My sister was named Mary and I had two aunts named Mary and two Aunt Helens. Our cousin is named Helen.)
I have branched out into cozy mystery as well. They’re fun, and I am drifting toward ones with bakery backdrops because I know a lot about bakeries and baked goods. I also have two cozy series planned, one for a woman who buys a food truck and another who ends up with a pizza place. Both are about women reinventing themselves as a single woman. One’s a widow, the other’s divorced.
So, I’ve basically hit all the genres. I’ve dipped my toes into Paranormal Women’s Fiction, and I still write non-fiction and edit collections of stories.
Do you outline, “wing it,” or something in between?
Something in between. I always have a starting point and beats I want to include, and I always know the ending. In between, it can sometimes get a little hazy. And sometimes I see that something’s not working, so I have to stop in the middle and reconfigure things.
One of the gigs I had early on was writing two short stories a week for the North Hollywood micronews site Patch. I created a serial novel based on Armisted Maupin’s brilliant Tales of the City series. I was full-time freelance and so I was also working side gigs because the owner didn’t believe in paying writers, so I was working for free (while my illustrator was paid the handsome sum of $10 a week).
I’d come out of news writing, and I was used to deadlines, so I didn’t have a problem with writer’s block, but I sometimes ended up finishing the stories just an hour or two before the deadline. I usually outlined my stories a month or so in advance, so I didn’t have to start them from scratch under a tight deadline.
And sometimes, something really unexpected happens. My most anthologized short story is “In the Kingdom of the Cat,” which is about a lonely woman and her cat. I was at home working with television on in the background for company when a documentary about what happens when people who have no family or friends die in Los Angeles. The story literally came to me complete and before the documentary was over, I was typing as fast as I could, afraid that I would forget it before I could write it down. It’s roughly 1500 of the best words I’ve ever written, and it never would have happened if I hadn’t seen that documentary.
So, outline but be open to inspiration.
What have been the major influences on your work (favorite authors or whatever)?
I used to say the biggest influences on my work were Jim Henson and Rod Serling. (A lot of my early crime fiction had twist endings.) I love Stephen King and how great he is with characters. Even characters that wouldn’t normally be sympathetic always have some humanity. I fell in love with the way Tanith Lee wrote. Just flinging words onto paper like she was painting with oils and a palette knife. I loved short stories and read everyone from Harlan Ellison and Isaac Asimov to the classics everyone reads in school—stories by Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and “The Most Dangerous Game” and “The Monkey’s Paw,” and “The Lady, or the Tiger?”
How did your experience as a magazine editor and nonfiction author affect your fiction writing (if it did)?
As an editor, I was always looking for story ideas. I consumed other magazines and newspapers. I used to tell my freelancers that every story could be presented as a business story, and that reading business stories was a great place to start if you were looking for a fresh angle on a topic.
I always checked my facts. Non-fiction usually requires some research, and my skills are good. You can go down a rabbit hole doing research—and I have—but in general, I think having too much research is better than too little. The title story of my collection Suicide Blonde is set in the Fifties, and I researched absolutely everything, from what was on the coinage to the price of a lipstick. It took me longer to track down the information than it did to write the story.
Do you keep a “bible” for your fictional town, Silver Birch?
I’ve had to since the series has expanded. I have a LOT of characters, so I keep them on a spreadsheet. (I reused first names a couple of times before I started doing this.) Now I have a list of locations and who works where and a timeline of events (which baby is born when, that sort of thing).
I really like spending time in my fictional city. It’s very much my happy place because I’ve taken all the things I liked about my time in the Pacific Northwest (especially the awesome fall foliage) and left out the things I didn’t like (the incessant rain). I also borrowed places. My landlady and her sisters in Bellingham also owned a string of Pho shops, and that turned into the go-to Vietnamese restaurant Pho on Fifth which shows up throughout the series. One character’s vintage clothing shop is based on a world-class thrift store in Centralia, Washington that’s run by the Visiting Nurses Association.
How did you become a screenwriter? What was it like to work with Hulu, and did you have any involvement in the actual filming of your script? What would you describe as the major differences between writing novels and writing screenplays?
