DarkLight On... Melanie Pickering!

Welcome Melanie!

You write urban gothic romance. What attracted you to this genre?

I've always loved mysteries that were a little bit spooky and once I was old enough to appreciate romance, I went looking for stories that blended the two. From Scooby-Doo to Scream, we know that feeling scared can intensify romantic feelings!

Writing gothic romance allows me to indulge both these loves while producing the sorts of stories I always wanted to read, but could never find.

You also have YA stories. Can you tell us about them? How is the market for them?

I cut my teeth writing YA. Adrift (part of the Mermaid Kisses anthology) was my very first publication and based on a nightmare I had about a mermaid couple who lured humans into the sea, so they could drown them and use their bodies on land.

My debut novel, Spill, was a homage to everything I loved - ghosts, teenage first love, and an ambiguous timeline. It's angsty, gritty and doesn't shy away from bad language or hard-hitting themes - one of which was self-harm. It was difficult to market and I still don't think it's found its audience.

Then came Ghosted, a purely-indulgent Holiday romance. It's light and sweet but with a whimsically dark edge. A Christmas Carol / Groundhog Day mashup set during a typical Aussie summer - it is illustrated by my daughter, Hannah, so will always have a special place in my heart.

While I've parked writing YA for the time being to focus on regular adult stories, I still have a couple to write.

Are you a plotter? Panster? Or somewhere in-between?

I started out as a meticulous plotter, but suffered paralysis-by-analysis when I didn't know what came next or if I veered off track. Now I am about 90% Pantser. I still need to write out everything I know about the idea of a story - this usually ends up being my synopsis or blurb - and I always do this first. Just don't ask me about GMC, or beats, etc. as I tend to figure these out organically, in my head, and having to think about them will have me running from the room (and you)!

Do you have advice for aspiring writers?

Write your own way - and don't be afraid to try a multitude of ways before you find "your" way. Trust your instincts - you'll know when something's right for you or not.

How do you fill the creative well?

I love to make things, but working full-time has run the well a bit dry. When I need inspiration, I like to head outside for a walk. The shower is also a good substitute. It's ridiculous the amount of ideas that come to me when I'm showering! I also read every single night before bed - without exception.

What is next in the future for you?

I'm currently working on a 6-part workplace-romance-psychic-mystery series, called Deadly Possessions, about a collection of ill-fated antiques and their secret histories.

Tell us about your latest release and your inspiration behind it. 

I've just released Book 1 in the Deadly Possessions series: Hounding the Truth. The whole series was inspired by the idea that our possessions - be they ordinary objects or heirlooms - carry stories that refuse to fade, intertwining with the lives of those who uncover them. If your antiques could talk, what stories would they tell?

Melanie Pickering

Hounding the Truth

Book 1, Deadly Possessions

Like your cozy mysteries a little dark, with bite, and slow burn sizzling romance?

When Emily Sloane starts her new job at Jared Bell’s prestigious auction house, she’s thrilled to prove herself with a high-profile assignment: cataloging the life-sized bronze statue of a hellhound once owned by notorious gothic horror writer, Victor Barrow. But as Emily delves into the statue’s history and taps into her uncanny ability to sense its past, she uncovers dark secrets linked to Barrow’s untimely death.

As the auction draws near, Emily and Jared are drawn into a dangerous game involving a ruthless publisher and a ghostwriter with a grudge. Amidst the gothic gloom of Barrow’s legacy and the growing attraction between them, Emily and Jared find themselves entangled in a web of danger that threatens their very safety.

Will they unravel the dark secrets of the Barrow estate in time, or will they become the latest victims trapped within their own gothic nightmare?

Hounding the Truth is the thrilling first addition to the Deadly Possessions series, where each antique hides a dangerous secret, and revealing the truth comes with its own distinct price.

Buy

Melanie Pickering

Melanie Pickering writes urban gothic thrillers with mystery, romance, and a supernatural twist. Her new dark cozy series, Deadly Possessions, follows psychic art historian Emily Sloane and her dangerously charming boss as they uncover the cursed secrets behind a trail of deadly antiques.

If you like your mysteries with bite, your romance slow but sultry, and your heirlooms haunted, Book One: Hounding the Truth is out now!


Visit Melanie at: melaniepickering.com

 

Magic Thursday: Why I Write for Young Adults with Melanie Pickering!

Ask any YA author why they write for a teenage audience, and more than likely their first answer is they are creating the kind of books they would have wanted to read when they were that age. You see, for the majority of us, there was a void in literature between middle-grade and adult fiction when we were younger, making it difficult to find age-appropriate books. 

Nowadays, the young adult shelves in bookstores and libraries are overflowing. Though not a genre within itself, young adult books have one of the largest followings on social media, and this is due to one thing. Emotion. 

We all joke about teenagers being drama queens, but it’s true. Young people are recording themselves reacting in over-the-top manners to the way the books they read have made them feel.

As a library assistant in a large secondary college, I’ve seen the influence that having access to different genres and authors can have on teenagers. Literature has always been an essential part of human culture, providing a means of education, entertainment, and inspiration. But for young adults, literature also plays a critical role in shaping their lives and values. 

