Tag Archives: Lynn Hardaker

F is for Fairy

F is for Fairy is officially out today!

This release has been different from most of the releases that I’ve done in that supporters of my Patreon at the Corvid level and higher got access to the electronic copy of this book a couple weeks ago and this title has been available in the Bad Fairy book bundle for almost as long.

But.

The book is officially out today — and that includes in paperback!

“Anyone who believes that faeries are wee, golden-haired creatures with dragon-fly wings and sweet intentions has never met a real faerie.” –Suzanne Willis, “A Silver Thread Between Worlds”

Retellings of familiar favourites from new perspectives, and brand new stories share the pages of this fairy-themed collection. Within these offerings you’ll find fairy music and food, contracts (making and breaking them), changelings, circles and curses–these stories deliver all the things you already love about fairies and a few new tricks as well.

A dusting of dragons, shapeshifters and ogres accompany these tales which include feminist fairies overcoming trauma, Norse fairies breaking the rules to interfere in human affairs, intergalactic fairies hitching a ride to a new home, political satire featuring an idiot king and talking animals, a new Robin Archer story, fairy run nightclubs and so, so much more.

Altogether this anthology includes twenty-six brand new tales–one for each letter of the alphabet–from contributors Pete Aldin, Steve Bornstein, Andrew Bourelle, Stephanie A. Cain, Beth Cato, Sara Cleto, Cory Cone, Danielle Davis, Megan Engelhardt, Michael Fosburg, Joseph Halden, Lynn Hardaker, L.S. Johnson, Michael M. Jones, Jeanne Kramer-Smyth, Samantha Kymmell-Harvey, C.S. MacCath, Jonathan C. Parrish, Alexandra Seidel, Michael B. Tager, Rachel M. Thompson, Laura VanArendonk Baugh, Brittany Warman, Lilah Wild, Suzanne J. Willis and BD Wilson.

For a limited time I’ve dropped the price on the book to $2.99, which means right now you can get 26 awesome fairy stories for less than what many of us might spend on a nice coffee.

(I don’t drink coffee, but you know what I mean LOL)

The price will be going back up on Saturday, May 11th so don’t miss out on this great deal 🙂

Get F is for Fairy now

Amazon (US) (CA) (UK)

Kobo

B&N

iTunes

There are just so many ways for you to get this fairy fix that you can’t possibly go wrong LOL

Cover Reveal: F is for Fairy

Check it out!

F is for Fairy, the sixth installment in the Alphabet Anthologies series, has got a cover! Yay!

As always with this series, the cover was designed by Jonathan C. Parrish.

“Anyone who believes that faeries are wee, golden-haired creatures with dragon-fly wings and sweet intentions has never met a real faerie.” –Suzanne Willis, “A Silver Thread Between Worlds”

Retellings of familiar favourites from new perspectives, and brand new stories share the pages of this fairy-themed collection. Within these offerings you’ll find fairy music and food, contracts (making and breaking them), changelings, circles and curses–these stories deliver all the things you already love about fairies and a few new tricks as well.

A dusting of dragons, shapeshifters and ogres accompany these tales which include feminist fairies overcoming trauma, Norse fairies breaking the rules to interfere in human affairs, intergalactic fairies hitching a ride to a new home, political satire featuring an idiot king and talking animals, a new Robin Archer story, fairy run nightclubs and so, so much more.

Altogether this anthology includes twenty-six brand new tales–one for each letter of the alphabet–from contributors Pete Aldin, Steve Bornstein, Andrew Bourelle, Stephanie A. Cain, Beth Cato, Sara Cleto, Cory Cone, Danielle Davis, Megan Engelhardt, Michael Fosburg, Joseph Halden, Lynn Hardaker, L.S. Johnson, Michael M. Jones, Jeanne Kramer-Smyth, Samantha Kymmell-Harvey, C.S. MacCath, Jonathan C. Parrish, Alexandra Seidel, Michael B. Tager, Rachel M. Thompson, Laura VanArendonk Baugh, Brittany Warman, Lilah Wild, Suzanne J. Willis and BD Wilson.

Though it’s not going to be available until May 7th, F is for Fairy is currently available for pre-order:

Amazon (US) (CA) (UK)

Kobo

B&N

Apple

OR

If you’d like to read a free advance copy in exchange for an honest review you can get a free review copy on BookSprout.

Whatever you choose to do, don’t forget to add it to your ‘Want to Read’ shelf on Goodreads!

E is for Evil Cover Reveal

E is for Evil contains twenty-six individual stories which each shine a different light on the multi-faceted idea that is evil. Running the gamut from lyrical fantasy to gritty horror in these stories possessed toys, hellish bureaucrats, scientists with questionable morals, abusive partners and even lingerie sellers all take their turn in the spotlight.