My path to becoming a screenwriter was not the usual one. When I moved to L.A., I had a roommate who wanted to be a screenwriter and was working as a “reader” for some producers. Just as in the publishing business, everyone uses readers—usually young, usually low-wage earners—to separate the submissions into PASS/CONSIDER piles. (Yes, the lowest paid workers in the industry are trusted to make decisions on multi-million dollar projects. It’s kind of crazy.
I was freelancing for Copley News Service and there just wasn’t enough work for me at the time, so my roommate suggested I try doing coverage, which is basically “book reports” on books, magazines, and scripts. He introduced me to one of his clients—the late, great Richard Donner (director of The Goonies, the Christopher Reeve Superman, the Lethal Weapon series and so much more.)
So, I met Dick and his wife Lauren Shuler Donner (producer of Pretty in Pink, the X-Men franchise and more) and I went to work with them. Their office faced the Marian Davies bungalow on the Warner Brothers lot, which was occupied by uber-producer Joel Silver (who produced the Lethal Weapon franchise, the Matrix series, the Robert Downey, Jr. Sherlock Holmes movies).
I worked for Joel and learned a lot and had a lot of opportunities. And I read a LOT of scripts. I went freelance and read a lot more scripts. I ended up working for some really big name Hollywood people, including Jerry Bruckheimer, Wolfgang Petersen, and Kathryn Bigelow. I read so many scripts that I internalized the formula.
At the time I was renting a house in Studio City owned by a very successful writer/producer who offered me a chance to write an episode of one of the television shows he produced. I did, and it was filmed and aired. I was so excited. Somewhere I still have the screenshot I took when my name came up in the credits.
Then one day I saw an ad on Craigslist looking for a cheap screenwriter (the pay was $800) to flesh out a science fiction idea the producers had. They wanted it on a very tight timeframe. Something like eight days. But I got the gig. And more followed. My advantage is that I’m not union but I’m not inexperienced. (I’d love to be in the Union.) Producers pay me
But I much prefer writing narrative fiction because screenwriting is so condensed. Most movies are around 90 minutes to two hours, so it’s hard to develop complicated stories and characters. And I love characters. It took me forever to become comfortable reading scripts because I found it such an odd way to tell a story after years of reading books and short stories.
I did not have any interaction with Hulu, nor did I have any involvement with the filming. I live in Portugal and the film was shot in Turin, Italy, so I could have made the trip (on my own dime), but I had other work obligations at the time. I was a little taken aback when I finally saw the finished product because the leading man (who was very cute) pronounced the leading lady’s character name differently in practically every scene. Also, a tacked on, and what I considered crass, joke at end made me want to cringe because I watched it for the first time with my best friend’s mother and his sister.
But one of the first lessons you learn in Hollywood is that the writer is the least respected person on the set. There are directors who are real collaborators—Ron Howard is one, Dick Donner was another—but mostly, directors let writers improvise and/or rewrite things themselves. I really love working with some directors—Stefano Milla, who directed the Hulu movie, for one. He’s incredibly creative and I’ve now written a few movies for him, all of which have either been filmed or are being filmed.
The producers of the film sold it to Hulu (and I was thrilled).
What is your latest or next-forthcoming book?
I have a horror novella coming out before the end of January as part of a shared world: Asylum Stories (The Tale of the Timekeeper.) It’s something very different for me. I am also a part of several other shared worlds and boxed sets coming out this year.
What are you working on now?
Several things. (I skip around. I’ll focus on one thing if I have a deadline but if I’m working on my own material, I like to change things up.) I am working on repackaging some of my Silver Birch stories into longer works, as well as rewriting and combining some of Katherine Moore’s “Mermaid Beach” stories. Under my own name, I’m taking part in a list-aiming mystery boxed set, so I have my story for that, a twisty little psychological thriller about a woman who’ll do anything for love. And finally, “Kat Parrish” is working on a trilogy about three classic monsters—Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Mummy. I think I have a new take on them that people will like, and I have killer covers.
What advice would you give to aspiring authors?
Start writing now. You’ll only get better the more you write. I think it was Stephen King who said he wrote a million words before he felt confident enough to call himself a writer.
Find your tribe. A lot of bookstores host book groups and writing groups. You can find them online through Meetups or Facebooks groups.
