I'm very happy to announce that Happy Hour at Casa Dracula, the first in my series, is now available at IBooks/Apple and other retailers as a free read and that I'm also releasing a Casa Dracula Collection box set. Danie Drankwalter designed the delicious new cover! I'm also very lucky to have Mina at Underline Designs update my website with Danie's California Poppy banner at top.

I've always been obsessed with cover art and I've been studying the transition of cover design with shift of readers shopping at bookstores, to venturing to Amazon, and now reading on phones and other devices. I miss all our lost bookstores, where I spent many happy hours wandering the aisles and reading back covers, searching for the ideal book. When I was in high school, there was a dusty little used book store which had a shelf of books for 25 cents. The kind woman who owned the store would steer me toward the best science fiction for the price of a quarter.


The books had exciting detailed covers and I couldn't wait for the future, for distant worlds and for technology to save us. Now I'm more ambivalent about technology, although I'm not especially worried about evil robots.

Changing covers of printed books used to be an expensive process, but now it's as simple as uploading a new image. The hard part is finding a designer who understands your vision. My good friend, artist Susan Kirshenbaum, steered me toward a wonderful organization of women artists and that's where I discovered Danie's work.

Among the things I didn't consider when I was tearing through scifit novels as a teen was that technology could serve to make art and artists more accessible to everyone. And that's really quite fab.