Kat Parrish's Blog, page 17

Tsundoku no more--reading the books on my TBR list

One of my best friends gave me a Kindle for Christmas ten years ago. She knew I loved reading and buying books and she also knew I was struggling financially as a freelancer in Los Angeles. That was when I discovered the "free books" newsletters and it made me feel RICH to know I could SHOP and BUY books any time I wanted. So I downloaded anything that sounded interesting and actually filled up my Kindle cache and had to dump some books out to make room for new ones.

Now that I'm more financially secure, I buy at least as many books as I download for free; but I haven't gotten around to reading most of them. I know I'm not alone. The Japanese even have a word for buying more books than you can possibly ever read--Tsundoku. 

In the last few weeks, my workload has fallen off dramatically. Most of my work comes from Los Angeles, which is in lockdown. My clients in France, Norway, and Italy are all okay, but they're all in self-quarantine or lockdown. I am fortunate enough to have a bit of a cash cushion, so I'm not freaking out (yet)  but my state is about I'm being careful about money.  Which means not buying anything that's not edible or a paper product.

Instead of worrying, I'm burying my anxiety by writing. But I've also decided to start reading my way through my substantial (and eclectic) collection of unread books. I'm going to post on that adventure every day with a few words about the book in question. (Kind of like that "short story a day" challenge I did with Brian Lindemuth back in the day.) It'll be something to give me structure and it'll free up space on my Kindle for more books. (And if, God forbid, I run out of Kindle titles before the pandemic runs its course, I have a few bookcases full of books as well.)

Now more than ever, we're all in this together.

Anxiety Baking

It's a thing and in normal circumstances, I'd be all over the recipes being posted. (I especially like the recipes for quick breads because bread is the staff of life and it's ALL good.) But I'm living in a household with someone on a strict diet and I'm not mean enough to fill the place with good smells. (I  used to live in an apartment overlooking a grocery store with an in-store bakery. When they baked their cinnamon rolls and honey bran muffins, it was all I could do not to run over and buy a dozen. (They also fried their own chicken, which was even worse. And it was GOOD fried chicken.)

So, not doing any baking. But that doesn't mean I can't write about baking and live vicariously. About a year ago I bought a series of cozy covers from the awesome Lou Harper of Cover Affairs. They were meant to be cozy mysteries, but I decided instead to make them cozy romances in the vein of my Halliday Theater and Meredith Manor Hotel stories. (And by "my," I mean books written under the name Katherine Moore. I borrowed my pseudonym from my maternal grandmother. My other grandmother was also named Katherine, called Kate, so I still have a 'sudo on reserve if I need it.)

The stories are set in the small town of Heaven, Washington--a place not unlike the small Pacific Northwest town where I actually live. I've already fallen in love with the characters and am having a lot of fun pairing them up and adding recipes. (I used to be a food writer and was the "Chocolate Editor" for Bellaonline.com for a year. I've also worked as a caterer. So food is one of my passions.)The books are going to have a lot of really good recipes (I am friends with a woman who's just been voted one of the top pastry chefs in Portland), but here's an instant gratification recipe that's a variation of those "cake in a cup" recipes you can find online.

SINGLE-SERVING INSTANT CHOCOLATE CAKE

Less than five minutes after you walk into your house, you can have a serving of freshly made chocolate cake on your plate. It’s made in a coffee mug in the microwave and it’s so easy it’s like a magic trick.

4 Tbsp. flour
4 Tbsp. granulated sugar
2 Tbsp. cocoa powder
1 egg
3 Tbsp. milk (can also use plain yogurt)
3 Tbsp. vegetable oil

Mix the flour, sugar and cocoa powder together in a coffee mug. Add the egg and stir it in.

Add the milk and the vegetable oil. Mix well.

Microwave on high for three minutes. The cake will rise out of the top of the mug like a mushroom. Let the cake sit in the microwave for two minutes (long enough to check your phone messages or sort through your email).

Remove from mug (it should slide right out) and enjoy.

Note: Make sure you use a micro-wave proof mug—you don’t want the mug to crack half-way through the cooking.

Notorious Minds boxed set Cover Reveal

What does it take to commit the perfect crime?



Delve into these dark and twisted tales by twenty USA Today and International Bestselling Authors. No matter what kind of crime story typically catches your imagination, there’s sure to be something for everyone.

Conspiracies, political plots, and yes, even murder, are just a few of the crimes waiting inside this box set. Discover a narcissistic grandmother running an underground syndicate, or a support group bent on murder…and even a serial killer who turns his victims into fairytale creatures.

