Happy New Year!

[K. A. Laity]

Hello, Cult members! Welcome to another year of furious writing and publishing. A few things to mention: with luck you've already seen my new publications with Trestle Press, It's a Curse: Drunk on the Moon 7 and "Mandrake and Magpies" in the anthology Dark Pages: International Noir. You can see all my latest publications as always at the website, which includes buy links to all the books. My novel Owl Stretching will be out this year from Immanion Press. I hope it will have a cover just as lovely as Ruby's cover for Pelzmantel. My comic poem "My Twitter Wedding" will be out this summer in Asinine Poetry. It's my second piece for them.

One thing I could use your help with is reviews and ratings, both for me and for Kit Marlowe. At Amazon especially, ratings, reviews and "likes" help persuade people to buy books. Readers in a recent survey from RWA listed Amazon reviews as the second most common place they find recommendations (after friends and family). If you're on sites like Goodreads or LibraryThing, reviews there are also helpful.

The biggest challenge any creator faces these days is being heard amongst the cacophony that the net provides.

Travels this year will include trips to PhoenixCon in Dublin in March and Alt.Fiction in Leicester in April. I've got visitors coming to Galway the next couple months as well, and there's a plan to go to Budapest and Switzerland in May. I'll be back in Scotland in a couple weeks and likely back again soon after that :-) My course at NUIG begins this week: I'm teaching Creative Writing with a focus on Writing Commercial Fiction.

Thanks again for being interested enough in what I do to sign up for this group. Be sure to check the blog for news in between my infrequent posts here.

Kate