Read as much as you can. You need to replenish your well of inspiration and reading does that in a way nothing else can.
Believe you have something to say.
What is the URL of your website? What about other internet presence?
I don’t have a website right now. I’m going to build one for Silver Birch, but right now all my pen names share a freebie blog site. It’s Eye of the Kat.
I used to be really good at posting book reviews and author interviews every day or so, but I see I haven’t updated it for a while. I have to rethink it.
My three pen names are all on Facebook and that’s probably where you’ll find me the most. I know it’s toxic, but I have friends from elementary school, from my first jobs, people I used to date, college friends plus tons of writers and colleagues who are sources of inspiration and information and who have been very kind and welcoming.
I used to be on X, but I never really posted much—just used it to keep up with people I followed. I’m on Bluesky now but haven’t developed a habit of posting. Mostly I put up “skeets” that are pictures I’ve taken. I love taking photographs and occasionally get lucky with pictures.
I need to learn how to do TikTok effectively because every single author I know is using that platform. I want to be able to add entertainment value and not just make my posts about “buy my book.”
I have not used Instagram much because I live in Portugal and there are problems setting it up with my phone.
*****
Some Books I’ve Read Lately:
OF DICE AND MEN, by David M. Ewalt. I recently came across this 2013 book—written when Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition was in the works—which the cover blurb calls “a blend of history, journalism, narrative, and memoir.” In keeping with this accurate description, Ewalt enlivens his wide-ranging overview of the origins and development of D&D by weaving the history of the game into his personal history with the game as player and dungeon master over several decades. Both casual fans of roleplaying games and lifelong grognards (a term originally meaning “old warriors”) will find entertainment and enlightenment herein. Even though I started playing D&D with the publication of the First Edition AD&D MONSTER MANUAL and its two companion guides, and I’ve read other histories of the game, OF DICE AND MEN held a lot of fresh information for me. For instance, Ewalt supplies a clearer explanation of why Advanced Dungeons and Dragons is a distinctly different product from the original Basic D&D than any other I’ve read. When our family started exploring the game with no guidance other than the manuals and commercially published adventure modules, we took the term “Advanced” literally and assumed the later system was a straightforward elaboration of the earlier one, a misunderstanding that somewhat hampered our playing. (And I still think the terminology was ill-advised and unnecessarily confusing.) For general readers, the main intended audience, the book begins with an explanation of roleplaying games and how D&D works. It then provides an overview of the millennia-old background of war games before moving on to a detailed exposition of how Gary Gygax developed D&D from tabletop wargaming. Subsequent chapters narrate the twists and turns of the game’s and its parent company’s evolution, including the financial and organizational ups and downs as well as the rocky relationship between Gygax and his co-originator. Naturally, Ewalt delves into the game’s public reception, including analysis of the “satanic panic” phase. The book concludes with the playtesting of Fifth Edition, aka “D&D Next.” Each chapter includes multiple entertainingly dramatized anecdotes from the author’s own playing experiences. Only one aspect of Ewalt’s personalized odyssey mildly annoyed me—his occasional references to being embarrassed or vaguely ashamed of his immersion in the game during his early years of involvement. I’ve been a geek/nerd and proud of it since long before those words acquired their current meaning; I regard weirdness as a positive rather than a negative. Still, this book offers fascinating content for both newbies and veterans of the tabletop roleplaying subculture.
