SOMETHING WICKED...
A lifetime ago, I was signed by a UK based publisher. Through that publisher, I ‘met’ a number of their UK authors, many of whom I’m still friends with, including Tom Williams. Tom has, historically, written historical fiction, but he’s started branching out into the paranormal.
You all know I try to support my author friends as much as I can by sharing their work, their launches, their events. Well Tom has been a spectacular friend in doing all that for me. So I’m happy to shout from the bottom of the world about Tom’s latest release - Something Wicked.
It’s my great honour, to hand over to Tom Williams:
I owe a lot to Kirsten. I’m following in her footsteps by shifting from history-based fiction to supernatural stories.
Why? (Besides that Kirsten seems a pretty neat person so following her lead makes sense.)
Mainly it’s more fun.
Writing historical fiction involves an enormous amount of research. It takes me a year to write a historical novel and a lot of that year is spent checking maps and reading 19th century diaries and worrying about what a Parisienne wore under her dress in 1809 (really!). Researching vampires is much easier. You just have to hang around graveyards at night. (I did do some research with a couple of trips to Brompton Cemetery. It’s amazing. If you are in London you should visit.)
Writing a vampire story also let me write about tango. I’m always trying to work tango into my books, but I generally can’t because it’s actually quite a modern dance. (Well, in my world the late 19th century is modern.) But tango and vampires go together like Counts and Castles. Tango is danced at night by people who arrive and dance and depart, often without revealing much (if anything) of their lives in the outside world. A tango hall is the perfect place for vampires to socialise. And the music, described by one famous composer as “darkness made light through art”, is the perfect accompaniment to the vampire lifestyle.
So, in substantially less time than it takes to write about an adventure with Spanish guerrillas in the Peninsular war (Buke in the Peninsula) I’ve been able to put together a police procedural novel that features vampires and tango and which is often (when not tripping over dead bodies) darkly humorous.
I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Available in paperback and on Kindle at mybook.to/Something_Wicked