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.

Read more »

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.

Progress has been good! Arcane Solutions has a word count of 41, 060 right now.

Excerpt:

 

“Look, just because the boss thinks…” I was interrupted.

“You really had both legs broken three weeks ago?” The shifter grinned when I began sputtering in reaction. “What was it? Oh, I remember: you were pushed off a roof.”

My face grew hot. “Shut up.”

“I’m curious. Why didn’t you use your telekinesis to…”

My turn to interrupt while whipping the car out into traffic. “It’s kind of hard to concentrate when you’re falling, okay?”

“How many stories was it?” Nick winced as I hit the brakes to keep from rear ending the car in front of us. Yanking the wheel, I passed it. “Can I drive?”

“Fifteen and no.” I’d been lucky my legs were all that had been broken, panicked as I’d been. “I wasn’t trying to use my telekinesis.”

“Watch it! Oh god.” I glanced at him, upper lip curling a bit at the sight of a shifter cowering in my passenger seat. Nick scowled. “Would you watch the damn road?”

“Wuss. I could drive blind-folded. Want to see?” A grin spread as panic bloomed over his face.

“No! There’s…shit! Can I please drive?”

“I already answered that question. It was a ‘no’. Your turn: any vampire enemies?”

“I’m a shifter, what do you think?” Nick grabbed the dash, still scowling.

“Names?” I persisted, making a sharp left that jerked him into the door. We were nearing an entry point for the underground city section known as the Barrows, so I began searching for a parking spot on the car-lined street.

“No one you need to worry about. Are we stopping? Because I think I need to throw up. Has anyone ever told you that your driving skills suck?”

“Yeah, and I’ll tell you what I told them: kiss my ass.” Spotting an open spot, I slowed down.

The shifter recovered quickly. “Ooh, can I?”

Arcane Solutions is my ‘official’ NaNoWriMo novel this year. How’s my blurbage for it?

_____________

Three witches, two warlocks, a werewolf, an elf and me – Discordia Jones, girl psychic.

If you don’t think we’re capable of saving the world from the return of dark magicks not seen in over a millenia…

Well, you’re not the only one.

Wish us luck, because I’m pretty sure we’ll need it.

____________________