VALDEMAR, by Mercedes Lackey. The final volume in the “Founding of Valdemar” trilogy. While it’s necessary to have read the first two books to understand what’s going on in this one, a reader new to the world of Valdemar with its Heralds, Companions, and mages could start with this trilogy. Familiarity with at least some of the other subseries of the series, however, would enhance one’s pleasure, since established fans would enjoy hints of things to come chronologically later in the fictional history. This book skips ahead ten years from the end of the second volume. (The text helpfully reminds us of that point several times.) Two of the three sons of Baron (formerly Duke) Kordas Valdemar are almost grown. The refugees’ colony has become an established city, Haven, although some of their people have split off into their own small villages. Valdemar’s Hawkbrother allies, having magically cleansed the surrounding area, have taken down their temporary protective shield and withdrawn, leaving the newcomers mostly on their own. Contact continues, though, and as we later learn, the Hawkbrothers will offer aid in extreme circumstances. The evil wizardry threat alluded to in the cover blurb doesn’t flare up until well into the story. Most of the first half of the novel concerns the day-to-day problems and minor crises involved in ruling a city still partly under construction. Some readers might find these chapters too slow, but I always enjoy the way Lackey portrays character interactions and the setting and customs of her invented world, with or without any thrilling events onstage at the moment. Secondary characters as well as Kordas himself are presented vividly and sympathetically. The main thread unifying this section comes from Kordas’s council members’ insistence that he must accept the title of King for the good of the realm. He eventually gives in, of course. Fans of the series will be happy to see the development we’ve been waiting for, the advent of the Companions. Since the gods have solid reasons for introducing those magnificent creatures at this time, soon after the Choosing of the first Heralds they, the nobility, the mages (Chosen or not), and the common folk of Haven must face a dire crisis. Aid from a friendly elemental and emissaries of the Hawkbrothers augment the Valdemarans’ defenses, but the threat is appropriately hard to defeat. This book caps the trilogy with a satisfying conclusion, although I’d love to read more novels set in this early phase of the world’s history.
MISLAID IN PARTS HALF-KNOWN, by Seanan McGuire. The much-anticipated annual installment in McGuire’s “Wayward Children” portal fantasy series. While many of these books can be read independently, one really needs to have read last year’s book, LOST IN THE MOMENT AND FOUND, to fully understand this one. Herein we pick up Antsy’s experiences after her return to this world at the end of LOST IN THE MOMENT AND FOUND. Like the other books, the new one begins with a prologue discussing the “children of the doors” as an introduction to Miss Eleanor’s school for children and teens who’ve returned from the other worlds to which various portals have taken them. This particular prologue expounds the distinctions among mislaid, lost, and truly Lost. Antsy’s schoolmates know she has the gift of being able to find anything. “Anything” includes Doors, for which she refuses to search; she maintains that people’s Doors will find them, if at all, at the right time without her interference. When the selfish, mean, but dazzlingly beautiful Seraphina learns of this talent, she tries to bully Antsy into finding a Door to a world where Seraphina might attain contentment. Antsy takes refuge with her friends in the attic sanctuary of Kade, Miss Eleanor’s heir (and the only student who has no desire to leave the school for any other world). Thanks to Antsy’s gift, the teens escape through a hitherto unknown Door in the attic. It leads to the place she never expected or wanted to revisit, the enchanted shop where she spent most of the previous novel. A sort of inter-universe nexus, the store gives access to innumerable other dimensions. Taking advantage of a handy Door, Antsy and her friends travel through multiple worlds – and, as foreshadowed by the book’s cover illustration, in one of them they meet dinosaurs. By the end of their journey, several characters have achieved resolutions or even happy endings. It’s delightful to watch as Ansty confronts the person who manipulated her childhood ignorance for selfish gain and, ultimately, sets the shop right (helped by a flock of sapient magpies). Along the way, we learn a lot of new lore about the true nature of Doors and the hidden dangers of opening them. In fact, so many threads get wound up that this story could serve as a finale to the series. But I fervently hope it won’t.
