Let’s start with my personal definitions of each, be they wrong or right:

• Paranormal – Ghosts, spirits and psychic phenomena.
• Supernatural – Demons, angels, miracles, unexplainable by science religiously related stuff.
• Preternatural – Vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters and other not human sort of critters.

Because those have been my personal definitions of the above, I was a little surprised when I noticed that some readers who’d purchased Dark Cravings from Amazon had tagged it as a paranormal romance.

My reaction was pretty much ‘Huh?’

I mean, there are werewolves and vampires in it, not haunted houses or psychics.

So I sort of checked around and discovered that pretty much any book with any non-human type characters that have a romance as part of the story are categorized as paranormal romance.

I thought ‘okay, I guess’ and went about my merry way.

But there are weird things that strike me as stuff to muse upon, and so I’ve mused over that for a few months now.

I would personally term Dark Cravings as more of a dark urban fantasy. The existence of vampires and werewolves isn’t common knowledge, hence the urban bit. The main character has had some pretty awful events occur in her life due to certain werewolfish circumstances, and the vampires aren’t your average suavely debonair types, which is where the ‘dark’ bit comes in.

There is a romance in there, yeah. But it’s not what I would personally describe as a paranormal romance.

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I spent a few days frenziedly working on covers: tweaking, completely re-doing or creating brand new.

End result included six covers for my Shadow Connor series, which I’m revamping this year. If you’re interested in following along as I rewrite the first three titles, you can hop over to ShadowConnor.com, register for free and do so. All three originally published stories are posted; there are some bits that may or may not be included in the books, plus the re-written prologue for Feral Intensity is posted.

From one comment made when I posted links to the covers on Twitter, it appears that I’ve managed to trip into ‘branding’ this series. Yay!

Without further ado, here are the covers:

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I’ve spent the morning attempting to puzzle out the dos and don’ts of writing a web fic. The Night Has Fallen trilogy is my chosen victim to this effort, although its fate is uncertain at this time.

There are a few good reasons to consider writing a web fic, and they’re centered around giving a good, solid example of your writing in order to draw readers and build a readership.

While some people write web fic just for the love of it, there are several authors who do so in hopes that it’ll draw interest to their titles available for purchase, or earn them a bit of sideline cash via donations to fund extras they can’t afford on their monthly budgets.

Ideally, you write a web fic, draw readers in to build a solid readership for your work, and those readers spread word of mouth, resulting in more readers and sales of your other works. Bonus: feedback and interaction from those readers!

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The word count for Arcane Solutions has risen to 48, 090. It’ll reach the 50k goal today! Yay!

Hopefully, it’ll be finished before the end of the month. Bad news is that once that 50k goal is passed, I have to do some re-writes in order to finish it. So NaNo will end for me today, and I won’t be updating the word count on it on my profile there.

Plan is to have it as polished as I can get it and send it for editing. After that’s finished, I plan to format it, design the cover and publish it.

It’ll be my first NaNo novel to go through those steps! Woohoo!

The publishing part probably won’t happen until after the first of the year, so if you’ve been checking the excerpts out and like what you’ve seen, stay tuned for information about when, where and how much the cover price will be.

My friend and fellow KKP author, Damian Herde, has just published a photo driven fairytale titled Dandaraga.

I’ve just had a look, and it’s on my wishlist! Go have one of your own.