Kater Cheek's Blog - Posts Tagged "urban-fantasy"
Treemaker free for Christmas
I made my second novel, TREEMAKER free for five days as a promotion for anyone who got an ereader as a gift this year.
It's only free until the 28th. You don't have to have read the first novel to enjoy the second one. Please take advantage of the remaining 4 days.
Thanks
It's only free until the 28th. You don't have to have read the first novel to enjoy the second one. Please take advantage of the remaining 4 days.
Thanks
New Books for 2013
I have some new publications planned for this year which I'd like to let people know about.
Right now I'm working on CHANGER'S TURF the fifth book in the Kit Melbourne series. It's going fairly well. My plan is for it to hit the shelves by September 1, but of course if I can get it out earlier, I will.
To help keep me motivated for the September 1 release date, I'm going to be giving away the other Kit Melbourne books in a series of goodreads giveaways. The first one, for two copies of SEEING THINGS, will begin March 21st if it is approved by the goodreads staff. I will follow that with a giveaway for TREEMAKER, and then DAYRUNNER and FAERIE KILLER. After that I may give away boxed sets.
The other exciting news is that I'm going to publish a new urban fantasy series this year, starting with the first book ALTERNATE SUSAN. The novel itself is finished and has had editing, so it will just need a few rounds of proofreading once I get some hard copies. Right now I'm working on the cover art. You'll be able to comment on the prototypes at www.catherinecheek.com or www.katercheek.com after Easter when I have something ready.
Right now I'm working on CHANGER'S TURF the fifth book in the Kit Melbourne series. It's going fairly well. My plan is for it to hit the shelves by September 1, but of course if I can get it out earlier, I will.
To help keep me motivated for the September 1 release date, I'm going to be giving away the other Kit Melbourne books in a series of goodreads giveaways. The first one, for two copies of SEEING THINGS, will begin March 21st if it is approved by the goodreads staff. I will follow that with a giveaway for TREEMAKER, and then DAYRUNNER and FAERIE KILLER. After that I may give away boxed sets.
The other exciting news is that I'm going to publish a new urban fantasy series this year, starting with the first book ALTERNATE SUSAN. The novel itself is finished and has had editing, so it will just need a few rounds of proofreading once I get some hard copies. Right now I'm working on the cover art. You'll be able to comment on the prototypes at www.catherinecheek.com or www.katercheek.com after Easter when I have something ready.
Alternate Susan
ALTERNATE SUSAN the first book in a new urban fantasy series was born yesterday on Createspace and Kindle. Smashwords version coming soon.
This book takes place in an alternate version of Tempe, Arizona. I wrote it in part because I wanted an urban fantasy that had no vampires, no werewolves, no fallen angels, no Irish fairies, and did I mention no vampires? It's fast paced and has a lot of family drama, with my own special sense of humor intermixed throughout.
Please go and check it out.
https://www.createspace.com/4177391
This book takes place in an alternate version of Tempe, Arizona. I wrote it in part because I wanted an urban fantasy that had no vampires, no werewolves, no fallen angels, no Irish fairies, and did I mention no vampires? It's fast paced and has a lot of family drama, with my own special sense of humor intermixed throughout.
Please go and check it out.
https://www.createspace.com/4177391
Changer's Turf progress
I finished the first draft of CHANGER'S TURF in August, a little over a year after I started. Since then I've been working hard on revisions. I got a new software, called Scrivener, and I can't believe I've ever been so foolish as to attempt a revision without it.
Usually a revision is a messy affair, involving notecards, stacks of tiny printouts of chapters, and various chunks of manuscript cut and pasted (with scissors! and tape!) and laid together on the living room floor, while the cats do their best to foil my efforts. Now I can do it all on the computer.
I'm so fortunate to have a number of amazing writer friends who have been willing to read my draft and give me feedback. When I'm done with this edit, I'll get a working cover so that I can print out proofs for copyediting.
