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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Its working title is Dark Secrets. I’ve written roughly 7k on the first title since late Friday night.

There’s supernatural critters, secrets, dark obsessions, hot sexing and violence.

The playlist for it so far includes:

• Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
• Fever
• Total Eclipse of the Heart
• Beautiful Stranger
• Shook Me All Night Long
• Self Control
• Human Nature
• Voices Carry
• Heat of the Moment
• I Said It
• Tiny Little Fractures
• Losing My Grip
• Killin’ Me
• God Complex
• The Killing Jar
• The Hand That Feeds
• Wreak Havoc

Stay tuned for an excerpt! I’m really excited about both it and the female lead!

About what goes on behind the scenes of my personal writing process, Secret Guardians will give you a pretty good idea.

I have most of the first chapter up, a couple of Bits & Pieces, some Stray Thoughts and have answered my first question from a visitor on there.

There’s another post and a Bit scheduled for posting tomorrow.

Secret Guardians is the home of a work in progress formerly known as Witch and Were (the first part of the first chapter is on here as well). It’s a contemporary fantasy about witches and shapeshifters, with all the behind the scenes brain workings and scribblings I do that flesh things out for the characters and their world.

Could be interesting, you never know. 

For all those who are looking for free reading material that’s guarenteed virus free, here’s what I currently have available:

• Shades of Gray: Contemporary tale of a young couple with marriage problems. Zipped PDF
• Tales from After: The zombie apocalypse did happen. So did some other rather unexpected things in Jazz’s life. Zipped PDF
• Playing for Keeps: Short short set in the After the Fall series. Zipped DOC
• Solo Mission: Flash fiction bit set in the After the Fall series. Zipped Doc

Those four are it at the moment, but you can always click over on Categories to find posts with more free to read excerpts, flash and short fiction. Code Walker is an installment story that’s still a work in progress. It’s listed under ‘Serial Indexes’.

I hope you enjoy them!