Featuring fresh new stories from Michael Fosburg, Lynn Hardaker, Stephanie A. Cain, Andrew Bourelle, Suzanne J. Willis, Samantha Kymmell-Harvey, Hal J. Friesen, C.S. MacCath, Michael B. Tager, Jonathan C. Parrish, Amanda C. Davis, Lilah Wild, Sara Cleto, Alexandra Seidel, Mary Alexander Agner, Cory Cone, Jeanne Kramer-Smyth, Beth Cato, Laura VanArendonk Baugh, Megan Engelhardt, Danielle Davis, Brittany Warman, BD Wilson, L.S. Johnson, Pete Aldin and Michael M. Jones.

 

I wanted this cover to represent ‘evil’ without relying on any one specific religion or mythology (satan & pentagrams, for example), which was tricky. To further complicate things I also wanted it to be black and white and grey. That made it difficult not only to find the right image (we went with a play on ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’) but also to get the contrast right. It took a lot of finessing but in the end I think Jo nailed it. I can’t wait to see this one on physical books 🙂

If you’re going to pick up a copy of this please consider pre-ordering your copy here:

 

E is for Evil on Amazon

(US) (CA) (UK)

 

Pre-ordering is an awesome way of supporting the book and I really appreciate it. Thank you!

Cover design by Jonathan C. Parrish

The Other Side of the Partition

The Other Side of the Partition

by Lynn Hardaker

When I was growing up in Toronto in the 1970s and ‘80s, one of my favourite haunts was the Royal Ontario Museum. My favourite exhibit was the dinosaurs. I’d walk through a doorway into a darkened passage which would lead past moody dioramas featuring a fossil T-rex, reconstructed Stegosaurus and Triceratops, all nestled within large-leafed plastic plants while at least one Pterodactyl hovered overhead. My little brother and I would amble and gape; imagine sneaking past the barriers – that thin partition between our world and that of the dinosaurs. Unfortunately, parental supervision always prevented that kind of fun. The exhibit was small, old fashioned, and I absolutely loved it. (It stirred my imagination far more than I can imagine the museum’s current dinos-in-a-crystal exhibit could.)

When I was offered the opportunity of writing a dinosaur story for Rhonda’s D is for Dinosaur anthology, I was thrilled. It was a chance to return to a childhood escape, to dive in there, to cross the partition. But when I started, I had no idea how to do it. For a while I brainstormed, but everything I wrote seemed either trite or like rehashed b-horror. So I stepped back from it for a while, and that’s when another memory of Toronto from years back surfaced.

There was a local eccentric who had turned his Victorian mansion into a museum – an oversized cabinet of curiosities – filling it with masks and totems, shrunken heads, the bones and skulls of exotic animals, a live python and Galapagos Island tortoise. I was invited to it once by someone who knew him. It was a magical place. Here was someone who had turned his home into a living exhibit; someone living on the other side of the partition. That experience, however brief, stayed with me. It was only much later that I would read that he’d been charged with, and convicted of, abusing some of the young men he’d offered shelter to over the years.

And that all got me thinking; weaving things together: fact and fiction; inspiration and imagination; an image here, a thought there. I scribbled and eventually the story happened. A dinosaur story.

And, in one of those serendipitous events which so often happen to writers, after having written the story – actually in the course of writing this blog post – I found that one of the displays I hadn’t seen in the home-museum of way-back-when was fossilized elephant-bird eggs. The relevance of which will come to light to any who read the story.

 

Lynn Hardaker is a Canadian writer and artist currently living in Regensburg, Germany.  Her poems and short stories have appeared in Mythic Delirium, Not One of Us, Scheherezade’s Bequest, The Ghastling, and other journals. She’s currently doing the final round of edits on her YA historical fantasy novel set in a slightly alternative eighteenth century London.


D IS FOR DINOSAUR is available now!

dino500x750

Amazon (US) (CA) (UK)

 

E is for Evil

I’m excited to announce the theme for the next volume in my Alphabet Anthologies series will be:

E is for Evil

Oh man, I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I am about this one. The contributors to this anthology series never cease to amaze me with their clever and diverse interpretations of a theme and this one… well, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a doozie!

