Kim Harrison's Blog, page 30

Five cats enter, one cat leaves

 

 

Hayley’s Winston

It’s week number two in the “Find Peri Reed’s cat” contest, and you guys came through with over four hundred cats to find some competition for Hayley’s Winston, who was chosen last week. Below are the five that I thought best exemplified Peri’s confident and resourceful cat. Now it’s up to you to pick your favorite. I’ll have one more contest this week to find a third, and then we have a cat-off to find the cat that will be featured on the phone cling. (This year’s freebie to help promote the new series coming out the first of September. Look, you can see through it. The woman might have glass technology on her phone, but she’s still needs a picture of her cat on it.)

[Amazon blurb] [B&N blurb]

 

To vote, pick out your favorite from below, and then send an email to coldtoastwritingsllc@comcast.net with the name of your pick in the subject line.

1. IF YOU DO NOT HAVE THE NAME OF YOUR PICK IN THE SUBJECT LINE, YOUR VOTE WILL NOT BE COUNTED.

2. IF YOU SEND MORE THAN ONE EMAIL, ONLY THE FIRST WILL BE COUNTED.

3. If you mess up and forget the name of your pick in the subject line and then send a second email, chances are good that Tim will figure it out, so don’t freak out.

4. This is Tim’s address, not mine, and he won’t be reading or opening the votes, just tallying them as they come in, so please don’t include any correspondence.

Guy will be tallying them up from May 11 until noon May 12 (EST). I’ll have this week’s final pick  for you later that afternoon.

In the meantime, I will be accepting and posting on the website cat photos for week three. I already have about fifty, so send them on in! They’ll start going up today.

The five finalists below should have an email in their inbox from me, so if you see your cat below, check your email.

Thank you everyone who entered! And a huge thank you to those of you who send me only one cat photo, waiting until this week to send me another for a second chance.

HOW TO ENTER YOUR CAT IN THIS WEEK’S CONTEST!

P.S. Please read and follow the rules. I had to throw out one of my top pics today because they didn’t put their name and the cat’s name in the subject line and I couldn’t find them. Also. ONLY SEND ONE CAT PHOTO!! PLEASE!

Winners of this week’s cat-off:

 

Sue’s Homer

Kelly’s Violet

Leanna’s Lynx

Elizabeth’s Monty

 

Lisa’s Woo-sevelt

Honorable mentions: Thank you again everyone who entered their cat.

Splash Zone

I got up fairly early this morning, and again got to play detective upon finding water splashed a good fifteen feet out from my birdbath. Holy Cow, can you imagine the happy bird who made that splash? See the birdbath way down there at the end of the picture? And the water drops way up front at the picture? I’m pretty sure it was a robin as we have one who has claimed my yard and they are the most vigorous splashers, but a blue jay is big enough to put velocity behind those splashes, and I’ve seen them use my bath as well. If you look close, you can see Kim and puppy prints in there too. :-)

Click to purchase signed copy from Nicolas

The contest to find Peri’s cat (and celebrate the release of the mass market of The Witch With No Name) is still going on, and I’m still accepting photos of YOUR cat until Friday. I’ll pick out the five that are most suitable for the back of Peri’s phone, and you guys can vote Mon-Tues on the one you like best. (I’m not going to make you pick the best out of 400 cats, eh?) That cat will move on to the finals with Winston, last week’s winner. Just click Winston to see this week’s cats up for consideration.

Hayley’s Winston

Again, please send me only one cat? You can send me your other cat next week.

[ How to enter. ]

Ooo! I almost forgot. If you missed it yesterday, the tour cities for Peri Reed are starting to come in. I’ve got Ann Arbor/Detroit, and Cincinnati OH so far. Yay! I’m going to Cincinnati!

 

 

Tour cities are coming in. (And cats!)

Wow, the word must be out, because yesterday I got a bunch of pictures of cat who want to be Peri Reed’s kitty.

Click to see the cats!

As we did last week, I’m going to cut submissions off on Friday, but if any come in, I’ll bump them into the last week’s submissions, so no worries. I think I have over three hundred so far for this week. . . .

But the news that has me brimming on this cold, damp spring morning is the first of the tour cities have just been solidified. Stop one on the Kim Bus Tour is Nicolas at Ann Arbor/Detroit. I’ll be there 9/1, at 7:00 PM, and from there, I move south. I’ll have more cities for you tomorrow.

