Kat Parrish's Blog, page 16

Cover Reveal! Soul's Day!

This is a boxed set collection that's been in the works for months and we're finally getting a sneak peek!

Here' are the details:

TITLE: Soul’s Day: A Halloween themed box set.
GENRE: Horror/Paranormal
ISBN: 9781947649699
ASIN: B086ZVTKSS
RELEASE DAY: 20th October 2020
PRE-ORDER DATE: 17th April 2020
PUBLISHER: Fire Quill Publishers

Here's the blurb:

Old Hallows Eve, when things go bump in the night,
Children come to play, and the witches provide the fright.
For 19 authors, USA Today and international bestselling,
The Halloween tales become more than this foretelling.
In the Soul’s Day Boxset, a mansion feeds on souls,
A gargoyle captures them, and a demon dungeon master makes the calls,
Campers gets picked off one by one,
The Karnaval’s corn dogs are less than fun,
Ghosts lurking around every bend,
‘I do’ at the wedding is the very end.
A boxset of chills and thrills to keep you up at night,
One-click pre-order to snap your copy filled with fright.
On old Hallow’s eve when creatures come to play,
With this spine chilling pages, it’s where you’ll want to stay.


You can pre-order now for 99 cents and if you do--there are FREEBIES:

If you pre-order your copy now for only 99c you will get this amazing Pre-Order gift - products are digital and printing is at reader’s cost.

HOW TO CLAIM THE PRE-ORDER
PRE ORDER NOW
https://books2read.com/u/4Dy5Ne

GIVEAWAY READING BUNDLE

GRAB YOUR FREE READS TODAY: https://books.bookfunnel.com/souls-da...

And don't forget to sign up for the boxset party on Facebook. There will be prizes.

Tsundoku no more Day #7

I’m an omnivorous reader, but romantic suspense and urban fantasy are two of my favorite genres. I snapped this book up, intending to read it right away but something (probably actual work) intervened.

13 (Tallent & Lowery Book 1) by Amy Lignor

Downloaded February 18, 2014

“Tallent” is Leah Tallent, a starchy research librarian (an homage to the author’s librarian mother) who really hates dealing with library tours, especially ones like the rowdy group currently touring the Heaven & Hell exhibit (“a literary celebration of both sides of humanity”). Gareth Lowery is a handsome,. bronze-headed, green-eyed teacher who is not at all what he seems to be. And though he’s quite taken with redheaded Leah, his motives for being in the library are mysterious and intriguing.

We KNOW from the subtitle that these two are going to get together (probably in more than one way, if you know what I mean) but from the first page, the third person/dual POV book is engaging. It delivers and fans of books like Katherine Neville’s Eight and Discovery of Witches will be entertained. (Some reviewers have compared her books to Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. I’m not one to scoff at that. Like everyone else on the planet, I read Da Vinci Code when it first came out and enjoyed it thoroughly.) I’ll definitely be reading more of the books (particularly the next one which has a Shakespeare connection).

Tsundoku no more Day #6

I was still living in Los Angeles when I downloaded this book and I can tell from the date I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. The city I’d lived in since I was 22 was becoming meaner and more expensive by the day and I was having a hard time staying afloat. I was balancing a crushing day job schedule with writing and a lot of time, if the choice came down to writing or sleeping, sleeping won.
200 Motivational and Inspirational Quotes that Will Inspire Your Success compiled by Kathy Collins
Downloaded August 21, 2015
Interestingly, this book is now “out of print,” but you can access Collins’ own quotes all over the internet. They seem pithy enough but back then? I’m not sure they would have raised me out of my funk.

Tsundoko no more Day #5

My father was in the army and I lived in France as a child. I’ve been trying to polish up my French skills ever since.

1000 French Verb in Context by Alex Forero

Downloaded January 17, 2016

I’m a big fan of the website A French Word a Day because Kristi Espinasse always introduces the words or phrases in context and that way they’re easier to remember.  In a way, this is a less interactive Duolingo approach to learning the language. You learn the verb. You use it in a sentence and you move on. Do I have the discipline to do that for a hundred days? Je ne sais pas, but it’s not like I can use the excuse that I don’t have the time.

Rezso is back!

Last year, I wrote a one-off novella for a boxed set called Guardians. It was meant to be about shifters (mostly werewolves), but since I can't ever just write something simple, I came up with a new kind of origin story about a character who's a shifter. The boxed set didn't sell that well (are people tired of werewolves?) but the stand-alone novella has been a surprise hit with my readers. (Thank  you all!)

The sequel is going to be out this spring--next month if I can manage it, by May for sure. I'm having an enormous blast writing it, and I hope that will translate into enjoyment for those who read it. And here's the cover!!

tsundoku no more Day #4

Reading about food calms me sometimes and the day I downloaded this recipe book, I was STRESSED. You might wonder how I can remember a random day almost five years ago, but there are two reasons—one, it would have been my father’s 94th birthday and I was missing him; and two—our landlord had just told us he wanted his mother to move into the home we’d been renting and if we could get out by the 8th, he’d give us all our deposit back. My best friend had found a new place for us in another city and he was already gone, leaving me to finish up the packing as he handled logistics on the other end. But after I downloaded this, I ended up going to sleep instead of reading.

100 Easy Recipes in Jars by Bonnie Scott

Downloaded December 7, 2015

The recipes run the gamut from cookies to soups and beverages (including the ubiquitous “Russian tea” recipe that includes Tang). About half the book is taken up with directions on how to fill your jars and decorate them afterwards, and there are some smart tips for dealing with super-fine ingredients so the presentation of the jars looks sharp. These are great for DIY gifts, especially if you include a baked batch of the same cookies so your gift recipient knows that they’ll be able to make the same tasty treats themselves.

Tsundoku no more Day #3

I know why I downloaded this book. I love urban fantasy and it was Halloween.

100 Days in Deadland (Deadlands Saga Book 1) byRachel Aukes

Downloaded to Kindle October 31, 2013

The blurb: “100 Days in Deadland is set in near-future Midwest America decimated by a zombie plague. In this truly unique story, our heroine— I Cash, an office worker and weekend pilot—is forced on a journey through hell that echoes the one Dante took in the “Inferno,” the world-renowned first poem in Dante Alighieri’s epic medieval tale, The Divine Comedy. In both tales, there are nine circles of hell that must be survived, and the thirty-four cantos of the “Inferno” are reflected in the thirty-four chapters of 100 Days in Deadland...reimagined zombie apocalypse style.”

This is a first-person story that starts out with a BANG, and doesn’t let up. Aukes’ style is readable, action-packed, and enjoyable, so it’s no surprise to find out that she’s a bestselling author (and a Wattpad star!) The setting is refreshingly different and her heroine, Cash, is extremely relatable and likable. I’ll definitely be reading more of Aukes’ work. (She’s got a new post-apocalyptic bounty hunter trilogy coming out next month and a science fiction novel coming this summer.)

Tsundoku no more Day #2

I used to be a food writer, so I read cookbooks for fun, not just to discover new recipes.

100 Casseroles and Main Dish Recipes by Chris Carraveau and Ann Carriveau

Downloaded to Kindle November 10, 2014

The subtitle of the book informs the reader/cook that the recipes were gleaned from church and community fundraising cookbooks. My mother and grandmother had a whole collection of those spiral-bound books and they always seemed to be a mixed bag. Many of the recipes started out with opening a can of soup, and a lot of them seemed to be ingredient by ingredient replicas of commonly available recipes found in similar cookbook. The authors here seem to have just cherry-picked recipes from their own collection.

I was disappointed there wasn’t any commentary between the recipes. (I like reading about how authors got a recipe from their Great-Aunt Edna who was a terrible cook but had one signature dish that was fantastic, or how the original recipe was invented to work around war-time rationing and Depression-era financial woes and yet still turned out to be a family favorite.)

The formatting of the book is funky (it looks like it was just shoveled into a file without regard to how it would look) and some of the titles and recipes are repeated, but if you enjoy “retro food” heavy on the meat and dairy products, there are a lot of comfort food recipes here, especially those involving ground beef, noodles and cheese. Chances are, though, you already have these recipes in your kitchen, hand-written in faded ink on food-stained index cards with a cheery greeting like, “From Kate’s Kitchen.”

Random lobsters

Apparently random lobsters are showing up on sidewalks on both the East and West Coasts. The last time that happened, I wrote this story, The Next Best Thing.


Priscilla Newnam had seen some peculiar things in her 87 years, but she had never seen anything like the bug that crawled across her spotless kitchen floor one sunny July morning as she was eating her oatmeal. For one thing it was huge, at least a foot long, maybe more. And it was strange in a disturbing way. It looked like what you’d get if you mated a roachy bug to a lobster. She decided it probably was some kind of mutated crustacean that had somehow crawled up from the harbor and found its way into her house. And now she was going to have to deal with it before she’d had a chance to finish her coffee.