Speaking of those contributors. For this volume the contributing authors, in random order, are Michael Fosburg, Lynn Hardaker, KV Taylor, Andrew Bourelle, Suzanne J. Willis, Samantha Kymmell-Harvey, Hal J. Friesen, C.S. MacCath, Michael B. Tager, Jonathan C. Parrish, Amanda C. Davis, Lilah Wild, Sara Cleto, Alexandra Seidel, Mary Alexandra Agner, Cory Cone, Jeanne Kramer-Smyth, Beth Cato, Laura VanArendonk Baugh, Megan Engelhardt, Gary B. Phillips, Brittany Warman, BD Wilson, L.S. Johnson, Pete Aldin and Michael M. Jones.

E is for Evil will be hitting shelves spring of next year, so we’ll all need to be patient while we wait for it, but people had been asking what the next letter was going to be and I was getting tired of saying it was a secret 🙂

Previous volumes in this series include A is for Apocalypse, B is for Broken, C is for Chimera and — coming out in less than three weeks! — D is for DInosaur.

D is for Dinosaur cover reveal

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For the fourth installment of Rhonda Parrish’s Alphabet Anthologies, contributors were challenged to write about dinosaurs. The resulting twenty-six stories contain widely different interpretations of the dinosaur theme and span the spectrum from literal to metaphoric.

Within these pages stories set in alternate histories, far-flung futures and times just around the corner, dinosaurs whimper and waste away, or roar and rage. People can be dinosaurs, as can ideas, fictions and flesh. Knitted dinosaurs share space with ghostly, genetically engineered and even narcotic ones.

Teenagers must embrace their inner dinosaurs in order to find peace and belonging, a dying woman duels a God in a far future city that echoes aspects of our past, an abused wife accompanies her husband on a hunt for an ancient power and finds more than she could ever have imagined and a girl with wonderful magical powers stumbles across the bones of a giant long-dead lizard. And so much more!

Features stories by Alexandra Seidel, Pete Aldin, Beth Cato, Michael Kellar, Cory Cone, Simon Kewin, Samantha Kymmell-Harvey, C.S. MacCath, KV Taylor, Laura VanArendonk Baugh, Michael B. Tager, Gary B. Phillips, Michael M. Jones, L.S. Johnson, Brittany Warman, Hal J. Friesen, Megan Engelhardt, BD Wilson, Michael Fosburg, Jonathan C. Parrish, Suzanne J. Willis, Lynn Hardaker, Amanda C. Davis, Andrew Bourelle, Sara Cleto and Jeanne Kramer-Smyth.

This cover was designed by Jonathan C. Parrish using original artwork by Janice Blaine.

D is for Dinosaur will be available in February 2017. In the meantime, don’t forget to add it to your ‘Want to read’ shelf on Goodreads and LibraryThing!

 

D is for [Drum Roll]

It’s time to announce the theme for the next Alphabet Anthology. I am really stoked about this one. Like, really, really stoked. I’ve been looking forward to the D anthology since I first decided to do this anthology series–in fact, more than once Jo has had to talk me out of releasing books out of alphabetical order because I was impatient to get to D.

So what is the theme?

Well, Demons seemed like a good fit–a collection of dark and diverse stories would be a lot of fun but not quite as fun as–

Dragons. Dragons seem the obvious choice, right? I mean, I love dragons. I used to collect them, I even have a dragon tattoo. And there’s no doubt that dragon stories could be diverse in theme, voice and tone… but dragons were actually kind of too obvious. Plus I have a vaguely dragony anthology in the works and I don’t want to duplicate efforts. Much. Still gargantuan reptilian creatures are pretty amazing and so I am excited to announce that–

 

D is for Dinosaur

–because c’mon! How cool is that?

The dinosaur theme will be interpreted in a wide variety of ways for this anthology but my authors assure me that there will, indeed, be at least a handful of prehistoric critters within its pages. I’m super stoked!

Speaking of those authors, contributors to this anthology include some veterans to the series and some new faces too. In no particular order, story contributors to D is for Dinosaur are:

~ Alexandra Seidel ~ Pete Aldin ~ Beth Cato ~ Michael Kellar ~ Cory Cone ~ Simon Kewin ~ Samantha Kymmell-Harvey ~ C.S. MacCath ~ KV Taylor ~ Laura VanArendonk Baugh ~ Michael B. Tager ~ Gary B. Phillips ~ Michael M. Jones ~ L.S. Johnson ~ Brittany Warman ~ Hal J. Friesen ~ Megan Engelhardt ~ BD Wilson ~ Michael Fosburg ~ Jonathan C. Parrish ~ Suzanne J. Willis ~ Lynn Hardaker ~ Amanda C. Davis ~ Andrew Bourell ~ Sara Cleto ~ Jeanne Kramer-Smyth ~

Janice Blaine will be contributing the artwork.

D is for Dinosaur will be coming out in 2017 but you can pre-order the third installment in the Alphabet Anthologies series, C is for Chimera right now.