For the past year and a bit, I’ve been helping a friend write, edit, and publish. We’ve met some workplaces ago, and kept in touch. I normally treat my colleagues as subjects for guerilla marketing (my study has the covers my books hanging on the wall behind me – great icebreaker for zoom meetings 😉).
We got talking, kept in touch as we both moved around. Last year she pinged me with, “well, looks like I’ve caught the bug,” and sent me the manuscript for her first novel, The Stolen Sonata.
What followed were multiple rounds of critique and editing, and general introduction to the world of publishing. Also, she apparently can write almost as fast as I can read 😅 Given the nature of her writing (paranormal romance), we decided to produce the full series and then launch it with a big shebang.
So, if you’re wondering what happened to my stories, you can blame Eric (for our anthologies) and Isla* for this:
* Isla isn’t her real name. We worked on security software, and she wanted to keep her professional persona very far away from that of a trashy romance novels author. Not that I think her books are trashy, but in a field that’s already harsh on women I can appreciate she wanted the disconnect.
Anyway.
Paranormal Romance isn’t my usual thing, but ghost stories involving historical murders very much are. Isla makes it work quite well all around, and the end story is quite engaging. The story takes place in Sydney (not your usual PNR setting), and relies much on music as a rather nice twist to the magic system. As the series progresses the supernatural world grows bigger, the urban-fantasy challenges harder, and the romance (the 🌶️ bits) spicier.
Here’s the official blurb:
He’s been dead for ninety years. She’s the only one who can hear him.
Lily Brennan is a section violinist: reliable, professional, invisible. Viktor Novák was a concert pianist and composer, until someone murdered him in 1934 and stole his music, his legacy and his name. Now he haunts Sydney’s Belmont Theatre, and he has finally found someone who listens.
What begins as a ghost story becomes a hunt for justice, a love with no business existing, and a journey into a Sydney far stranger than its postcards.
The Phantom always loses the girl. Not this time
As usual, I’ve asked Felix and Jack to read this and provide reviews as well. Felix was rather vehemently against the whole ghostly love angle – in his experience, the only good ghost is a banished one. He said he’d have dealt with things more directly, and I pointed out “direct” is hardly an adjective people ever ascribe to him, so he brought up royalties I owe him for his adventures, and I went to speak with Jack.
Who, turns out, derives a guilty pleasure from reading trashy paranormal romance. He’s got a thing for ghosts, apparently, in a way that makes me rethink why he’s in the supernatural policing business. His view was that this series was an excellent sample of the genre, hitting all the right tropes in the right ways. He says it’s a great palate cleanser from his day job, a love story to devour around this time of year.
Speaking of which, considering the skeletons are coming out of closest, the whole series will be released between now and Xmas. The whole series is up for pre-order, the first novel will be released by next week (just in time for Halloween), and then a new book every fortnight to a grand, Happy-Ever-After finale a week before Xmas!
So if you want a bit of feel-good romance, on the backdrop of a supernatural Sydney…
