Witches, Wolves, and the Ties Between

So in case I hadn't mentioned it yet, BLOOD WITCH is out tomorrow! *showers everyone with glitter* And tomorrow I'll do the usual business of throwing buy links in your faces and being over-excited, but today I thought I'd share an interesting factoid about BLOOD WITCH.

BLOOD WITCH exists because of a book read by a character in another series of mine.

Yes, this gets meta.

I mentioned when I finished the first draft of BLOOD WITCH that an early scene where Lola, our fearless heroine, goes to visit her ex-girlfriend was originally part of an urban fantasy parody I was writing. Lola's ex, Rowan, owns and runs a high-scale BDSM club which just so happens to be the scene of the murder that kicks off all the trouble in BLOOD WITCH. This club is called the Red Lotus and I lifted the club, and the murder for that matter, from this parody.

So what was the deal with the parody? Ugh, long story short, I was going through a bout of anxiety over my writing and decided I'd just find something silly and fun to work on until it was resolved. I'd not long finished writing BLOOD HUNT (my second Urban Wolf novel), and one of the things I'd really enjoyed about that was working in references to Ayla's favourite series of books.

The Katrina Pagan series is a very OTT urban fantasy series that exists only in the Urban Wolf world. Ayla loves them, Shannon teases her for loving them. They are meant to be a riff on the genre, exaggerating the tropes and poking fun at the themes. So when I was in a funk and wanted something utterly ludicrous to work on, I thought...why not an actual Katrina Pagan story? It could be as stupid and embarrassing as I liked, it would never have to see the light of day, and it might shake me out of the funk.

I wrote about 1000 words of ridiculous cliched shenanigans and then, I guess, something distracting came along, like a new series of MasterChef, and I forgot about Katrina. Until some time in 2014 when I was salvaging my old, nearly-dead laptop for files I wanted to keep. On a whim, I opened up the Katrina file and found I kinda liked that opening scene with a bloody murder at a sex club. It was too good to waste, but I no longer had any desire to write a stupid, embarrassing story.

And then I found something else - a few pages from a notebook, where a witch is being questioned by the police over a murder she didn't commit.

And then...alchemy.

Well, not immediately. It took me several months (with a massive gap in between) before I got past the first three chapters of BLOOD WITCH. But I had it, or at least the opening. I had Lola.

So because of a fictional book my fictional werewolf read in one of my actual novels, tomorrow you get to read a brand new actual novella from me! A novella with witches! Demons! Murder! And strangely no werewolves!

Have some glitter.