Reading can help young adults to understand their own thoughts, feelings, and motivations. Not only can this help them navigate the challenges of adolescence and beyond, but it also provides a sense of comfort and understanding to young adults who are struggling with emotional challenges. By reading books with characters that are dealing with similar problems, they can gain a sense of perspective and realise that they are not alone in their struggles.

As I was writing my debut novel, Spill, I didn’t set out intending to tackle mental health issues. They just sort of happened organically as the story progressed. I had a blood-letting ghost and a protagonist who could see him whenever she drew blood. This first happens by accident, but then she starts bleeding herself on purpose. Add in a boyfriend who was a former cutter, and you’ve got some heavy issues. 

However, drawing on personal experience and having teenagers of my own, I could see a clear theme beyond the mental illness—something that affects nearly every young person at some point—not being understood, believed, or truly seen. My character, Amy, spends most of the book feeling invisible to everyone who isn’t a ghost. A very small number of my early readers challenged this idea, citing that she had a great friend group and people who loved her—how could she claim to not be seen? As adults, we might find this hard to understand, but for any young person going through this tumultuous phase of life, these seemingly irrational feelings are completely valid. It’s not up to us to tell anyone else how they should feel. But there are ways we can help.

As parents, mentors and educators, our role is to encourage young adults to seek literature that helps them explore the world from a safe place. This is also the time when they begin to develop their reading habits and interests, and the books they read can have a profound impact. If I can help just one young person feel validated, while providing entertainment and the promise of hope for the future beyond the last page, then I couldn’t ask for anything more. 

That’s why I write for young adults.

Spill

If you’d always felt invisible, how far would you go to be seen?

When seventeen-year-old Amy Shipley crosses the threshold of the abandoned house on Flinders Lane, she unwittingly unleashes the curse of a nineteenth-century bloodletter. Haunted by a charming ghost with a dark obsession, she is pushed down a path that leads to blood and pain.

But it’s a path where she is finally seen. Where she no longer feels alone.

Unable to ignore Amy’s descent into self-destruction, former boy-next-door Flynn Powell embarks on a mission to save the girl he’s fallen for. But walking that path opens old wounds, forcing him to question whether he’s the hero she really needs.

While Flynn battles his troubled past, Amy is thrust deeper into a seductive world of secrets and lies. In the fight to save their love, more than blood is going to be spilled, and it might just cost Amy her life.

If you like captivating mystery, characters with real issues and a tender romance that will melt your heart, you’ll love Amy and Flynn’s story.

Buy

Melanie Pickering

Melanie Pickering is an Australian author of genre-blending young adult novels that deal with love, loss, beauty and madness.

She has always had a vivid imagination and has been penning stories for as long as she can remember. Never satisfied when her favourite books were over, she continued the stories herself (often in cramped and messy handwriting) on the inside of the front and back covers.

Lewis Carroll’s timeless classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, fed her early hunger for twisted reality stories, and she has been obsessed ever since. 

She lives with her husband, two teenagers - plus their rescue pets - in beautiful sunny Brisbane, which is in stark contrast to the dark worlds that inhabit her stories. She loves dressing up, and thinks Halloween is terribly underrated.

You can find Melanie at her website.

A bite of... The Blood She Betrayed

Today we're grabbing a bite of The Blood She Betrayed by Cheryse Durrant, who is taking a break from her Queensland book-signing tour to chat to the dingoes at Fraser Island.

Can you, in less than five words, describe The Blood She Betrayed?

Demon slayer on action-fantasy quest.
PS: But for the Whedon buffs: Buffy meets Wolverine in happily-ever-after.

What inspired you to write it?

My heroine and warrior princess Shahkara flashed through my mind a few years ago and wouldn’t let go. There’s nothing more delicious than writing/reading about a banished princess on an impossible quest to save her devastated kingdom from evil, heart-devouring Taloners – especially when she’s half-Taloner and embedded with the same heart-lust, despite her human emotions and loyalties.

My readers say they not only love this book because it’s an urban fantasy quest (and a fabulous romance to boot) but because the story is set locally – Brisbane, Sydney and the old-fashioned Aussie farm.

I talked more about the inspiration behind The Blood She Betrayed at the DarkSiders DownUnder Enchanted Orb from July.

And here's a snippet:

Bolts scraped metal, chains clinked through sockets and the door opened all the way.

A sharp breath filled her lungs at the wild glitter of Nick’s eyes as he stretched in the doorway, well-defined abs rippling beneath his shirt. His uncut hair fell in tangles to his neck, matching the stubble shadowing his chin. Reckless blood rode his veins. On her world, he would either be locked up or sitting on a throne.

~~

Readers can download the first 12 chapters of The Blood She Betrayed for free from Clan Destine Press or buy the paperback from Clan Destine Press, Booktopia or selected Australian bookstores.

The eBook is expected to be available online through Amazon, iTunes and Kobo within the next fortnight.


To find out more about Cheryse Durrant, check out her Website, Facebook, Twitter or GoodReads.

