FANG BANGERS collects 14 hot stories of fanged and clawed love and lust - Vampires loving shape shifters, werewolves lusting for fairies and every creature imaginable with the girl next door!It’s a collection of the ultimate taboos.
Erotic super star Cecilia Tan gives us some Vampire BDSM, New York Times best-selling author Lois Gresh gives us a clawed creature of unique proportions and propensities, and Gina McQueen (New York Times best-selling author John Skipp in drag) shows us some new werewolf tricks.
And more importantly from my perspective, my alter ego Inara LaVey and her boyfriend Kilt Kilpatrick both have stories in Fang Bangers as well, along with our friend Rebecca Leigh! Click on the book cover for more information!
As my friends and family know, I’ve been buried in work the last few months. Work work and writing work. I’ve been plowing through the WiP That Wouldn’t Die and have watched two self-imposed deadlines pass by at a speed that’s frightening. My only social life has been Thursday night wine tastings at Vin Debut and the occasional quick hello to friends, the social equivalent of hit and runs. And I’m STILL not done with the WiP. Oh, I can see the light at the end of the zombie-infested tunnel … but there is still work to be completed.
In August, however, I plan on being back in the blogging habit. Not only here at the Den, but the bi-weekly Ravenous Wednesdays on UnBound, my Monday posts at Fatal Foodies and my bi-weekly Sunday posts on Make Mine Mystery (if the latter two haven’t replaced me in disgust by now).
I’m hoping to have good news to share in a few weeks, but in the meantime… I write. I walk on the beach. I play with kitties… and I write some more.
When I first heard about Lynne Murray’s new book Bride of the Living Dead and the fact she was looking for blogs to host her on her upcoming blog tour for BotLD’s release, I admit I jumped up and down and shouted “Me! Me! MY blog!” partly because I fully expected zombies. I anxiously awaited my preview copy (I ripped open the envelope with all the eagerness and ferocity of a ghoul really wanting to get to the best gooey parts inside…) and settled in to read it right away once it arrived.
I kept expecting zombies to show up even after the first few zombie free chapters. After all, the heroine Daria loves horror movies (I love her T-shirt collection depicting old movie posters) so it stood to reason there would be monsters coming along at some point.
As I reached the mid-point, however, I finally realized this book was zombie free. And I found I didn’t care. Daria’s tale of true love, wedding planning trauma, crazy exes, and her relationship with her anorexic control-freak sister didn’t need flesh-eating ghouls to entertain me. Funny, touching and unique, Bride of the Living Dead was a joy to read and I am delighted to welcome Lynne here to the Den as she talks about:
What’s in a Title?
A book title, like a book cover, has a job to do. Its primary assignment is to get the reader to physically pick up the book, or if it’s viewed online to click on the link to find out more. At that point the words in the short description of what the book take center stage. At any point the reader can move to away from the book, so these are very important words.
The title, Bride of the Living Dead, has changed since I wrote the book. For a long time it was called A Guide for the Dysfunctional Bride. When the book found a home at Pearlsong Press both the publisher and I felt that it sounded too much like a nonfiction how-to book. We had fun brainstorming possible titles and one candidate became a chapter heading–Attack of the 50-Foot Wedding Planner. However Bride of the Living Dead won out over the rest.
The main worry I had was that fans of books like Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies might think that there be disappointed to find no zombies or similar undead creatures in the book. The heroine, Daria, loves old movies that feature such critters, which is why she views the effort to turn her into the Stepford Bride as a horror movie in action, aiming to transforming her into a rose-petal pink, mindless bridal creature. People have asked if Daria is a Bridezilla, super-demanding bride, but the truth is that she needs to find a way to access her inner giant reptile. We all need that monster sometimes to help us fight for what we want.
Fortunately those who demand zombies and other undead creatures in their fiction have not (so far) been roused to form a mob, light torches and hunt me down for impersonating a zombie in a romantic comedy. It might help that I live on an extremely steep hill in a windy part of town-very hard on torches.