Hope you guys can wait a little longer. (I'm not the most patient person either.) Current estimation is that CHANGER'S TURF will hit the shelves around Christmas. I'll post a cover when I've got it.
Meanwhile, if you haven't already seen my new novel, ALTERNATE SUSAN, feel free to go to my website, where I'm serializing it. If you like it, it's out now. It's the first in a new series.
Usually a revision is a messy affair, involving notecards, stacks of tiny printouts of chapters, and various chunks of manuscript cut and pasted (with scissors! and tape!) and laid together on the living room floor, while the cats do their best to foil my efforts. Now I can do it all on the computer.
I'm so fortunate to have a number of amazing writer friends who have been willing to read my draft and give me feedback. When I'm done with this edit, I'll get a working cover so that I can print out proofs for copyediting.
Hope you guys can wait a little longer. (I'm not the most patient person either.) Current estimation is that CHANGER'S TURF will hit the shelves around Christmas. I'll post a cover when I've got it.
Meanwhile, if you haven't already seen my new novel, ALTERNATE SUSAN, feel free to go to my website, where I'm serializing it. If you like it, it's out now. It's the first in a new series.
Changer's Turf Progress 2
Well, I've got my proofs of Changer's Turf out, and I've been starting to get the proofs back from my awesome copyeditors. I have a cover snapshot to show you as well.
Goodreads won't seem to let me post photos, so you'll have to go to my blog at www.katercheek.com
Don't forget to check out my giveaway! In honor of book 5, I'm giving away two copies of book 4, FAERIE KILLER to a couple of lucky winners.
Goodreads won't seem to let me post photos, so you'll have to go to my blog at www.katercheek.com
Don't forget to check out my giveaway! In honor of book 5, I'm giving away two copies of book 4, FAERIE KILLER to a couple of lucky winners.
Hawthorn Hex Interview
Feminist Mage: Kater Cheek discusses Hawthorn Hex
Kater Cheek is the author of seven novels, dozens of short stories, hundreds of book reviews, and a comic book about chickens. She’s just come out with Hawthorn Hex, the sixth book in the Kit Melbourne series. We talk to her about childcare, feminism, refugees, and how they relate to urban fantasy.
This is the sixth book in what is proving to be an enduring series. How has Kit changed as a character since Seeing Things?
Kit has come a long way since the first book. When she started out the series, she had a typical young person’s problems: how to make the rent, how to find love. Now that she’s started a family, she has to balance taking care of her daughter with her work for the Vampire Guild. It’s a struggle that a lot of people go through that’s not well represented in fiction, especially not in contemporary fantasy.
Why do you think it’s underrepresented?
Partly I think it’s because it’s inconvenient. For example, in high fantasy you have this problem with horses that are basically cars that Diana Wynne Jones mocked so beautifully in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland back in 2006. Fantasy horses don’t need to eat, they don’t need to rest. They just take the heroes from place to place, a prop that gives the book that high-fantasy feel, like cloaks and castles.
I’ve seen that in other novels, where the heroine has a baby but it’s merely used as a prop. It’s disingenuous, because raising a baby is hard work, and to pretend that it isn’t is disrespectful to the people who have done it, who are doing it. It requires a lot of time and a lot of skill that has to be learned.
Tessali and Kit have a complicated relationship in this book. Kit seems to seems to feel guilty about how much she needs Tessali, and yet she resents her as well. Do you think readers will respond to this? Most readers don’t have a full-time faerie nanny.
The struggle of how to raise children or not raise children is one I think that all women deal with. Even women who don’t have children (maybe especially women who don’t have children) have thought about how much weight is placed on every decision. No matter what you decide, society will judge you harshly.
My female friends and I joke a lot about how much we’d like to have a wife. Anyone who’s read the series will know there’s a lot of parallel between the karla/spira bond and a traditional marriage. In the Vargel society, the Indel have been conditioned since birth that bonding, becoming a submissive helpmeet to a Vargel, is the highest role they can attain. As in real life, it doesn’t always work perfectly even if both people think that’s what they want.
