Hi —
As you may know, i have a new book coming out in TEN DAYS!! Yayyy. The book is called Cataclysmic Shift and it’s an Aloysius Tale. (I don’t have the cover yet, but i’ll show it to you soon!) What, you might ask, is that? An Aloysius Tale is a book that involves my black-cat witch’s familiar named Aloysius. My husband loves to ask me, where do you get these ideas. And that’s what i’d like to talk about.
I’m a non-fiction writer in my day job. I have been for many years, but i never wrote a novel until 2010. Partly because i couldn’t imagine writing at night and on the weekend could be fun after writing all day. That idea went away as soon as i found erotic romance. That is fun to write any time. My 
other fear was, as many people voice, that i wouldn’t have enough ideas to write a novel.
What i learned is that creating stories is like sex. The more you do it the more you want to do it and the better you are at it! The idea for the first Aloysius Tale came from a simple statement that a black cat story would be good. Black cats suggest witches, don’t they? So i decided to write my first paranormal book about witches in New York. And one of those witches, a powerful male witch who is also a history professor, is given a black cat familiar by his mother. Why did i name him Aloysius? All i can say is “He told me to.” Spell Cat was born.
Books beget books, and every story has characters who yell at you to tell their tale. That 
was the case with Brush with Catastrophe, the second Aloysius Tale. In Spell Cat, there was a minor character named Sammy and he stepped up and told me he was a good artist but a crappy witch and he couldn’t get a boyfriend. That idea launched a dynamic tale of evil nearly victorious until the least talented of witches must face the villain head-on — with a paintbrush.
But the thread that ties all the tales together is Aloysius. He had to have his own book, and now he does. Cats don’t talk a lot except in cartoons, so i had to put Aloysius in a position to be the hero of his own story. He gets that chance when he “shifts” into a human who doesn’t remember his past and falls in love with a gorgeous but mysterious man. I hope you enjoy reading Cataclysmic Shift as much as i enjoyed writing it.
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