Prepare to delve into an elite killing team who made a mistake, an oil rig filled with secrets ready to explode, and a reporter uncovering a treasonous plot.
Uncover how fatal passion, jealousy, and fear can be to a group of royal marines and learn from a detective who is far from home fighting demons from his past in order to stay alive.

This fantastic boxed set comes from Fire Quill Publishers, and will be on pre-order from today (St. Patrick's Day) for 99 cents until publication day (October 13, 2020). AND if you preorder now, there are goodies!! See how to grab the bundle here.


Order on:

Amazon
Kobo
B&N
iTunes

Reading for the Apocalypse

In a parallel life I would have been an epidemiologist. Ever since I read Guns, Germs, and Steel, I’ve been fascinated by the interaction of plagues and society. (Another book along the same lines that has been in my library for years is Plagues and Peoples, along with Ken Alibek’s book about the bio-weapons lab he ran. It’s called Biohazard and it will keep you up at night.) Laurie Garrett’s book The Coming Plague is a sobering, informative read. You might have seen her interviewed on The Rachel Maddow Show recently. She did not have good news about COVID-19. And the Band Played On, the monumental work about the AIDS epidemic by Randy Shilts (who died of AIDS at 42.) is a must-read.

I’ve been thinking of fictional plague books lately. I’ve read a lot of them, and am wondering what else is out there that I haven’t read. I subscribe to the service K-lytics, which tracks genres in books, and a few months ago dystopian books—particularly ones featuring disasters like plagues and EMP episodes—were all the rage. I’m wondering if people are still fascinated by those “what if” books now that we’re in a real-life plague crisis of our own. Would reading those books now allay anxiety or make it worse? Could anything be worse than refreshing news feeds every two minutes?


The best plague novel I ever read is probably Stephen King’s The Stand. I read it when I had one of the worst colds I’ve ever had in my life (I don’t get colds often) and that added to the experience. I’m also a huge fan of the miniseries, which you can watch in full on YouTube. The second best is The Book of M, a debut novel from Peng Shepherd in which the “plague” is not medical but something else as people lose their shadows and their memories. I loved Connie Willis’ The Doomsday Book, which threw in a little time travel. (If you ever have an opportunity to hear her speak—as I did at Comic-Con a decade ago—take it. She’s funny, lively, and altogether engaging. My favorite book of hers is To Say Nothing of the Dog.)

I also read Dean Koontz’ book, The Eyes of Darkness, which some people are claiming “predicted” the current coronavirus epidemic. Koontz has disavowed that and really, just because a book has a pandemic in it does not mean it’s prescient.

I’ve read Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter, which was written about the Spanish flu epidemic. I’ve always been fascinated by that period because my paternal grandmother died of Spanish flu and I read this book because I’m somehow—distantly—related to Porter through our mutual ancestor, a ship captain named either Patrick or Phillip Porter who came to the new world in the 1600s.

Like everybody else, I read The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton. And saw the movie. Years later, I did some research for the late, great Michael Crichton. (I was such a fan girl I was too shy to tell him how much I loved his work.) I wish he were around today to offer his perspective on what’s going on.

At some point I also read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ book Love in the Time of Cholera, and although it’s considered a masterwork, I don’t remember much about it at all except a quote from the author about plagues feeling like “destiny.” For anyone brought up with a Sunday School education, plagues feel like more than that.

Books I haven’t read: Albert Camus’ The Plague; Daniel DeFoe’s Journal of a Plague Year. (You can read the Defoe book for free on Project Guttenberg’s site. I skimmed a few pages as I checked this link and am definitely going to go back. Defoe’s writing is pretty accessible and him talking about how he and his neighbors have heard the plague has returned to Holland feels like a conversation anyone could have had a few months ago. “Oh that plague in China is awful.”)

There are currently a lot of people putting together books with plots about plague. Many of them have books that sound fascinating. I’d heard of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, but not The Children’s Hospital by Chris Adrian. I’m really curious about Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatin (the plague has killed only men and the title refers to a beauty shop that’s become a hospice.)

If you want more suggestions, check out Holly Genovese’s list of both fiction and nonfiction. And of course Goodreads has their lists, broken down into categories. Happy reading! And wash your hands.

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell: a review

When a teenager is lured into an obsessive relationship with a teacher 30 years her senior, the emotional fallout lasts for decades.