Kit feels conflicted about having Tessali do this for her, because our society still tells women that their natural place is as a caregiver. And Fenwick has a problem with it too, because he wants to be at home with the kids, but as a man, he’s been taught that it’s his job to earn the money. So they’re all struggling with the conflict between what they want and what they think they’re supposed to want.
Would you say that this is a feminist book?
Oh, yes. I would say anything I write is feminist. I feel very sad when I hear women say a woman’s proper place is to be under the authority of a man. Women who claim that a woman should not have her own authority and autonomy remind me of victims with the Stockholm syndrome.
Being a homemaker was the right decision for me and my family, but I’m extremely aware of the risk, the sacrifice, and of the pressure it puts on a relationship to have one person financially dependent on the other. In a way, writing this book was like an exploration of what the other side of the coin is like.
For me, feminism is not just about deciding whether a woman should have kids and whether she should stay home to raise them. That’s a loaded question, designed to set women against other women. Feminism should be about women helping each other. That’s a strong theme of this book, women trying to help other women, and about how far you can go to help another person without endangering yourself.
In the novel, the Vampire Guild has to make decisions about how many vampire refugees to take in. Did you mean to draw parallels with the situation in Syria when you wrote this?
Not at all. When I first wrote the sixth book in the Kit Melbourne series, it was a very different story. it was called Familiar Battles, and it was about a rather sympathetic witch named Barbara who had an incurable degenerative disease. She had an opportunity to live disease-free forever if she was willing to kill an innocent woman. Kit was a background character in that version. In trying to incorporate her as a main character, I had to abandon the plot and start over from scratch.
When I rewrote the novel, I knew I wanted to focus on Kit and Tessali’s relationship, and on Kit’s career as Dayrunner. I also wanted to flesh out her development as a mage. The plot needed a pressing reason why she had to finish the ward in a short amount of time. I’ve already written later books in this series, so I kind of know where I want the story to go. I had written in Adamiak’s background story that he had been living in Toronto when an internecine vampire conflict caused a lot of vampires to flee to other Guilds. I decided to use that backstory here.
This book took me over a year to write, and when I started it, I knew nothing about the Syrian refugees. In Hawthorn Hex, the vampire refugee situation is made more complicated in that if a city gets too top-heavy, that is, too many vampires per humans, it can endanger everyone in the city. It’s a heavy question. Who do you allow to come into your safe space? How do you balance the desire to help others with the need to keep your own group safe?
What’s next after this?
I’m currently working on an omnibus of the first three Kit Melbourne novels. Its title will be Bindi Magic, and I’m working with a cover artist to give it a fresh look. My next standalone novel will be Parasitic Souls. It’s an emerging adult contemporary fantasy novel about what happens when people develop the technology of transferring a soul into another person’s body.
As for Susan Stillwater, the third book in the Desert Mages series, The Heat Stealer, won’t come out until 2017 at the earliest. I’m pretty busy with work and kids, and I only do one project at a time, so it can take a lot longer than I’d like.
Kit would understand!
Hawthorn Hex is available as an ebook through most formats or paperback through libraries or retailers. For more information on her other books, visit: http://www.catherinecheek.com/fiction-2/
Kater Cheek is the author of seven novels, dozens of short stories, hundreds of book reviews, and a comic book about chickens. She’s just come out with Hawthorn Hex, the sixth book in the Kit Melbourne series. We talk to her about childcare, feminism, refugees, and how they relate to urban fantasy.
This is the sixth book in what is proving to be an enduring series. How has Kit changed as a character since Seeing Things?
Kit has come a long way since the first book. When she started out the series, she had a typical young person’s problems: how to make the rent, how to find love. Now that she’s started a family, she has to balance taking care of her daughter with her work for the Vampire Guild. It’s a struggle that a lot of people go through that’s not well represented in fiction, especially not in contemporary fantasy.