There wasn’t much that Priscilla Newnam was afraid of but the sight of the creature scuttling across her kitchen linoleum was…unsettling. Priscilla’s husband Tom had been a lobster man, and once or twice he’d brought home some strange things he’d found in his pots. There’d been a yellow lobster once, a freakish thing that he’d sold to the owner of a clam bar in Massachusetts who wanted to keep it in a tank to attract customers.

A reporter and photographer from the Cape Courier had come up to the house to interview Tom about the one-of-a kind find. The photographer, a young fellow named Julien Thibidoux, had take Tom’s picture holding the yellow lobster up by one claw. Then Julien had taken a picture of Tom and Priscilla just because he wanted to and sent it to them later. That had been thoughtful of him, Priscilla thought. She still had the picture on her bedside table.

As she watched the thing move from one end of the kitchen to the other, Priscilla decided that she was going to play the “age card” and turn the problem over to someone else. She hardly ever did that because she didn’t want people to start thinking of her as an old biddy, someone who’d outlived her usefulness. But just this once, she decided she would call animal control and let them handle it.

When she described what the thing looked like, the dispatcher sounded skeptical but said she would send someone out right away.  Because Priscilla had a young voice, the girl on the phone didn’t dilly-dally around asking her foolish questions like, “Are you sure that there’s really a foot-long bug on your floor? Priscilla hated people who assumed that because you were no longer young, you were somehow stupid. She’d been a math teacher until she was 65 and she could still do long division in her head.

The animal control officer they sent was a young man, just out of college from the look of him and he took one look at the thing on her floor and said “Fuck me.” And he didn’t apologize for the profanity in that falsely smarmy way so many people did when they were talking to old people. As if they’d never heard a bit of salty language. Priscilla liked him for that.

“You ever see anything like this before?” she asked him.

“Yeah,” he said, surprising her, “I have.” He excused himself and went back to his truck and when he came back, he had a little collapsible trap with some kind of stinking bait in it. 

“What are you going to do with it?” she asked him.

He didn’t look up as he answered, his attention focused on coaxing the thing into the trap. “Gonna ship it to the university. Marine biology professor up there is paying $100 for specimens. He says they’re showing up all over.” It belatedly occurred to the exterminator that Priscilla might claim ownership of the bug so he added, “I’ll split it with you.”

She waved away the offer. She knew young people always needed money and Tom had left her comfortable. “No, just ask him to email me when he knows what it is,” she said.

“Email?” he repeated, as if he’d never heard the word before.

“What’s your phone number?” she asked, whipping out her iPhone. “I’ll just text you my addie.” He pulled his cell phone out and wordlessly held it out to her so she could see the number scrolling on its screen. She tapped out her message with her thumbs and hit Send with a flourish. She looked up to see the exterminator’s mouth hanging slightly open. She loved getting that reaction. Young people were always amazed when they saw old people using technology without having to use a Dummies guide.

***

As it turned out, by the time the exterminator’s specimen reached the marine biology professor at the University of Maine, an Icelandic climatologist named Gudný Pétursdóttir had beaten him to the punch and published a paper identifying the “bug” as a trilobite, a marine creature that was supposed to have died out around 250 million years ago.

Conspiracy nuts launched websites to air their rants about Jurassic Park-style experiments gone awry and to float their theories about where the supposedly extinct creatures might have come from. Trilobite-me.com and cambrianconspiracy.org both claimed a million hits a day, although a check of alexa.com couldn’t verify that kind of traffic.

Everybody had an explanation for the sudden revival of a long-extinct species. Ocean tectonics combined with global warming was a popular choice. A close second was the theory that aliens who’d collected trilobite DNA on their first visit to the planet had come back to return their specimens to their native habitat. Sort of a Born Free kind of a thing.

While the scientists were still arguing about the “what” and the “why,” an enterprising fish monger in Louisiana sold a bushel of trilobites to a New Orleans restaurant noted for its seafood. Served with a dipping sauce of herbs, drawn butter and white wine, the trilobites turned out to be succulent and satisfying.

One prominent food critic wrote that trilobites reminded him of Balmain “bugs,” the sweet-fleshed crustaceans found in Sydney Harbor. Their delicate flavor and texture turned out to be extremely versatile. They could be made into fritters and timbales and cakes. They could be baked or fried or poached. Since trilobites came in so many sizes and varieties, they could be tossed together in bouillabaisse and jambalaya and pasta dishes.