This novel seems inspired by novelist Joyce Maynard’s relationship with J.D. Salinger. Seeing the May/December romance through the filter of the #metoo movement is an ingenious way to explore the characters, both in their past and in their present. It is also reminiscent of Philip Roth’s THE HUMAN STAIN. It is, of course, crafted to be current and controversial, but mostly it’s a little creepy. (In the 2000 sections where Vanessa is 15, it is genuinely disturbing seeing the way Strane “grooms” her. No wonder her mother reacts the way she does. The writer also brings in Monica Lewinsky and her infamous relationship with President Clinton. “She seems nice,” Vanessa says when she and her mother watch Lewinsky’s interview with Barbara Walters. Her mother, seeing the situation from a 20th century perspective, is not convinced.

As an adult, it’s extremely easy to see Strane’s “pose” for what it is. He’s the kind of guy who swears in front of his students, who wears a tailored blazer with scuffed up hiking boots. And of course, he thinks he’s a literary genius, and there are plenty of adoring students who’ll agree and prop up his ego. This is also a boarding school story, so it’s already kind of a hot house. Strane is a very specific kind of predator and as he compliments Vanessa, he simultaneously pretends that he gives AF about whether it’s appropriate or not. “Is that all right,” he asks her faux anxiously. “I wouldn’t want to overstep.” The scene where he feels her up during a seminar, shielding his actions with his desk while all the other students work on their Whitman paper thesis statements, is anxiety provoking.
It’s an impressive debut. It’s not QUITE as good as it wants to be—there are elements that feel a little too familiar—but it’s a book that captures the zeitgeist and I think it’s going to be HUGE.

Check out an interview with the author here.

To be added to the TBR list--The Grace Kelly Dress

Or more accurately--the To Be Read Bookcase. (I've gone way beyond a bookshelf of unread books.) This one had me at the cover. The Eiffel Tower? You know I'm there. It also comes with a lovely recommendation from author M.j. Rose, so bonus.  (I trust other writers when they tell me a book is good.)
Here's the book description: 
Two years after Grace Kelly’s royal wedding, her iconic dress is still all the rage in Paris—and one replica, and the secrets it carries, will inspire three generations of women to forge their own paths in life and in love.

Paris, 1958: Rose, a seamstress at a fashionable atelier, has been entrusted with sewing a Grace Kelly—look-alike gown for a wealthy bride-to-be. But when, against better judgment, she finds herself falling in love with the bride’s handsome brother, Rose must make an impossible choice, one that could put all she’s worked for at risk: love, security and of course, the dress.

Sixty years later, tech CEO Rachel, who goes by the childhood nickname “Rocky,” has inherited the dress for her upcoming wedding in New York City. But there’s just one problem: Rocky doesn’t want to wear it. A family heirloom dating back to the 1950s, the dress just isn’t her. Rocky knows this admission will break her mother Joan’s heart. But what she doesn’t know is why Joan insists on the dress—or the heartbreaking secret that changed her mother’s life decades before, as she herself prepared to wear it.

As the lives of these three women come together in surprising ways, the revelation of the dress’s history collides with long-buried family heartaches. And in the lead-up to Rocky’s wedding, they’ll have to confront the past before they can embrace the beautiful possibilities of the future.

Brenda Janowitz' work is new to me, so lucky me--because she already has a handful of wonderful-sounding books in her backlist, so I'll have days of fun reading. Check out her book on Amazon (The book is everywhere, but I have a Kindle, so Amazon is my go-to.

It's Women's History Month. A few thoughts.

I don't know about you, but the history classes I took in high school and college (Women's History wasn't yet a subject) were pretty devoid of women. There was Betsy Ross and Dolley Madison, possibly Abigail Adams. There was Harriet Tubman and Sacajawea and Madame Curie and Florence Nightingale.  There was Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt. (Amelia Earhart offered to give Eleanor Roosevelt flying lessons but FDR vetoed the plan.) And there were was Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great, two of the greatest, most influential monarchs who ever lived. (And no, Catherine the Great did NOT die the way you think she did.)

Madame C.J. WalkerAnd then there was...who else? Marie Antoinette? Joan of Arc? I learned the name of every single explorer who ever traveled up the St. Lawrence River or set foot on the South Pole or traveled across the Sahara Desert. But none of my teachers ever mentioned Wu Zetian or Nellie Bly (I wanted to be a reporter when I grew up. I was crazy about Nellie Bly.)  There was no mention of female astronomers, mathematicians (R.I.P. Katherine Johnson), or explorers. I learned about Henry Ford but not about
So many amazing women have touched and changed history. This month I'm going to catch up on my reading about them.

Allison Pataki, the author of The Traitor's Wife (Benedict Arnold was the traitor in question), has written an engaging article on 7 Forgotten but Extremely Influential Women from History. Check it out here.