 

 

Voting ends noon EST

Voting ends noon, EST, but cats for next week’s vote are already coming in, and they are beautiful! [enter your cat] I’ll post on FB today as soon as I know who the ultimate cat of last week is. It’s very close between Ophelia and Winston right now, but there are a few more hours to go. [To see the five cats and vote]

We’ve had a couple of nice days in a row, and my garden is looking good. Here’s a picture of something I swore I’d never do, and it just kills me how much I like it. Damn it all to hell and back. I swore when I first saw these stupid fairy gardens that I wasn’t going to get caught up in them, but . . . yeah. They’re too much like the ancient art of bonsai, and I after four years of fudding around with trees and lights, and miniature landscaping, I finally bought a house. Doesn’t it look sweet under that twisted tree with the bleeding hearts behind it and that wee little bench out front to look at the pond at?

I am so disappointed in myself.

 

I think I need to add a little stone path next.

Five kitties for you to vote on

It was a very tough choice, but I’ve narrowed almost six hundred cat photos down to five for you to vote on to become Peri Reed’s cat and be featured on the phone cling. (This year’s freebie to help promote the new series coming out the first of September.

[Amazon blurb] [B&N blurb]

I have a lot of honorable mentions. You guys have some seriously fun and beautiful cats.

Below are the winners. To vote, pick out your favorite, and then send an email to coldtoastwritingsllc@comcast.net with the name of your pick in the subject line.

1. IF YOU DO NOT HAVE THE NAME OF YOUR PICK IN THE SUBJECT LINE, YOUR VOTE WILL NOT BE COUNTED.

2. IF YOU SEND MORE THAN ONE EMAIL, ONLY THE FIRST WILL BE COUNTED.

3. If you mess up and forget the name of your pick in the subject line and then send a second email, chances are good that Tim will figure it out, so don’t freak out.

4.��This is Tim’s address, not mine, and he won’t be reading or opening the votes, just tallying them as they come in, so please don’t include any correspondence in them.

Guy will be tallying them up from May 4 until noon May 5 (EST). I’ll have this week’s final pick ��for you on Wednesday, May 5th.

In the meantime, I will be accepting and posting on the website cat photos for week two. I already have about fifty, so send them on in! They’ll start going up today.

The five finalists below should have an email in their inbox from me, so if you see your cat below, check your email!.

Thank you everyone who entered!��And a huge thank you to those of you who send me only one cat photo, waiting until this week to send me another for a second chance.

HOW TO ENTER YOUR CAT IN THIS WEEK’S CONTEST!

Winners:

Rhonda’s Ophelia

Cherrie’s Chewbacca

Christa’s Grizzie

Hayley’s Winston

Jeannie’s Rory

 

Honorable mentions:

 

Amid the cats and new mass market, there is spring

I just about went out of my mind Tuesday with cats, beautiful cats for Peri. If she were a real person, she’d probably just shake her head and wish she could have them all. You’ve sent me just about five hundred so far, and I expect a few more before I close this week’s submissions down late Friday and prep for your guys’ vote on Monday. (Don’t worry if you miss the deadline. I’ll just put your late arrival into next week’s contest. It’s all good.) So send me your cats. Just one cat picture a week, please. [cats-cats-cats]

Also, I have word from my local store that the mass markets of THE WITCH WITH NO NAME have come in, so if you want one of these signed bad boys, you can order one now. They will even ship overseas. [how to order a signed copy] Pretty much everything on that page comes to you signed, and they are taking early orders for personalized note copies of THE DRAFTER as well. (Pssst! It’s my quiet campaign.)

We’ve had a slow, cold spring so far, and I’m not complaining, being of the peaceful mind to enjoy it this year since I didn’t go out in Feb/March. Just look at those blooms on my bleeding hearts. I’ve never seen it flowering so soon.

How to enter your cat in the Peri Reed Cat contest

The Witch With No Name is finally out in mass market!

To help celebrate, I’m having a contest to find Peri Reed’s cat.

Every good special task agent has a cat, right? Peri Reed is no exception, and I’ve intentionally left out any description of her cat in the first book,��The Drafter, so that you, the readers, can help me develop it. (More info on Peri and��The Drafter)

The photo chosen will be made into a cling that fits on the back of the freebie mock-up of Peri Reed’s glass technology phone. I hope to have two or three different clings available at signings so you can take the one you like best. But first, I have to find Peri’s cat.

