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Back when I sold my first book in 1999, nobody, but nobody, was buying paranormals. Publishers, that is. I had a fairy tale-esque paranormal that was doing well in contests, but all the comments came back saying "you will never sell this."

Well, thank goodness, it did sell (The Cat's Fancy) and over the next couple of years, paranormal grew and grew and grew, and considering the state of the paranormal romance and urban fantasy markets, it's not slowing down anytime soon. To which I say "yay!" because I love paranormal in all shapes and forms.

And the truth of the matter is that paranormal should be popular. After all, to my way of thinking, paranormal is the heart of genre fiction, if not all of fiction. Heck, of writing itself.

That's a lot of responsibility to shoulder, but I'm standing by my theory. I mean, think about it. Fiction is the creation of a world out of thin air--that's easy-squeazy for a paranormal author.

Building people. Putting characters together bit by bit, just like Frankenstein. That's paranormal.

No matter what the story, there's a little bit of magic in every book you pick up. And we should never forget how special that is. Authors dabble in magic, and instead of pulling a rabbit out of the hat, we pulled a novel.

We create worlds. We create people. We sit down in front of a blank page and a few months (or years) later we emerge with a fully realized world with people (or fairies or superheroes or vampires or aliens) that we know as well as we know ourselves. People that our readers also know and love and care about.

Thomas Carlyle said, "All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."

 "Lying like magic"...and it's true. Reading is magic. Fiction is magic.

And that, folks, is a very cool thing.

Tainted, Julie Kenner, The Blood Lily Chronicles, urban fantasy, Ace