New Project Demon Hunter book!! Reviewof Unmarked Graves

I’m a long-time fan of USA Today bestselling writer Christine Pope, and the Project Demon Hunters series is probably my favorite. (While I love paranormal romance, I really love urban fantasy, and these books hit my reading sweet spot. (They are a little darker, a little scarier, and a little edgier. Unmarked Graves is probably my favorite book of the series so far.
The pace is fast…and the story opens just moments after the last book ended with Will and Rosemary’s ill-fated encounter with the demon Caleb Lockwood. Will doesn’t know where he stands with Rosemary, the police are skeptical of the story they’re both telling, and worst of all, that missing Demon Hunters footage is in Caleb’s hands. If he destroys it…

All the characters we’ve met over the last four books are here, plus Rosemary’s mother Glynis, who is exactly the sort of supportive mother you’d expect to have raised her brood of witch daughters. She’s warm and has a sense of humor and I wouldn’t mind if she ended up with a book of her own.
As always in her books, Christine makes the locations come alive with details that let the reader know she has actually lived in the places where she sets her books. In this case, I have lived in some of the same places, and it’s a treat to relate her supernatural doings to the real-life places I’ve been.
This book has psychics, exorcists, demons, and even a ghost. That ghost, in life a woman named Madeline Nash, proves very helpful to Will and Rosemary, and we even learn something of her backstory, which makes a nice addition.
This series has just gotten better and better and the best news is that there’s one more book to come in this cycle—Unbroken Vows (out in March 2020).

You can buy Unmarked Graves here.
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You can follow Christine Pope on Amazon.
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Friday Excerpt: Deus Ex Magical

This is an excerpt from the first of the Ostrander Witches series, set in Seattle.

DEUS EX MAGICAL by Kat Parrish

I won’t pretend my usual breakfast is a bowl of unsweetened Greek yogurt with a handful of perfectly ripe raspberries stirred in with a tablespoon of chia seeds that I wash down with a huge mug of organic green tea sweetened with a teaspoon of artisanal honey.
I’m not the girl juicing beets she grew on her apartment balcony or blending kale with pineapple and ice for a super-healthy, vitamin-packed smoothie. I don’t even own a juicer. Machines like that scare me. I can barely manage to wrangle my drip coffee maker in the morning.
Most of the time I start my days with leftover Indian food or drunken noodles with chicken or kung pao shrimp because spice kickstarts my metabolism way better than caffeine and I can tell myself I’m getting a shot of protein and vegetables in with the carbs of the leftover naan and noodles.
And yes, what I eat for breakfast tells you more than you need to know about what I eat for dinner most nights.
Cooking is not my super power.
I try, but sometimes, when it’s been raining for a week and the five-day forecast calls for more of the same, the only thing I want for breakfast is the daily special at the coffee shop on the first floor of the building where my office is located. The daily special never varies because nobody wants to have to deal with making choices first thing in the morning. I find that comforting.
I love that I can sit down, push the menu to the side and tell Dineen I’ll have the special. I love Dineen, even though she’s not a morning person so our interactions are pretty one-sided. I know it can be irritating to be around someone who isn’t morning challenged when you are, so I respect that and keep it brief.
 I love that Dineen doesn’t try to talk me into having something like oatmeal with a bowl of fruit on the side. She just picks up the menu, goes away and then returns bringing me sustenance. Orange juice. With extra pulp, just the way I like it.
French toast with crispy edges.
Bacon that’s still flexible.
An egg any style, which means scrambled dry for me.
All for eight dollars, which is a steal.
It’s late October and 44 degrees in Seattle. It was a French toast kind of day.
***
I had meetings scheduled back to back all morning, so I wanted to come in early to get paperwork out of the way. I’d done a job fair at Kent-Meridian High School over the weekend and had not only heard from tons of kids who were looking ahead to jobs after graduation and summer internships, but six different faculty members had also contacted me. I was particularly interested in one history teacher who had her pilot’s license, had exhibited her photographs in galleries across the Pacific Northwest and who listed “adventure travel” as a hobby on her resume.
She absolutely fitted the requirements I needed to fill a position being offered by a documentary filmmaker who was putting together a history of British Columbia’s Gulf Islands and needed a pilot to get him to remote locations as well as someone to take still photos for the book he was writing to accompany the documentary. He had a government grant for the project, so the pay would be generous, and he planned to do all the field work during the summer when the teacher was on a school break.
My food arrived just as I was composing a text to my client, telling him I had the perfect candidate to work on his documentary.
You’re probably thinking—Shouldn’t you have at least interviewed the teacher before telling your client you had “the one?”
If I were just any job recruiter the answer would have been—yes, I absolutely should have. But I’m not just any recruiter. Finding people isn’t just my job.
It’s my talent.
If you’re a Fuqua Business School graduate who invented an app and sold it to Google before your twenty-third birthday, anyone can find you a job—if you actually need to work after selling your app to Google.
But say your skillset is a little more…eclectic. Say you are basically unemployable except for the one job that fits your skillset perfectly, even though you have never heard of that job.
I am the headhunter who will find you that job.
When a client comes to me with a request for a left-handed Mandarin speaker who plays the piano and has experience as a pastry chef, I know that somewhere there exists exactly the person they’re looking for.
And if you are that person, I will find you.
As I said, it’s a talent.
All witches have one.
I grant you having the ability to match people to jobs isn’t exactly the sexiest thing a witch can do. When I was growing up, a lot of my relatives pitied me and some of the ones who were closer to my age bullied me. Especially my twin cousins Lea and Tia who could both time travel. They used to call me a “lamitch,” which was their made-up word for “lame witch.” They didn’t call me that around Roz, though. My older sister is a weather witch, the strongest in the family for the last hundred years, and she’s very protective of me. The last time the twins started to give me a hard time, she conjured up an extremely localized storm that rained on them just as they were leaving for their prom.
Roz is awesome.
That sort of thing is totally against the rules, of course, but I wasn’t the only one the twins bullied, so everyone in the family kind of looked the other way. And the twins never bothered me again.
I would have liked to be able to time travel or whip up storms, but having a skill that’s actually marketable in the normal world turned out be pretty useful, and while Tia and Lea landed jobs working for a super-secret government contractor at monthly salaries roughly ten times what I make in a year, their job requires them to live on-site in an out-of-the-way military base in Greenland.
I know of at least three people who’d hire either one of them in a second if they knew they existed, but I’m not going to be the one who introduces them.
I know it’s petty, but they’re mean girls. And I don’t like mean girls. It’s not as easy to steer clear of them here in Seattle as it was in my home town, but for the most part, my life is mean girl free.
***
I was born in Port Angeles, Washington, a small town north of Seattle known mostly for being the birthplace of football legend John Elway. My dad runs the online learning program for Peninsula College and my mother is a liaison for the student exchange program with kids from Port Angeles’ sister city in Japan. My mother’s talent is languages. She speaks them all. Even the dead ones. Some of the ghosts of people who died in the Fukushima tsunami ended up wandering on the beaches of Washington state and my mother helped them get home. That’s another of her skills. She sees dead people.
My father loves my mother unconditionally, but he isn’t a witch and it sometimes freaks him out that both his daughters inherited her witchy ways.
I think he’s kind of relieved that what I do isn’t particularly showy or odd; that it’s almost something that could be explained as being “really good at her job.”
Almost.
Even if I hadn’t had a power, though, I still would have been “different.” Even though Roz and I look enough alike I used to “borrow” her driver’s license when I was underage, in other ways, we could not be more different.


