Friday, March 21, 2014

No wonder they always sprained their ankles

Running barefoot down those dirt roads with only moonlight and that lamp in the tower window to guide them? How scared out of your wits would you have to be to take off sprinting into the night without so much as your peignoir and mules?

I've been reading and thinking and thinking and reading. I need to write something as Diana Killian, but what? I'm over my burn-out, but I'm not ready to write the last Mantra for Murder or Poetic Death books. They need to be written, that I know. It's not fair to leave readers with an unfinished series.

But...I'm just not there yet.

So I've been fooling around with Gothic mysteries. I found a couple of really entertaining sites:

Gothic Romance Reviews

Women Running from Houses

Gothicked

Anyway, for some reason I have a treasure trove of Gothic romance novels in my garage. I use the word "treasure" lightly because we're talking about Genevieve St. John and her sisters.

Well, there's some of the good stuff too, Victoria Holt, Phyllis A. Whitney...ah, memories of my adolescent summers! But there is really also a lot of terrible stuff. My grandmother used to buy these by the bushel. I can remember staring, mesmerized, at those covers when I was a kid. All those weird old houses with the single light in the window. I used to wonder about that light. Was someone being smart about electric bills or was something far more sinister at work? Now days I figure someone just forgot to turn the light off. We have a lot of that going on at Castle Smith & Browne.


Anyway. Maybe some kind of a mash-up? Something funny but maybe a little scary at the same time? I'd have to somehow work it in around everything else, but seeing that Mr. Thrilling and I have committed to Bouchercon this year, I do probably need to publish something as Diana.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I listened to the audio version of Holt's 'Touch Not the Cat' a couple of years ago and was reminded of how much I enjoyed some of these old stories. Do you think the gothic romance genre is ripe for a revival? I suggested Bente should try her hand at writing something along the lines of Barbara Michaels last Spring, and I was pleased to see another old list sib had the same idea and wrote a gothic themed book a few months later. That one sold well with its target audience, so maybe a Killian gothic would do well, too. Or you could do something with Mary Kelly, yes? I can think of some crazy ideas that would be fun for her character. :0)

Faye

Anonymous said...

Oops. Mary Stewart wrote 'Touch Not the Cat'. I have seen several of Victoria Holt's titles and Mary Stewart's Arthurian Saga available on Kindle.

Faye

Carly said...

You don't find many gothic romances anymore. Go for it!