So . . . send me a picture of your cat. Over seven days, I’ll post all eligible photos at the website for everyone to see, and then I’ll pick five for you to vote on to find your favorite of the week. I’ll do this for three weeks, and then have a final vote with the three cats you pick to find the ultimate Peri Reed cat.

The final winner will have their cat immortalized on the cling and win my undying gratitude as well as bragging rights.

Who is eligible?

 

I will accept photos from anywhere on planet earth or within orbit as long as it’s your or your relative’s cat. No lifting of pictures from the web as your own. I’ll be asking the five who win each week to send me another photo of their cat with an object I choose as proof of ownership. Kitties who have passed over the rainbow bridge are eligible, but if chosen, their owners might have to jump through a few extra hoops to prove ownership. I’ll also be asking the final winner to sign a release form giving me permission to use the photo of their cat for promotion.

Guidelines for best chance:

Because I’m using this for promotion, there are a few things I’m looking for. Adhering to them will give you the best chance for getting your cat chosen.

1. No gnarly backgrounds like legs, TVs, other cats/dogs, or clutter.

2. No people at all in the photo. I won���t even post them.

3. One cat in the photo, adult, no kittens. The book is at the printer, so no matter how cute, I can’t change it.

4. No identifying logos or brand names.

5. Make it something that a person would have on their phone. Cute is okay, but a picture of a sleeping cat has just as much pull with me as one playing with a mouse, maybe more.

6. Vertical oriented pictures rather than horizontal will get preferential treatment. Horizontal won’t fit well on the phone mock-up.

To send me a picture

I will be cropping photos to fit onto to back of the phone, which is 2″ X 4″ or roughly 5cm by 11cm, or 310 X 680 pixels exactly. If your picture isn’t resized or cropped to 310 X 680 pixels, I’ll do it for you, and you might not like what you see, so please try to do this for me. Please? Ple-e-e-e-ese.

Here’s a picture of the phone so you can see the size I’m looking for with a blah desert scene for a background.

Send pictures to my business address with both your first name and the name of your cat in the subject line, such as Jack’s Snookums, or Amy’s Mouseburger. If you can rename your cat’s photo with the same, that would make my life easier and be uber cool. But don’t sweat it. I’ll be posting pictures with your first name only and the name of your cat.

Send to:��kim_harrison@comcast.net

Please include your real name (first and last) in the email, and use a email that will be active and monitored for at least a month so I can get in touch with you if need be. ** This is important. It drives me nuts when someone wins and doesn’t bother to check their email to find out. **

If you send me something that’s 3000 pixels, my service provider might bounce it back to you, so try to resize it just for that reason alone.

There is no monetary gain from “winning” this competition, but I’m going to send the five weekly picks either a signed, first edition hard cover of��The Witch With No Name, or a signed, oversized trade paperback of��The Hollows Insider��as a thank-you, so please check your email on Mondays while the contests are running to see if you won so I can get your address.

(If you want to snag a signed, first-edition, blue butterfly copy of��The Witch With No Name,��or even a signed mass market of the same, without all the fuss, Nicola’s has them.)

 

Legal stuff

I will be asking the winner to sign a release form giving me rights to publish their cat’s photo. I will be posting all eligible photos here at the website for probably a year before I take them down. If you object to either, please don’t send me a picture. I’ll be posting pictures of your cat with your first name only.

There’s no monetary value to winning this competition, and the odds of winning depend on how many people enter as well as how much I like your cat photo and how well it fits on the back of Peri’s phone. Yep, it’s a beauty contest, but the ugly cat might win.

Let me know if you submit a photo and I don’t post it within a few days. Sometimes they go missing. But again, if there are people in the photo, I won’t post it.

Please enter only once per week so I don’t go crazy trying to resize and post.

And good luck!

Two Worlds Collide

It sounds like the title of either a SF or maybe a romantic suspense book, Two Words Collide, but it’s actually been my office for the last year or so as I shift my focus of work from pure urban fantasy where the characters are witches, vampires, and Weres, to something a little more mainstream. Reader, oh, my reader, don’t despair. The same things that you liked in the Hollows will be in the Peri Reed Chronicles. The trappings have changed, not the soul of my work. Trust is a hard to earn, and I hope that in the last ten years, you’ve learned to trust the storyteller. It’s what I do.

As I took the picture below, I realized at just that moment that it is a visual culmination of not just the last ten years of the Hollows linked to the new beginning of the Peri Reed Chronicles, but a gathering of my aware years of life from The Little Engine That Could, to Blade Runner, to Elysium, to The Big Bang Theory. (Yep, I watch ’em.) So seeing an urban fantasy cover next to the first Peri Reed freebie looks natural to me, even as it’s kind of odd. There–on the background of tomatoes.