If bouncers had looked at that license too closely, they’d have seen that my brown eyes didn’t match the blue eyes on the face in the photo, the blue eyes of our Dutch ancestors that everyone in my father’s family had inherited.
I hadn’t inherited my father’s height either and took after my petite mother while Roz was tall and willowy. I yearned to be willowy, but it’s hard when you’re only five two.
When it came time to go to college, Roz had chosen to stay in Port Angeles, but I’d gone to Whitman College in Walla Walla and after an internship with Smartsheet, I’d borrowed the money to open a virtual headhunting service, operating out of my apartment and meeting clients in public spaces until I could afford to rent an actual office. My parents were sad that I hadn’t come back to the nest, and when Roz started talking about moving to Seattle, so she could be closer to her clients, they were not enthusiastic.
“It’s not as if she’d be moving to Kathmandu,” I protested.
“Might as well be,” my father said glumly. “We hardly ever see you anymore and if you both live in the city, you’ll never want to come home.”
My dad is kind of a drama queen, although to be fair, it had been a while since I’d made the trip.
Port Angeles is about two and a half hours from Seattle, which is close enough to visit when I want to and far enough away that I can skip the lesser holidays the family celebrates. Like Arbor Day, which is my father’s favorite non-candy holiday. He always plants trees on Arbor Day and then immediately negates the effect of all that new oxygen by firing up the barbecue so Roz has to jump in and clear the air around the house. There are times I think my father would be happier working as a forest ranger, but he claims he likes what he’s doing, so I don’t press.
Thinking about my dad gave me a guilty little twinge. I actually hadn’t been to Port Angeles since my mother’s birthday in August and here it was early October. I was about to compose a text inviting myself over for the weekend when a guy sat down at the table across from me and smiled.
“Carys Ostrander,” he said like he knew me. Did we go to high school together? I wondered. But no, I would have remembered if I’d ever met someone as insanely good looking as he was.
He reached over and grabbed one of the strips of bacon on my plate, dragged it through the buttery, maple syrupy puddle dripping down from the French toast and popped it in his mouth.
I probably should have objected but I was distracted by his mouth. He had that narrow upper, plump lower lip thing going on and I don’t know why but I immediately wanted to nibble on that lower lip.
 “So, Carys,” he said, making my name sound like the best name in the world. “Rika Bailey and Michael Sarkissian.”
That’s kind of random, I thought.
He patted his lips with the napkin at the place setting across from me and then crumpled it lightly and set it aside.
Dineen saw that and immediately materialized at his elbow, coffee pot at the ready. He saw the waitress out of the corner of his eye. “No thank you Dineen, I won’t be staying.” He gave her a thousand-watt smile that melted her.
“Too bad,” she said with a smile of her own. I was astonished.
Dineen was always in a bad mood. Her studies at Cornish College of the Arts weren’t going well. She’d been hoping to have a gallery show in the spring and it looked like it was about to fall through. I hoped she could hold on for another semester because one of my major clients was going to need her in about six months, but he hadn’t created the job yet, so I couldn’t tell her why I thought she needed to stay in school.
As Dineen sauntered off, the guy turned that smile back on me. He seemed a bit surprised that I wasn’t quite as susceptible as Dineen was to his charms.
“Rika Bailey and Michael Sarkissian,” he said again. “You need to end that.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, baffled. Rika was a former client, but I had no idea who Michael Sarkissian might be.
“You are meddling in something way above your paygrade,” the guy said, reaching for another strip of bacon. I swatted his hand with the back of my fork.
 “Rika is a client,” I said evenly. “I don’t discuss my clients.”
“She came to you looking for a job,” he said, “not for help with finding a husband.”
How does he know who I am and what I do? I wondered.
“You seem awfully well-informed about my business,” I said.
“Being informed is part of my job description,” he said with a smirk.
I was about to say something else when my phone chimed. Ordinarily I don’t break off conversations to answer the phone—it’s so rude—but I needed a second to figure out what to say and when I glanced up, the guy who’d been sitting across from me was gone.
I don’t mean gone like he’d stepped away. I mean…gone… as in he was no longer sitting at the table and not anywhere near it either. I hadn’t heard him get up or walk away. I looked around the coffee shop, but there was no sign of him. He had left a twenty on the table, on top of the check.
Weird. But I didn’t have time to think about that right now because my assistant had just texted me a 911 and that meant it was time for me to finish up my coffee, ask Dineen for a box for the French toast and leftover bacon, and head upstairs to start my day by putting out whatever fire had Melissa in a tizzy.