Why do you think it’s underrepresented?
Partly I think it’s because it’s inconvenient. For example, in high fantasy you have this problem with horses that are basically cars that Diana Wynne Jones mocked so beautifully in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland back in 2006. Fantasy horses don’t need to eat, they don’t need to rest. They just take the heroes from place to place, a prop that gives the book that high-fantasy feel, like cloaks and castles.
I’ve seen that in other novels, where the heroine has a baby but it’s merely used as a prop. It’s disingenuous, because raising a baby is hard work, and to pretend that it isn’t is disrespectful to the people who have done it, who are doing it. It requires a lot of time and a lot of skill that has to be learned.
Tessali and Kit have a complicated relationship in this book. Kit seems to seems to feel guilty about how much she needs Tessali, and yet she resents her as well. Do you think readers will respond to this? Most readers don’t have a full-time faerie nanny.
The struggle of how to raise children or not raise children is one I think that all women deal with. Even women who don’t have children (maybe especially women who don’t have children) have thought about how much weight is placed on every decision. No matter what you decide, society will judge you harshly.
My female friends and I joke a lot about how much we’d like to have a wife. Anyone who’s read the series will know there’s a lot of parallel between the karla/spira bond and a traditional marriage. In the Vargel society, the Indel have been conditioned since birth that bonding, becoming a submissive helpmeet to a Vargel, is the highest role they can attain. As in real life, it doesn’t always work perfectly even if both people think that’s what they want.
Kit feels conflicted about having Tessali do this for her, because our society still tells women that their natural place is as a caregiver. And Fenwick has a problem with it too, because he wants to be at home with the kids, but as a man, he’s been taught that it’s his job to earn the money. So they’re all struggling with the conflict between what they want and what they think they’re supposed to want.
Would you say that this is a feminist book?
Oh, yes. I would say anything I write is feminist. I feel very sad when I hear women say a woman’s proper place is to be under the authority of a man. Women who claim that a woman should not have her own authority and autonomy remind me of victims with the Stockholm syndrome.
Being a homemaker was the right decision for me and my family, but I’m extremely aware of the risk, the sacrifice, and of the pressure it puts on a relationship to have one person financially dependent on the other. In a way, writing this book was like an exploration of what the other side of the coin is like.
For me, feminism is not just about deciding whether a woman should have kids and whether she should stay home to raise them. That’s a loaded question, designed to set women against other women. Feminism should be about women helping each other. That’s a strong theme of this book, women trying to help other women, and about how far you can go to help another person without endangering yourself.
In the novel, the Vampire Guild has to make decisions about how many vampire refugees to take in. Did you mean to draw parallels with the situation in Syria when you wrote this?
Not at all. When I first wrote the sixth book in the Kit Melbourne series, it was a very different story. it was called Familiar Battles, and it was about a rather sympathetic witch named Barbara who had an incurable degenerative disease. She had an opportunity to live disease-free forever if she was willing to kill an innocent woman. Kit was a background character in that version. In trying to incorporate her as a main character, I had to abandon the plot and start over from scratch.
When I rewrote the novel, I knew I wanted to focus on Kit and Tessali’s relationship, and on Kit’s career as Dayrunner. I also wanted to flesh out her development as a mage. The plot needed a pressing reason why she had to finish the ward in a short amount of time. I’ve already written later books in this series, so I kind of know where I want the story to go. I had written in Adamiak’s background story that he had been living in Toronto when an internecine vampire conflict caused a lot of vampires to flee to other Guilds. I decided to use that backstory here.
This book took me over a year to write, and when I started it, I knew nothing about the Syrian refugees. In Hawthorn Hex, the vampire refugee situation is made more complicated in that if a city gets too top-heavy, that is, too many vampires per humans, it can endanger everyone in the city. It’s a heavy question. Who do you allow to come into your safe space? How do you balance the desire to help others with the need to keep your own group safe?
What’s next after this?
