Hello cowboys & vampires!

If there’s an option, always pick Key West

Location, location, location; my father’s cautionary advice to me upon purchasing a first home. “Nothing else matters, Kath, location, location, location.” It was good advice, I was glad to have it.

The advice, it turns out, is relevant to a novel’s setting too, but since Dad had no similar editorial advice, Clark and I learned this literary lesson — and the ripple effects on everything from post-publishing marketing strategies to taxes — on our own.

Here are four fruits of that experience, interspersed with a running deliberation on a related question: does the literary ball-and-chain “write what you know” meme apply to setting choice too? (For sure, hell no and it depends).  Read more >>поисковая раскрутка сайтов

Lizzie, Elita and the rest of the gang are back for blood in the second book of Hays and McFall’s (The Cowboy and the Vampire, 2010) series.

Following the climactic events of the first book, Lizzie Vaughan doesn’t get much of a breather. When a friend’s niece disappears, her Adamite (read: full-blooded human) boyfriend, Tucker, is still coming to terms with the fact that his woman is a vampire. While he leaves town to investigate, Lizzie is having trouble resisting the urge to kill, as the baby she carries—the one no one thought was possible—makes her hunger unbearable. Meanwhile, powerful elders are arriving in the western town of LonePine to decide if the prophecy has come true. Is Lizzie really their new queen, the one who can save vampirekind—or at least their own Messianic bloodline? Read the rest of this entry »

Idle traveling is great, but traveling with a purpose has its definite attractions too. As paranormal fiction writers, whenever we find ourselves in a new locale, we make sure we have time to check out the local paranormal lore.

On a recent trip to Key West, we discovered a mother lode of stories, and also stumbled on the horrific (literally) linguistic history of the phrases “dead ringer” and “saved by the bell.” Read the rest of this entry »

Humans are scary.

Imagine if the undead featured on the pages of Blood and Whiskey were the ones writing about strange paranormal creatures of fantasy — humans — instead of the other way around. Here’s a blog post in which we channel our own characters and hand over the laptop to our vampire writer colleagues.   

“Everybody loves a good fright story and there’s nothing more frightening than humans, forever skulking about in the sunlight with their wooden stakes and tan skin. In Blood and Whiskey, we tried to do something different and imaginative with our people, the non-dead, as they are known. Humans have existed in legends and folktales for thousands of years and each country seems to have similar stories about the sun-walkers. We stripped those stories down to the bare bones to re-think the traditional notion of humans as simple-minded monsters.” Read more >>aracer

Any self-respecting prepper keeps a bug-out bag ­loaded with survival gear near the door, and the characters from The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series are definitely used to dealing with the worst.

The rationale behind a bug-out bag is simple — it’s a backpack or some other form of personal conveyance loaded with all the stuff necessary to survive the first few days after some kind of catastrophic event. Say a meteor hits — doesn’t seem so unlikely now, does it Russia? — or there’s a huge, city-leveling earthquake or solar flares disrupt earth communications and turn half the population into solar zombies. Whatever the cause, when (not if) disaster strikes, a bug-out bag provides careful planners with a head start that won’t be enjoyed by his or her neighbors who will be wandering around wringing their hands and wondering what to do. And probably becoming zombie food. Read the rest of this entry »