An Excerpt from The Gates Between

This is an excerpt from my story in Queens of Wings and Storms , now available. The cover was created by Lou Harper of Cover Affairs. I love her work. She has plenty of premades as well as the custom work she does.

THE GATES BETWEEN
by Kat Parrish

Most people believe the gates separating life from death only open one way. That’s not true. What is true is that once you pass through the gates and then return, you are never the same again. I found this out the hard way. I died on my 17th birthday.
And then I came back.
***
 
CHAPTER 1:  You’ll be sorry when I’m gone

I don’t even remember what the argument was about. My stepmother and I fought constantly about everything…everything and nothing. Often our arguments were about me *not* doing something. One day it would be about me not making up my bed.
I kept the door to my bedroom closed, what did she care?
Another day it would be about me not putting gas in the car the last time I used it.
The morning of my birthday, it had been about me not wanting to eat the nutritious breakfast Elle had cooked especially for me, relaxing her ban on eating what she called “flesh” to fry up some turkey bacon. Though why she had even bothered, I don’t know. I usually just grabbed a cup of yogurt on the way out the back door and on the one day—the one day—she decided to do the mom thing and cook up some eggs and bake some refrigerator biscuits, I didn’t want to slow down to bond with her.  It was my birthday and it already sucked.
 I was already missing my real mom worse than usual; the idea of making pre-coffee chit-chat with her flawed replacement was not appealing.
It never occurred to me offering me breakfast might be Elle’s way of trying to make me feel better, to start the day off in a nice way. It never occurred to me to give Elle credit for anything, especially not for doing something nice.
My best friend   Kasi told me I was being a bitch when I complained to her about what a big deal Elle had made of me dissing her breakfast. 
Kasi’s mother’s idea of cooking breakfast was throwing a box of toaster waffles on the table as she left for her office. “You should be grateful she cares enough to cook for you.”
Maybe, but I was sure Elle wasn’t cooking for me because she cared about me. She just wanted to look good for my father. 
Not that he was there. He was hardly ever at home any more, at least not for more than a week at a time before he jetted off to some exotic place to advise his clients on the best way to exploit the natural resources of their or someone else’s country.