HIM, by Geoff Ryman. This novel is odder by far than even the author’s WAS, a tragic deconstruction of origins of THE WIZARD OF OZ, both book and movie. In HIM, Ryman re-envisions the life of Jesus in terms some readers may dismiss as blasphemous. However, this deeply moving treatment of the familiar gospel story, told mainly through the viewpoint of Maryam (the Virgin Mary), might be better regarded as an imagining of an alternate reality. Yeshu (Jesus) implies as much near the end of the book. He reveals the existence of an infinite number of possible worlds. There might be a universe in which he doesn’t have to die by crucifixion; there might exist universes wherein he lives to a peaceful old age. Or the world of this novel, where he was born a girl. The author “makes the familiar strange” in other ways as well, including language. He spells the names of people and places as they might be transliterated from Aramaic or Greek, e.g., “Yerusalem” instead of Jerusalem, “Perisayya” for Pharisees. Even for a reader familiar with the New Testament, many of the correspondences can be hard to figure out. It took me several pages to realize the “Migdali woman” is Mary Magdalene, especially with her significant differences from the way that saint usually appears in tradition and art. So I’ll write proper names in their customary spellings for clarity, aside from Yeshu, Maryam, and Yosef. When Maryam tells her priestly uncle of her miraculous pregnancy, naturally he fears she has gone mad. Searching for a suitable husband to rescue her from her plight, he settles on Yosef, an eccentric dreamer who holds heretical views such as the belief that Adam and Eve before the fall were neither male nor female. He’s just crazy enough to accept Maryam as his wife. The disgraced pair are “exiled” from Jerusalem to Nazareth, where the holy child is born. Therefore, no journey to Bethlehem, no angels and shepherds, no star, no Magi. Maryam and Yosef remain celibate throughout their marriage, although they do conceive several other children by a makeshift version of artificial insemination. As for the child of the Holy Spirit, Maryam gives birth to a daughter. When the girl is five years old, her best friend, a boy slightly older than she, dies. From then on, she adopts his gender and his name, vehemently insisting she’s now a boy named Yeshu. While Yosef comes to accept him without too much difficulty, Maryam takes many years to adjust. For a long time she thinks of her oldest child as “it” and “the Cub.” While she impresses me as more prickly than likable, she also evokes sympathy, especially at the climax of the novel, when she fearlessly berates God for the ordeals He has put her through. In youth, far from holy, Yeshu and his gang of rowdy friends behave almost like juvenile delinquents. Eventually he leaves home in search of his cousin John the Baptist. When Maryam (now widowed) next meets Yeshu, he has assumed the title “Son of Adam” and gathered a throng of followers, roaming through the countryside in groups he calls “eklesia” (from the Greek for “calling out”). In one delightful innovation, they habitually sing favorite lines from Yeshu’s preaching and stories. It’s easy to understand the suspicious reactions of some people in the towns they pass through, viewing the disciples as the first-century equivalent of a traveling Woodstock. Matthew conscientiously writes down as many as possible of the Son’s parables and sayings, but in this version of the story, so does Maryam. Both of them leave out elements they find too unconventional, disturbing, or just plain baffling. Miracles don’t come as easily as often depicted in the New Testament. The feeding of the five thousand is casually attributed to incidents when people share food among themselves and it always seems to work out to enough. Lazarus, Mary, and Martha of Bethany aren’t close friends of Yeshu. Rather, when he learns of Lazarus’s death, he has never met them before. He raises Lazarus from the dead just to see what would happen, and the witnesses don’t welcome the result with joy but shrink from it as an “abomination.” To me, the portrayal of the miracles is the most innovative and unsettling feature of the novel. Yeshu’s healings have a shattering effect on observers, as if the universe momentarily turns inside out and resets itself. In another hint of an alternate world, during Yeshu’s trial it’s claimed that the Romans don’t customarily crucify people in the Jewish territory and that women are never crucified. Unlike in the gospels, the High Priest displays sympathy for Yeshu and tries to save his life. Yeshu, however, won’t accept a lesser sentence and seems determined to die. In another departure from the gospel accounts, Maryam doesn’t follow him to the cross. The narrative skips from the trial to the Resurrection, numinous and as strikingly weird in its way as the rest of the story. This iconoclastic retelling of a revered narrative displays a surprisingly high Christology. Yeshu seems fully aware of his status as the human embodiment of the divine. He repeatedly declares that the purpose of his existence is to let God experience pity, sorrow, pain, suffering, and death – in short, to teach God what it means to be human. In its own idiosyncratic terms, that claim actually comes across as a thoroughly orthodox summary of the Incarnation. While I may not reread this novel straight through, many passages invited repeated perusal and reflection. With the final scene (to quote a PBS TV cartoon character) “my brain just exploded.”
For my recommendations of “must read” classic and modern vampire fiction, explore the Realm of the Vampires:
Realm of the Vampires
*****
Excerpt from “Bunny Hunt”:
Downstairs, she exited the house through the kitchen door, since the voice in her head seemed to be coming from that direction. She carefully left the door unlocked, not wanting to get stuck outside even in a dream.