The fooderati embraced trilobites with an enthusiasm unseen since the day the kiwi was introduced to the world. The fish showed up as the “secret ingredient” on Iron Chef America. You could buy them in bulk at Costco. Bon Appetit featured a trilobite recipe on its cover in July and then again the following February. Guy Fieri raved about eating trilobites stuffed with Scotch bonnet peppers at a small, family-owned bar and grill outside of Roswell, New Mexico.

Trilobites were cheaper than crabs, or lobsters, or prawns and eating them didn’t raise your cholesterol unless you ate them with a side of fries. Nutritionists praised the high-quality protein available in the average-size trilobite pointing out that a single serving offered high amounts of vitamin B12 as well as trace minerals like potassium, magnesium, copper, phosphorous, and zinc.

Trilobite-shaped tchotches and kitchenware sprang up on Instagram and Pinterest. Interior designers who had flogged the Santa Fe look and embraced bold, black and white cow prints went gaga for what was dubbed “Trilo chic.” Designer Michael Graves created a “trilochair” that was snapped up by furniture boutiques around the world at the bargain price of $975. You could find inexpensive trilobite items on the shelves in Target, and expensive ones in various museum gift shops.

A struggling single mother in Roanoke, Virginia came up with a smiling trilobite design she marketed through Café Press and hit the jackpot, eventually selling the design to a Chinese frozen food company for more than a million dollars. An enterprising college student with a 3-D printer financed his last two years at MIT by crafting trilobite jewelry and selling it on Etsy.com.

Trilobites. Like American Express, they were everywhere you wanted to be. Until the day Lorenzo Barbato, a scientist working for Save the Tigers, announced that he’d genetically engineered a kitten-size tiger that would never grow any larger. He’d used the size-suppression gene from female lions, so technically his chimera creature should have been called “tigons,” but the tiger genes proved dominant and the resulting cubs were perfect replicas of their forbears, just shrunk to the size of 12-week-old kittens.

His mission had been to preserve tiger DNA in a way that would engage the public in the fight against the extinction of the big cats and he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. The tiny felines (dubbed “Titties” by the tabloid press) were sold exclusively by breeders licensed by Save the Tigers, with the organization receiving 25 percent of the sale price.

The tigers bred like cats, which is to say that instead of the tiger’s normal 100-day gestation period producing two to four cubs every two to two and a half years, a litter of “titties” needed only nine weeks, with an average of four to five cubs per litter. Breeders of exotic cats, prized for their tiger-like stripes or leopard-like spots, went out of business overnight. Who’d pay $100 for a lookalike when for $2000; you could get the real thing in miniature?

Priscilla Newman, who’d never been much of a one for pets, but had a soft spot for tigers, purchased a cub over the Internet from a breeder in Chicago. She named it Tom.

Tiny tigers were soon the most popular pet in the world, eclipsing cats, dogs, hamsters, mice, iguanas, ferrets, and birds by a wide margin. As the scientist had hoped, the tiger population in the wild increased too, mostly because an underground trade in the tiny tigers fed the makers of tiger-bone wine and other illicit industries that rely on tiger parts.

Trilobites were interesting and all, but they couldn’t compare to titties in cuteness. And they couldn’t purr. And they weren’t cuddly. They’d already been extinct for millions of years and nobody had much missed them, so when they faded from public view, they weren’t mourned. In time, the only place you’d find trilobite on an ingredient list was on the label of a cat food can. Ironically, most tittie breeders mixed trilobite-laced wet food in with the raw meat they served their cubs so they’d get extra B12.

Tsundoku no more Day #1

I’m going to be reading in alphabetical order. First up is…
‘Scuze Me While I Kill this Guy by Leslie Langtry

Downloaded to Kindle 7, 2014

This is a first-person comic crime novel told by Ginny Bombay, a snarky single mother who comes from a long line of assassins. Tonally, it reminded me a lot of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum books with her likable cast of characters (boyfriend Diego, brother Dakota, aka Dak) and her deadpan narration of the silly events that unold.

Langtry is a USA Today bestselling novelist and there are nine other books in her “Greatest Hits” series. (And it’s not the only series she’s written.)

“I turned the engraved invitation over in my hands and sighed. I hate these things [family reunions]. We only held them once every five years, but for some reason this time, the reunion was only a year after the last one. That meant someone in the family had been naughty. That means one of my relative was doing to die.”