He talked to Elle a lot more than he talked to me, but he didn’t talk to her enough to suit her, and she took that out on me. But she kept her real feelings about her abandonment hidden to the world even from the so-called friends she surrounded herself with, self-involved trophy wives married to my father’s business associates. But she couldn’t really trust them not to weaponize any confidences she might spill. After all, their husbands were ambitious and ruthless—just like my dad had been at their age.
It’s a dog eat dog business,” he used to say, “and the first bite counts.”
I used to think that was funny.
Elle used to laugh when he said that, too. Laughing at his lame jokes was apparently part of the “contract” she’d made. That and pretending to be the “perfect stepmother.”
That would have been fine with me if her definition of “perfect” had been anywhere near what mine was.
I get it, step-parenting isn’t easy, and when you’re stepping into the maternal role because your predecessor is dead, it makes it that much harder. How do you compete with a saint?
By being a martyr.
Elle would have preferred to marry a guy without kids, and she was jealous of dad’s bond with me.  The only reason she hadn’t shipped me off to a boarding school was that he wasn’t onboard with it. Especially in the first few years they were married, she walked on eggshells around him, being extra careful not to contradict him or cross him in any way.
And she probably figured once I got into college, she wouldn’t have to deal with me anymore. Hence the charade.
I’ll give her credit; she could be pretty convincing. It helped that dad traveled a lot. She could keep it together for short periods of time, so he never knew just how awful she could be to me.
Or how spiteful and petty I could be to her.
It never occurred to me how depressing it must have been to be confronted by my mother’s presence every time she turned around. My mother had been fond of whimsical decorative touches while Elle was a minimalist and scornful of the cutesy switch plate covers and the kitschy tchotchkes that were liberally sprinkled around the house. The first weekend Elle moved in, right after the wedding because my father had wanted to keep his sex life apart from me, she’d boxed up a load of my mother’s belongings and taken them to the nearest Goodwill while I was still at school. I was furious and even my father had thought the action was a little abrupt.
There were a couple of things I’d really wanted, like a fancy hairclip she’d worn every Christmas. And a small ceramic cardinal that she’d bought because it reminded her of her hometown in Virginia. They don’t have cardinals in Los Angeles. There was also a small green glass pitcher that had been my grandmother’s. I’d really wanted that too. Elle taking all those things was just plain mean and it was a declaration of war, a war we’d been fighting ever since
She might have scrubbed every remnant of my mother’s presence from the place, sterilized it, nuked it, but she couldn’t do much about me, the daughter everyone said was the spitting image of the mother who had died.
“Have you ever thought of coloring your hair?” she’d once asked me.
“I like having red hair,” I’d said, annoyed.
She’d wrinkled her nose in distaste. “It’s just so…carrot top,” she’d said.
My mother always called the shade “rose gold.” When her hair had begun to fall out because of the treatments, she’d braided it and cut it off. I still had the braid, coiled inside a plastic zip bag I kept in my school locker because I didn’t trust Elle not to throw that out too.
Think about coloring my hair? That was typical of the passive/aggressive volleys we lobbed back and forth.
I don’t know what the end game was for either of us. I knew in my heart that my father wasn’t going to divorce Elle, just as she knew he wasn’t going to kick me out of the house, or ship me off to a monastery, but we just kept up this asymmetrical warfare just because it gave both of us a focus for our unhappiness and anger.
She was good at it, but I was better.
I’m not necessarily proud of that, but at the time, I saw it as a survival strategy. I figured we’d be locked into this battle royale forever.
And then my 17th birthday rolled around.
Elle and I had been in sniping at each other all week, barely speaking, hardly even acknowledging each other’s existence. She was pissed dad was off on another business trip; this one to Barcelona, a city where she’d never been and wanted to visit. He’s put her off. “It’s business, Elle, I’ll be tied up in meetings all day.”
When she’d pointed out that she didn’t need him with her to walk around and take in the sights, he’d said, “It’s not safe,” and that had been the end of that.
Like Los Angeles is the safest city in the world.
I was not happy he was gone either. When I was young, it was fun when he went away because he always came back with presents. Also, he hadn’t traveled as much. When my mom got sick, he used work as an excuse not to have to stay home and watch her deteriorate day by day. I confronted him about that one day and he’d gotten angry and defensive. He told me better times were coming but for the moment he had to practically sell his soul to make ends meet. At the time, I didn’t really pay much attention to the words he used, I was just upset that I’d been left to handle things alone. To be fair, he’d talked about getting someone to stay with me and mom, but I’d convinced him that I could handle things by myself with the help of a practical nurse to do the medical stuff.