Their yard backed up to the wooded area whose other end bordered the playground where the children had searched for eggs that morning. She started toward the trees, listening hard, hunting for the source of the call. When the plea for help echoed in her mind yet again, she realized there was no question of its origin. The voice definitely came from the woods, and there was only one way in from here.
As soon as the damp grass touched her ankles, she realized she should have put on thicker socks. Also, the April night breeze chilled her bare arms. When she considered going inside for a sweater, though, the disembodied voice chimed, Please hurry. Still feeling pleasantly drifty, Melanie shrugged off the chill and quickened her pace.
On the trail that led into the woods, trees cut off most of the light from houses and street lamps. Even with a full moon, she could barely see her way, but fortunately she’d strolled this path many times before. The second time she stumbled on a root, though, she yielded to common sense and dug the emergency flashlight out of her bag. Wouldn’t you think I’d be able to see fine and walk safely by moonlight in a dream?
Every few yards, the voice renewed its appeal for her to hurry. Where was it coming from? How long had she been walking, anyway? Surely not much more than ten minutes. Shouldn’t she have reached the border of the woods by now? The walk from one end to the other took no more than fifteen minutes at a leisurely stroll, and by road the long way around only about five minutes.
Of course, that was in daylight. Maybe she’d unconsciously slowed down to avoid a fall, despite trying to obey the urgent appeal of the voice. On the other hand, she didn’t recall the trail having this many curves. Could she have accidentally stepped off the main track onto a side path?
Around the next bend, what she ran into convinced her she was definitely not on the right path anymore.
Overhanging the trail, a tangle of tree limbs entwined with thorny vines formed an arch. This shouldn’t be here. This dream is getting wilder by the minute. Am I supposed to go through that?
The voice responded as if reading her mind: This way.
Of course, what else? Can’t turn back now, even if this is the weirdest dream I’ve ever had. Melanie stepped through the portal. Beyond the threshold, vine-draped tree trunks hemmed her in on both sides. Aiming the flashlight beam upward revealed a tangle of vines that roofed the trail as far ahead as she could see. A layer of leaves rustled underfoot, stirring a scent of damp loam. The night’s chill abruptly yielded to humid warmth, more like June than early April.
She staggered with dizziness. When the vertigo passed and her vision cleared, the mental fog that had cushioned her until that moment evaporated. Her feet felt clammy from walking in wet grass. Ticklish tendrils of hair clung to her neck. The fingers of her left hand cramped from carrying her bag. The bronze disk on the necklace heated her skin through the T-shirt.
This is no dream. I’m really here. She spun around, pointing the light at the path behind her. Instead of the opening she’d walked through, a wall of branches and thorns blocked retreat. Where is here?
-end-
*****
The long-time distributor of THE VAMPIRE’S CRYPT has closed its website. If you would like to read any issue of this fanzine, which contains fiction, interviews, and a detailed book review column, visit the Dropbox page below. Find information about the contents of each issue on this page of my website:
All issues are now posted on Dropbox, where you should be able to download them at this link:
All Vampire’s Crypt Issues on Dropbox
A complete list of my available works, arranged roughly by genre, with purchase links:
For anyone who would like to read previous issues of this newsletter, they’re posted on my website here (starting from January 2018):
This is my Facebook author page. Please visit!
Facebook
Here’s my page in Barnes and Noble’s Nook store:
Barnes and Noble
Here’s the list of my Kindle books on Amazon. (The final page, however, includes some Ellora’s Cave anthologies in which I don’t have stories):
Carter Kindle Books
Here’s a shortcut URL to my author page on Amazon:
Amazon
The Fiction Database displays a comprehensive list of my books (although with a handful of fairy tales by a different Margaret Carter near the end):
My Goodreads page:
Goodreads
Please “Like” my author Facebook page (cited above) to see reminders when each monthly newsletter is uploaded. I’ve also noticed that I’m more likely to be shown posts from liked or friended sources in my Facebook feed when I’ve “Liked” some of their individual posts, so you might want to do that, too. Thanks!
My Publishers:
Writers Exchange E-Publishing: Writers Exchange
Harlequin: Harlequin
Wild Rose Press: Wild Rose Press
You can contact me at: MLCVamp@aol.com
“Beast” wishes until next time—
Margaret L. Carter