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I'm Kimberly Frost, and I'm the author of the Southern Witch series brought to you by the Berkley publishing group. The series features a young woman named Tammy Jo Trask who was minding her own business and working as a pastry chef in a small Texas town, when her long--dormant-and seemingly broken--magical powers emerged.

In recent interviews, I've been asked why I chose to write about witches. I usually talk about having been interested in the history of witchcraft and in its varied potential for plot twists, but my answers are actually something of a smokescreen, since I'm not sure that I chose to write about witches at all. You see, there are some writers who choose their stories and others who feel like their stories choose them. (I'm part of that latter group whose characters are so real that sometimes I know more about their backgrounds than I remember about my own.)

The follow up to the "Why witches?" question is often: "Why did you become a writer?" That one's easy. "I couldn't help myself." I'm part of a community that we'll refer to as "The Afflicted."

The Meaning of Matthew by Judy Shepard (Hudson Street Press, on sale now)

Most people know the horrific details of 21 year-old college student Matthew Shepard's murder in Laramie, Wyoming ten years ago.  Long before the terrible hate crime that took his life, and made him a household name in the area of gay rights, Matthew was simply Judy Shepard's son.  In The Meaning of Matthew: My Son's Murder in Laramie, and a World Transformed, on sale now from Hudson Street Press, Judy speaks for the first time in book form about her loss, sharing memories of Matthew, their life as a typical American family and the pivotal event in a small college town that changed everything.   National publicity included coverage in USA Today and Newsweek and appearances on CBS' "The Early Show," and NPR's "Talk of the Nation" on 9/8.   Judy kicks off a 12-city book tour with an event at the Barnes & Noble at Union Square in New York on 9/9.  
 

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S.M. Stirling Hits the New York Times Hardcover Fiction Bestseller List 

Roc author S.M. Stirling's series of novels set in a post-apocalyptic world where technology stops working has been gaining in popularity with the release of each new installment.  Several of Stirling's books, including last year's The Scourge of God, have come close to hitting the New York Times bestseller list.  With last week's publication of The Sword of the Lady (Roc Hardcover), Stirling finally lands on the Times list, debuting at #13 on the hardcover fiction list.

A few nights ago, I was sitting around the living room, reading Woody Allen's short play, Death Knocks: a schlubby middle-aged man receives a visit from the Dark One, who is clumsy and cranky. The man convinces Death to play a game of gin-rummy, and Death agrees, despite the absence of any fun snacks in the apartment. As I read it, I wondered what it would be like if Death visited an Arab woman in Dearborn, Michigan, home to the biggest population of Arabs outside the Middle East. I present you with my short homage to Allen's play: Death And the Sheesha.

Umm Ali: Oh, who is zat? Why my batio door is open?

Death: It's me, Karima, let's go.

Umm Ali: Karima? No one calls me that. I'm Umm Ali. Where your manners?

Death: Sorry. Umm Ali. Time's up. Come with me.

Umm Ali: Where we going so fast?

Death: Where do you think?

Umm Ali: But my hair is not blow dried and I am wearing house clothes.

Death: Your dress is pretty and your hair looks great. Let's go.

Umm Ali: No, no, Um Ali not gonna leave the house looking like maid.

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via Bookwitch:

If you have a fairly normal name, you can bid money to become a character in a novel by Meg Rosoff. The reason for the normality request is that Meg somehow doesn't fancy having a character with an embarrassingly abnormal name running through a whole book. Which is understandable.

Meg has donated the name of one of her characters in an upcoming book to a charity auction for Women's Aid, which is the key national charity working to end domestic violence against women and children.

Other authors who have done this in the past are Kate Thompson, John Grisham and Ian Rankin. When Meg went digging further she found this page which actually lists an awful lot of similar goings-on. So, it's not new, but it's fun. I remember thinking when I read Kate Thompson's The New Policeman that I wanted to be in a book. But I want to be a nice, lovely character.

There isn't a lot of time for you to think about this, as the bidding needs to be in on Thursday. That's this Thursday. The 10th September. If you have lots of money to spare in order to subject yourself to whatever Meg can come up with, you should email your bid to t.downes@womensaid.org.uk

Do it today. Now.

A side benefit is that you will get a mention here, when the time for review comes. How great is that?

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All right, there are a few awards I figured I'd never get, and I got both of them this year for Another Man's Moccasins-the Western Writer's of America Spur Award and the other is the Mountains & Plains Independent Bookseller's Association Novel of the Year for The MPIBA fall meet back in 2004 was the first event I ever attended, I mean the first, and I learned a lot-namely, how to behave like an author or at least pretend. Viking/Penguin had been kind enough to send a couple of cases of The Cold Dish, the first in my Sheriff Walt Longmire series, to the event. Basically, I was supposed to hand out advance reader copies of a book that wasn't going to be available till January and wondered what that was all about... Like I said, I had a lot to learn.

Booksellers were kind, taking a novel from some cowboy who looked more like he should have his hind end on a horse rather than espousing on literature. They asked me questions for which I was sorely unprepared, outrageous questions like, "What's the book about?"

I'd stand there for a few long seconds thinking about a novel I'd been formulating for the last decade and with that sum of collective knowledge, say, "It's about a sheriff who..."

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As an urban fantasy author who grew up on a steady diet of fairy tales, horror movies, Disney princesses, Victorian Gothics, and other seeming contradictory influences, I'm pretty regularly asked "Well, can't you just make up your mind?" Unicorns aren't supposed to gore you; werewolves aren't supposed to save the day. Horror and fantasy aren't meant to exist on the same shelf, much less in the same story. And to this I say...

Once upon a time.

Once upon a time, there were three sisters, living in...well, not harmony, exactly, but living in the sort of uneasy cease-fire that comes naturally to a lot of siblings. Horror—we'll call her Rose Red, in honor of the color she tends to paint the landscape behind her—thought that her sisters played too nicely with their toys. They never stopped to smell the entrails. Fantasy, on the other hand—and let's call her Snow White, since that's a nice, familiar, fantasy name—wondered why Rose had to be so nasty all the time, and why her sisters couldn't see the virtue of sugar and spice and sleeping for a hundred years beneath the fairy hills. Meanwhile, stuck in the middle of it all, you had their poor sister Marchen—arguably the eldest, and somehow always the first to be forgotten—trying to hold it all together. We'll call her Lily Fair (and there's a reason for that), and she was constantly trying to strike a balance between the other two, or at least keep them from killing each other, because Lily understood something that people still have trouble with today: Lily understood that they were all telling the same story.

» Seanan McGuire discusses her first urban fantasy in a new series about a woman torn between the human and fairy worlds.

» Read more about Rosemary and Rue

Seanan McGuire, Rosemary and Rue, urban fantasy, Penguin Podcast