I am an avid reader of urban paranormal books and I moved deeper into the real realms of the fictional undead in the book that followed Bride of the Living Dead. Vampires and other paranormal creatures inhabit my next book, The Falstaff Vampire Files, which will be published by Pearlsong Press (though the publication date isn’t yet set). The book has humor, ghosts, vampires and life-sucking entities from another dimension, creatures that humankind was never meant to encounter, that seize upon the slightest invitation to prey upon the living and the undead.
The charming creator of this blog was kind enough to say that she “came for the zombies and stayed for the humor.” Thanks for that, Dana, it was my fondest hope for the title.
Lynne Murray, author of the romantic comedy, Bride of the Living Dead, has had six mysteries published. Larger Than Death, the first book featuring Josephine Fuller, sleuth of size who doesn’t apologize won the Distinguished Achievement Award from NAAFA (the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance). She has written three ebooks of encouragement for writers as well as essays, interviews and reviews on subjects that rouse her passions, many of those can be found under “Rants and Raves” on her web site at http://www.lmurray.com. Lynne lives in San Francisco and when not writing she enjoys reading, watching DVD film directors’ commentaries and spoiling her cats, all of whom are rescued or formerly feral felines.Want to know how to reach Lynne and/or find out more about what she’s doing? See below for links a plenty! Web page: http://www.lmurray.com
Looking for some romance? A fan of zombies? Interested in seeing how the two genres combine? Check out Hungry For Your Love at Ravenous Romance! This unique anthology includes stories by yours truly (that’s me, writing under my own name this time), Kilt Kilpatrick, Isabel Roman, Brian Keene, and John Skipp…er…I mean, Gina McQueen. Who we think is John Skipp in drag! And plenty of other authors whose work I can’t wait to devour…
Coming out on Halloween with Ravenous Romance, an anthology for all you zombie lovers out there! My short story “First Date” is in there, along with Kilt Kilpatrick’s “Last Times at Ridgemont High.” And they said it couldn’t be done…
…I’m on a grueling (yet exhilarating) deadline and have been writing my butt off (yup, looks like it’s shrunk a bit!) all last week into my lovely long weekend. Can’t say much more right now other than zombies are involved. So you KNOW I’m having a blast! The kitties have been a great help by keeping their rampaging down to a minimum, so I’m posting the picture below in their honor.
See you all later, and definitely look for Ravenous Wednesday at Un:Bound this week!
One of my fellow August Blog Challengers (ABC) wrote a post about the need for taking a break, no matter how hectic the writing schedule might be or how scary the deadlines looming over us. I wish I could remember offhand which of these talented writers wrote that post, but I can’t. And as is the way of things, skimming back through their blogs is NOT turning up the post in question. Trust me, it was a good post. And if the author of it reads this post, I trust they’ll give me a cyber whack upside the head and leave a comment so I can do an after the fact link. A POST post, as it where.
But on with the point here.
I took my usual morning walk on the beach (is there ever a point where one can collect too many shells and pieces of beach glass? Is there a socially acceptable limit, as there is with, say, cats? Can I be a crazy shell lady?) and have spent the rest of the day so far expanding the world of my short story, Champagne, with a brief diversion to write my weekly post for Fatal Foodies. Then back to Champagne (and wishing I had a glass of it). I hit a wall about 20 minutes ago and took a meal break (whatever you call lunch and dinner when they’re combined). I turned the TV on to see if some wonderfully crapituous (it’s my word and I like it!) Sci Fi original movie was on, but it was FINAL DESTINATION II, which is only bad enough to be annoying rather than gleefully horrendous. It’s gotta be at least an 8 on the Crap-o-meter to make it in our Bad Move Night lineup. Disappointed, I did a brief channel surf to see if anything else was on. ROAD HOUSE was on AMC, Patrick Swayze and his mullet were kicking the shit out of testosterone overdosed men with inferior mullets.
This is the second time I’ve walked in on ROAD HOUSE mid-movie and considering that both times it took only five minutes to fill me with an overwhelming desire to gather a group of friends and several bottles of tequila, I decided to save it for later and did another brief channel scan. This time I found the last 10 minutes of SUMMER STOCK, an MGM musical starring Judy Garland and Gene Kelly. I was just in time to see Judy sing ‘Get Happy’ (as in ‘Forget your troubles, come on, get happy…we’re gonna chase all your cares away…forget your troubles, come on, get happy…we’re heading for the judgment day’). Both song and movie were part of my upbringing; Mom raised us on musicals (I found the Hammer horror films all on my own), watched the movies and played the records. She used to waltz me around the pool when I was too young to swim, and sing the songs.