The Witch With No Name is there because it comes out in paperback tomorrow, and the Peri Reed’s freebie is there because (insert quaver into voice) it’s time. It’s finally time.

Peri’s first freebie is a mockup of her glass-technology phone, which is why I’ve got that white piece of paper clipped to it. Otherwise, you’d see right through it. Peri’s version rolls up into a tube, reads data by putting the chip anywhere on the phone, and connects automatically to the pay-at-point-of-sale system at every retailer, fast food, and transport in Peri’s not so distant future. ��Right now, Peri’s phone shows the cover of THE DRAFTER so it has some sort of marketing value as I give these away for SASEs and at the events, but I like it because you can see through it. I want her phone. I also want her car, and maybe her boyfriend, (then again, maybe not) but that’s another story.

Here’s where you come in. Most phones have backgrounds, right? So I’m coming at you guys to help me out here. I’m going to make a cling that fits the back of Peri’s phone, probably one or two a year while the series runs, and I want one of the first to be Peri’s cat. You guys have cats, right?

All I need from you is to send me a picture of YOUR cat. I can’t stress enough that this has to be your cat, or at least one that belongs to someone you know. No lifting of photos from the web. I’m going to ask the winners to take another picture of their cat with something I pick so to prove that it’s theirs, and of course ask them to sign a release form so I can print and distribute the photo of their/Peri’s cat.

I’m going to run the contest for a good three weeks, picking the best five photos every week that I think are the most suitable, then letting you guys pick the best one from that five. At the end of three weeks, I’ll have a final contest with the top three to pick the one that I make the cling out of. I’m also trying to find a way to maybe get a signed copy of something to the weekly five winners as a thank you, so don’t be surprised if I ask for an email in the submission process so I can get your address. Photos will be displayed on line, so don’t send me one if you don’t want it there.

When you take your picture of your cat, a few things to keep in mind to be one of my favorite five that you guys can vote on:

1. No gnarly backgrounds like legs or TVs.

2. No people at all in the photo. I won’t even post them.

3. No identifying logos or brand names.

4. Make it something that a person might want on their phone. Cute is okay, but a nice picture of a sleeping cat has just as much pull with me as one playing with a mouse, maybe more.

5. Vertical oriented pictures rather than horizontal will get preferential treatment, just so they look better on the mock-up.

6. Sorry, no kittens.

I’ve cut out the description of Peri’s cat from the first book intentionally just so I could do this, so take some pictures, and tomorrow, when THE WITCH WITH NO NAME comes out, I’ll tell you how to send them to me. Keep in mind that this is going to run for three weeks, and you can enter one picture every week.

See you tomorrow for where to submit! I hope this is going to be fun. It’s going to be a lot of work on my end, but I’m on “vacation” (ha, ha, ha. Like I ever really take one?) for the next three weeks, so I’ve got the time.

 

Come back Monday for Peri Reed contest

I’m going to have a contest! Come back on Monday to find out what it is, and how you can participate. Up for grabs is bragging rights and a place on the Peri Reed Chronicle freebies. It actually starts on Tuesday, when the mass market of THE WITCH WITH NO NAME comes out.

This is a long-running contest, so even if you forget, you won’t miss out, and it’s open to everyone, even out of the U.S.

Also, if you missed the short story SUDDEN BACKTRACK, you can pick it up in the mass market. I find myself a little embarrassed with this one. There is a big reveal in it, (which was why I was so excited about it at the time it first came out) and I don’t think anyone spotted it. I made the error of being too subtle. But sometimes, you write just for yourself, eh?

 

Yep. That’s about right

I’ve been watching my Hosta closely these last few weeks. They’re old, and very close to the surface, so as soon as the ground starts to warm, they try to get going. And hey, I have lived most of my life in Michigan, and I know that at this latitude, we’re likely to get frost all the way to the last week of May.

As soon as they started poking up, I started dropping mulch on them to try to slow them down, and it’s working fairly well. We had another night below freezing last night, and though they are showing green, they look small and tight enough to take it. The ornamental cherry, which is flowering, doesn’t care, and most of the trees that have leafed out have enough sugar in them at this point to sort of act like antifreeze.

But the snow we got yesterday probably didn’t help. It’s gone now, but really? Totally unnecessary.