Parafolk Tales from Cerridwen and Ellora's Cave

Back in 2002 I was convinced I wouldn't want to write a vampire book. I was reading and enjoying them, but figured I didn't have anything to add to the genre and I didn't want to just copy what everyone else was doing. But then one night I had a dream where the heroine was desperate for a job and I heard a man say, "You can't work here without my mark." What kind of mark? The mark of his fangs on her neck. (Bwahaha!)

That inspired me and All Night Inn was the result. I wrote the book because in this dream I saw something new - the idea of a vampire companion, an otherwise normal person to feed the vampire and be "all he needs." I didn’t want my humans to give up who they were to become the lover of a nightwalker. Instead I decided that there was no reason why two sensible people couldn’t work out their differences in diet and sleeping arrangements and learn to live together.

I was also having a lot of fun mixing up vampire lore with my reality. Sharon Colson was forever making assumptions only to have Jonathan Knottman shake his head with amusement and say, “You really have seen too many movies.” And then there was the fun of creating a society of parafolk, vampires and werewolves living among us.

What are the needs of such people? Vampires live a long time and must hide that fact, but the government will still insist on taxes being paid and notice when the deed for a house doesn't change hands for a couple centuries. How does a werewolf hold down a job when he gets really hairy during the full moon? Coming up with answers for all this became part of the fun of creating their world.Since I grew up in Los Angeles I wanted to set parts of all the stories there and with the bulk of the movie industry down there, it was only another step to assume that a culture based on creating magic might have a few magic people dwelling within it.

That led to the second book, Fangs For The Memories, about Cleopatra Lutz an early thirties movie actress who'd been made into a vampire at the height of her career and has been in hiding ever since. She meets her match in Michael Brown who knows all about the parafolk as he used to be a nightwalker companion before his boss found his own lady. Now at loose ends, he ends up kidnapping the bite-and-run lady nightwalker and holds her prisoner in an abandoned movie studio.

Since then I’ve written many parafolk stories, some of which are Cerridwen stories by author Janet Miller, and some erotic stories by Cricket Starr and published by Ellora’s Cave. The contemporary stories are all under the series title Hollywood After Dark regardless of author name or sensuality. The lastest of these is Tasting Nightwalker Wine, a story about a romance author who meets her greatest fan at a late night booksigning...and would you believe he's a real vampire? Stella didn't until Prince Sebastian spoke into her mind, then left her after a one-bite stand. Using her skills as a researcher she tracks him to his winery and he reluctantly takes her as his companion, but when someone attacks his servants, Stella and Sebastian must work together to save the parafolk. This story was inspired by another author at a RWA convention talking about some of the strange people who come up to her at booksignings and I thought...hey, suppose they were for real?

Hollywood After Dark:

In addition there are two futuristic tales that use the parafolk. One of these is an independent story in an Ellora's Cavemen anthology about a "dark pilot"- a vampire who travels the long distances in space before finding his lady. The other story is a collaboration with Liddy Midnight that starts with, “A vampire, a psychic and a werewolf walk into a bar on Alpha Prime...”

Futuristic Parafolk:

To buy at Amazon: