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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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!

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What? Whose end? Argh! Adult language in this one. © GL Drummond, 2008. Part 15, and the last.

For now.

______

“How’s he doing?” I ask Regan eagerly as he returns from checking on Hayward. We’ve been brainstorming for about six hours.

“He’s starting to hurt pretty bad, babe. We need to hurry up.” Regan’s face is worried, his dark eyes bloodshot.

“I think this will work,” Dale says. “We can try, if nothing else, maybe it’ll slow it down, give us more time.”

“Try what?” Regan drops down next to me with a sigh.

“Dale thinks we can try to call the infection out of him…sort of like creating an elemental out of it,” I explain quickly.

“Babe, he’s to the point it’s affecting his organs,” Regan responds gently. “Calling up the infection…that could kill him.”

“Okay, try this,” Dale decides. “Call up some of his infected blood, and change it. Make it attack the virus.”

“How?” This sounds like a good idea, I think.

“I think you’ve got something there,” Regan tells him, a weary grin appearing on his face. “And he should be immune, after that, right?”

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Back on the road, new mission, and tragedy strikes.  Adult language in this one.  © GL Drummond, 2008.  Part 14.

I’ll be honest.

By the time our leave is over, I’ve mostly gotten used to the sharing thing, and the result? It’s way beyond what I could’ve expected.

No, I don’t mean the Nookie Buffet, though, you know, that’s pretty damn awesome.

What I do mean is the deepening of the connection between the three of us. We can’t exactly carry on conversations in our minds, like telepaths, but we can convey sort of single word communication.

My little water elemental, Caspian, is bald when I call him up for the general, out of the park’s pond. He’s also not so little. Waters called him ‘Mr. Clean’, so I let Caspian super soak his ass. Heh.

Now, we’ve been ordered to a small city, to see if these new spells are up to the challenge of retaking it, and I’m excited. I think we can do it.

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