Not all musicals were created equal, of course - if they didn’t have Gene Kelly they weren’t quite as good. I grew up with a very definite opinion on what the ideal male legs looked like and they were Gene Kelly’s. If you’ve ever seen THE PIRATE and watched the Pirate Ballet number where he’s wearing what might be the sexiest pirate costume ever created, you will understand why my opinion remains unchanged to this day.
What does this have to do with taking a break? Easy. Because some of my best childhood memories are based around watching these movies with Mom and Lisa after our dad moved out, hearing a snippet of one of the songs or, better yet, seeing even a few minutes of movies like SUMMER STOCK, AMERICAN IN PARIS and THE BANDWAGON (the latter doesn’t have Gene Kelly, but it has the Manhunt Ballet, which was a huge influence on Murder for Hire) is an instant mood booster. Admittedly I sometimes watch a few minutes of DAWN OF THE DEAD (my first date movie) when I need a break, but I’ve yet to see a zombie with legs as good as Gene Kelly’s.
P.S. Go here to check out my latest post on Fatal Foodies!
We went to a book signing last night for our friend Kat Richardson, author of the urban fantasy Greywalker series. The signing was at Borders in Union Square, always a bit of a zoo on a Friday night. Before even reaching Union Square, however, I started the evening off by inadvertently sitting in a puddle of water on the Muni; one of the panels in the ceiling was leaking steadily, something I only noticed after soaking my skirt, the bottom of my jacket and yes, even my underwear. Not much I could do beyond being grateful it was just water (one never knows on the Muni) and hoping everything would dry off quickly. They didn’t, but by the time we ran the gauntlet of tourists and panhandlers from Market Street to Powell, at least they’d stopped dripping. My clothes, that is. I can’t speak for either tourists or panhandlers.
Kat’s signing was on the fourth floor of the Borders. They’d set up a table on a little stage, displayed her new book (Underground, third in the series) prominently on and around the area, and there was a respectable sized audience there for the event. We were a little late (and a little wet), but hadn’t missed the reading portion of the evening. Kat did what is one of the better author readings I’ve seen: her characterizations were distinct and she took her time. Too many authors rush through their readings, anxious to get to the end of it. To misquote Dr. McCoy, the majority of writers seem to subscribe to the ‘I’m a writer, not an actor, dammit!’ school of thought and they do NOT enjoy reading their own work to an audience.
After the signing, we went out for wine and snacks with Kat and her San Francisco ‘handler,’, author Frank Lauria, who, according to his bio on Amazon, ‘has published seventeen novels, including five bestsellers and the novelizations of Dark City, End of Days, Mask of Zorro, Alaska, and Girlfight.’ He was a hoot, a self-described food snob and excellent company. It’s something when you get four writers in a room together and they’re all as interested in what the others are doing as talking about their own projects. It wasn’t all ‘me, me, me!’ It was more ‘you, me, what about you?’
I had no complaints about the evening, especially after my clothes dried off. It was a late night, however, and we didn’t get to bed until well after midnight, which meant a late start on the morning routine of beach walk et al. I’m also feeling uninspired and dull, but that doesn’t let me off the August blog challenge or working on Champagne (current book project).
I’ve read the first two books in Kat’s series, Greywalker and Poltergeist, loved them, and recommend them to anyone who enjoys urban fantasies and is tired of Laurel Hamilton’s increasingly unbalanced ratio of sex versus plot/action in her Anita Blake books. I’ll do a proper book review of all three after I’ve read Underground. I hear it has zombies in it, so you KNOW I’m anxious to get to it. I’ll be checking out Frank Lauria’s books as well. And if you don’t know about my zombie fixation, it’s detailed on my website here.
And now it’s time to turn off WEBS (a made for TV movie featuring Richard Greico trapped in an alternate universe where spiders rule Chicago), and get to work on Champagne. Mutated spider people and literary erotica do not mix well together. Although…no…never mind. I’m not gonna go there. At least not today.