I’m currently working on an omnibus of the first three Kit Melbourne novels. Its title will be Bindi Magic, and I’m working with a cover artist to give it a fresh look. My next standalone novel will be Parasitic Souls. It’s an emerging adult contemporary fantasy novel about what happens when people develop the technology of transferring a soul into another person’s body.
As for Susan Stillwater, the third book in the Desert Mages series, The Heat Stealer, won’t come out until 2017 at the earliest. I’m pretty busy with work and kids, and I only do one project at a time, so it can take a lot longer than I’d like.
Kit would understand!
Hawthorn Hex is available as an ebook through most formats or paperback through libraries or retailers. For more information on her other books, visit: http://www.catherinecheek.com/fiction-2/
Dayrunner Magic Giveaway
I have a new goodreads giveaway for Dayrunner Magic starting today. It ends in two weeks. There's only one copy, because at three books in one, it's a heavy paperback.
I have another book coming out later this summer that I'm very excited about. It's neither in the Kit Melbourne series nor the Desert Mages (Alternate Susan) series. It's a YA urban fantasy set in California wine country. Come back to the blog later for more details.
Meanwhile, go to the goodreads page http://www.catherinecheek.com/2016/08... to find it. And if you read Faerie Killer, Changer's Turf and/or Hawthorn Hex, why don't you write a review and let other people know about this?
I have another book coming out later this summer that I'm very excited about. It's neither in the Kit Melbourne series nor the Desert Mages (Alternate Susan) series. It's a YA urban fantasy set in California wine country. Come back to the blog later for more details.
Meanwhile, go to the goodreads page http://www.catherinecheek.com/2016/08... to find it. And if you read Faerie Killer, Changer's Turf and/or Hawthorn Hex, why don't you write a review and let other people know about this?
Dayrunner Magic Giveaway
I have a new goodreads giveaway for Dayrunner Magic starting today. It ends in two weeks. There's only one copy, because at three books in one, it's a heavy paperback.
I have another book coming out later this summer that I'm very excited about. It's neither in the Kit Melbourne series nor the Desert Mages (Alternate Susan) series. It's a YA urban fantasy set in California wine country. Come back to the blog later for more details.
Meanwhile, go to the goodreads page http://www.catherinecheek.com/2016/08... to find it. And if you read Faerie Killer, Changer's Turf and/or Hawthorn Hex, why don't you write a review and let other people know about this?Dayrunner Magic
I have another book coming out later this summer that I'm very excited about. It's neither in the Kit Melbourne series nor the Desert Mages (Alternate Susan) series. It's a YA urban fantasy set in California wine country. Come back to the blog later for more details.
Meanwhile, go to the goodreads page http://www.catherinecheek.com/2016/08... to find it. And if you read Faerie Killer, Changer's Turf and/or Hawthorn Hex, why don't you write a review and let other people know about this?Dayrunner Magic
Kit Melbourne Relaunch Continues!
A mysterious curse. A deadly dimension. Can she survive another world to save her dying boyfriend?
Dryad's Blade (Kit Melbourne Book 2) is out May 1st. Here's the universal book link: https://books2read.com/u/mqvxX2
In the meantime, I'm offering the first book, Witch's Jewel free on two different promos. You can get plenty of free stuff on both these sites, and the sites have different offerings, so check both.
Pages and Potions (Ends May 6)
https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/J...
Urban Fantasy Mystery Escapism (May 1-30)
https://storyoriginapp.com/to/v1eGmkG
Dryad's Blade (Kit Melbourne Book 2) is out May 1st. Here's the universal book link: https://books2read.com/u/mqvxX2
In the meantime, I'm offering the first book, Witch's Jewel free on two different promos. You can get plenty of free stuff on both these sites, and the sites have different offerings, so check both.
Pages and Potions (Ends May 6)
https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/J...
Urban Fantasy Mystery Escapism (May 1-30)
https://storyoriginapp.com/to/v1eGmkG