Magic Thursday: Carlie Simonsen on Writing for the Younger Crowd

Thank you to the DarkSiders for having me here, today, even though I write mostly speculative and paranormal fiction for Younger readers, and very rarely hint at romance. I have written science fiction (Dear Tiger, Rocky to the Rescue), fantasy (Assassin, Not), contemporary ‘reality’ with a twist (Long Hair, Tag Man One, The Dog’s Way), science-fiction-fantasy blend (Spit), and contemporary reality with no twist (Legacy of Dreams, All Alone). 

People ask me why I write for a younger audience, and what they need to do in order to write successfully for that age group. Over the years, I’ve come up with the following tips, or rules:

 

The first rule is DON’T WRITE DOWN: No one likes being talked down to, or having it all explained as if they are too stupid to work it out for themselves. Just write the story. Write to entertain. Youngers are *young*; they’re not morons, and they’re far from stupid. Don’t treat them as either.

Secondly: LEAVE OUT THE LECTURE: A story should never be a lecture. Sure, you might have some points you want to get across, but you’re a story teller first, and, for that, the story MUST come first. You’re not there to preach, or ram a few good points down anyone’s throat. You’re there to tell a story. The hardest hurdle to get over when I started in this genre was to get my head around this simple point. Editors wanted stories ‘with meaning’, stories that ‘had a moral’ or ‘a point’, or they wanted it to be wrapped in humour, or ‘e: all of the above’. Forget that. Write the story. If Youngers are your audience, then write a story they’ll enjoy, just the same as you would, if you were writing a story for an adult audience.

 

Third: FORGET THE MARKET: Think of the story you want to write and the audience you want to write it for. Some might think that a story that doesn’t ‘fit’ a market isn’t worth writing, or that the audience *is* the market, but this isn’t the case. What a publisher asks for isn’t necessarily what the audience wants to read. The story is king, and, as with every other genre, you can stifle it by trying to make it fit into a box (or set of guidelines) it was never made to go in. Worse, it can make it very difficult to write anything. Remember, you can independently publish. If a publisher doesn’t want to take a chance on your work because the content doesn’t match their perception of the market OR because your work simply doesn’t suit the style and flavour of the lines they have established, don’t try to jam your story into a shape it was never meant to be. Chances are it won’t be worth reading, or it will come across as forced.

Fourth: KEEP IT SIMPLE: And I don’t mean the story; I mean the sentence structure and words. Remember, Youngers don’t have the word experience of an adult (although a few would give the “grown-ups” a run for their money). In terms of writing for Youngers this means keeping the following in mind:

• The nuts and bolts of your work need to have a simple but clear structure.

• Shorter sentences work best, but varying the length of sentences is still important for a smooth flow.
• Use words that don’t require a PhD to understand (another good rule that applies to books for Olders).

·         Use words Youngers are likely to encounter in everyday life, over words they’re going to need a dictionary or an Older for. Every time your reader has to stop and check something out, they are pulled out of your story. You don’t want this, no matter what age you write for.

Fifth: SUBJECT SUITABILITY: Yes, I know I said the story is king, but you are writing for Youngers. Some stories are best told to an older age group. If you wouldn’t talk about it to your own children, or you wouldn’t feel comfortable reading it out loud to a Younger audience with an adult (teacher, parent, person off the street) looking over your shoulder, then you might want to re-think who you are writing for: perhaps, that story is not a Younger tale, but something for the Olders. Having said all that, you can see that some of the subjects I write about touch on “issues” such as being in a wheelchair and losing your original hopes and dreams (Legacy of Dreams), being away from your parents and not fitting in (Dear Tiger), and some are mostly story with only a little bit of controversy, such as law enforcement and gun control in a semi-war setting (Spit), or facing down fear to save your family and move house (Rocky to the Rescue).

 

Sixth: RELINQUISH REALITY: Okay, not all of reality, just a little bit—just enough for your story to live and breathe. It’s like writing a story where the world isn’t quite what it seems, where the unlikely *can* reasonably happen. For instance, where you can use your hair as an effective weapon in karate (Long Hair), or a Younger can climb into the cockpit of the latest fighter jet and fly it away from a bunch of bad guys trying to steal it (Tag Man One). You’re telling a story. Always remember that.

Now get out there and write.

And all the best of luck

Carlie

  

Bio: Carlie Simonsen has independently published eight chapter books for Youngers, with the ninth, The Dog’s Way, about to be released, and another three to follow that. She started writing in the genre in response to a number of publisher calls for submissions. Unfortunately, she soon learned she couldn’t write ‘funny’ to save herself, and took the hint from a few good-hearted editors that her work just wasn’t going to ‘fit’ an established market, although they encouraged her to keep trying. The result is a number of quirky stories that entertain while touching on issues such as children left alone after a supermarket bombing (All Alone), bullying in—and out of—the playground (The Dog’s Way and Yard Boss—both soon to be released), pursuing the most unlikely dreams through hard work and effort (Long Hair), and doing the right thing even when it means change (Assassin, Not).