The idea that my grandmother might come stay with us, horrified me. She and I got along okay, but she and my mother hated each other. And since it was pretty clear that my mother wasn’t going to get well, I didn’t want her to spend the last months—it turned out to be only weeks—being annoyed by her mother-in-law.
He gave me an emergency credit card so I could Uber us around to doctor’s appointments and hospital visits and buy groceries and other necessities. Kasi’s mom checked in often, bringing food she hoped would tempt my mom to eat and stacks of DVDs to distract her from the pain. She was around a lot, but she never stayed long. I understood, being around a dying person was depressing.
Mom and I would eat the snacks and watch the DVDs and try to pretend that things were normal. Just a bald-headed chemo-brained woman and her daughter kicking back on a Friday night Nothing to see here.
I knew it was stupid to want my dad around to help me celebrate my birthday, but it was so hard not having at least one of my parents around. He had called me and given me permission to use the auxiliary Amex card  he‘d given me to “buy myself something nice.” He’d even suggested Elle and I go shopping together. “She has such great taste,” he said to me. Which was true but…
As if.
He told me I could spend up to five hundred dollars. I’m sure he expected me to spend it on clothes or makeup or something. Which told me how out of touch he was with me. . Unlike Kasi and a lot of my friends, I’m not  a devotee of fast fashion. Almost all of my clothes came from a thrift shop in Studio City or yard sale treasures.
Elle hated that I was a “thrifter.” She’d often make snarky comments about me coming home with clothes infested with lice or someone else’s body odor. Which never happened.
She was just a snob.
I got a money order with a credit card advance and put it into my “escape fund,” writing a vague “thank you” email that didn’t mention what I used the money for. Dad didn’t ask. He had changed since Mom died, but lately, he’d been even more disconnected than usual. Emailing him was like sending a message to a total stranger you were obligated to check in with.
I knew there was something going on with him and even asked Elle if she had noticed a change in dad lately. “Why would you ask me something like that Roisin?”
Because you might know, bitch, I thought, but all I said was, “forget it.”
So that’s how it had been for a while, and all my birthday week we’d been rubbing up against each other. By the actual day, the tension between us was so thick it was almost visible as a toxic haze to the air. I should have just skipped the whole day.
After the breakfast I’d bailed on, it just got worse. In first period, I got back an essay I’d written on Ophelia’s daddy issues in Hamlet and saw that Ms. Ptak had given me a C on it.
A C, seriously?
I went up to her desk after class to protest and she took off her hipster horn-rimmed glasses and stared at me blankly when I asked her why she’d given me a C on what I considered an A minus paper. (I actually considered it an A plus, but I said A minus in order not to seem arrogant.)
“You just phoned it in, Roisin, she said mildly, ignoring my air of injured self-righteousness. “If you want to revise it and turn it in tomorrow, I’ll reconsider your grade.”
“It’s my birthday,” I said, because obviously I shouldn’t be expected to do homework on my birthday.
“Happy birthday,” she said and then glanced at the clock. “You’d better get moving or you’ll be late to your next class.”
“Fine,” I said, and stomped off. I spent lunch rewriting the essay, which meant I missed out on the day’s info dump of intel from Kasi and Jared. I was in all AP classes, so I only saw them before and after class, and they were always full of great gossip about what was going on. That time was always the highlight of my day, which tells you how boring my life was.
Kasi was smart enough to be in AP classes but just to piss her mother off—LeeAnne was the poster girl for female empowerment—she pretended to be dumb. I’d called her on it a couple of times and she’d just shrugged. “Sue me for not wanting to spend three hours a night doing homework,” she said.
It was more like four.
“And I can’t afford college anyway,” she’d added because she’d learned that was the quickest way to get someone to drop the subject. Her plan was to get her real estate license and go to work for her dad, who sold commercial real estate to foreign investors and had more work than he could handle. Her dad hadn’t gone to college either, and he fully supported her choice. I thought that working in real estate sounded like a good way to end up an alcoholic at thirty, but then I was a little jealous. My dad’s successful at what he does but his work involves what whistleblowers would consider “dubious practices” and he had absolutely no interest in me joining the family business.
Not that I wanted to sit in a cubicle all day anyway.