Why Do I Write Paranormal Stories?

I have always had a fascination with the world of the supernatural and paranormal.  As a child I loved reading ghost stories and watching TV documentaries. Strange But True was one that I remember as a favourite, and one of the few that I was allowed to watch.  My all-time favourite Hollywood films include Ghostbusters 1 and 2 and The Addams Family trilogy.  When I was old enough I wasted no time in watching Hammer Horror classics and whatever horror films I could get my hands on!  My dissertation at university was about vampires in popular culture and their presence in society today.

I have always been a bookworm. My early favourite stories were usually of the fairytale variety, adventure stories by Enid Blyton, and fantastical fictional feasts by Roald Dahl. As I grew older and began to discover the new world of Young Adult (as then uncategorised in popular fiction), I was excited to find that there were hundreds of books about vampires, werewolves, witches and other supernatural creatures. In my cultural circle these sorts of stories were very much relegated to childhood reading, and I was encouraged to ‘get real’ as I grew up.

What does it mean to ‘get real’ anyway? The paranormal world is very much alive and thriving, even if people prefer to think of it as fiction or fantasy. The very fact that all of these stories exist makes them real. Fans of popular television series such as True Blood and The Vampire Diaries will agree that to them the characters and stories are also very real. It is simply an exaggerated form of reality, something that might happen in a parallel universe or alternate reality. And that is probably why I write paranormal stories. I love the freedom, the possibility, and yes, the romance, of the creatures and characters that come to me.

Have you tried the Redcliffe novels yet? Maybe you should…

Join my tribe today, and I will send you a fabulous FREE book to get you started… (be warned, my vampires do not sparkle, and my wolves will bite!) 

*Strange But True image courtesy of Britmovie; Monsters image courtesy of Digital Art Gallery

Catherine Green Author Interview on Redshift Radio

I did it! My very first actual studio appearance on a radio station, and here is the finished product. Enjoy!

http://www.mixcloud.com/ManInTheRain/catherine-green-guest-on-something-different-with-tim-prevett-on-redshift-radio-12th-july-2012/

We talked about books, Tarot, new age beliefs and random music. It was fun!

Love Kills (A Redcliffe Novel) - Exclusive Preview

For those of you who have read Love Hurts and are thirsty for more sex, blood and secrets, here is a taster from my second Redcliffe novel, Love Kills. This book is due for publication in Summer 2012:   

     I was running through the forest on the outskirts of the Cornish town of Redcliffe.  It was evening and the sky was growing dark with that smooth, silky blackness that descends gradually as night progresses.  There was an eerie feel to my surroundings, where tall trees shadowed me with their heavy green branches, but I saw only light and colour.  The air was clear and fresh, late summer, and I paused and breathed in the delicious scents of plant life and nature.  Here, deep in the forest, I could still taste sea salt on my tongue, and I relished the sensation.  It was beautiful, and I was blissfully happy.
     Suddenly a man burst through the trees into the clearing where I stood, making me jump with surprise.  My fright quickly turned to welcome when I recognized my boyfriend Jack standing before me.  My gaze rose from the ground up, taking in the delicious definition of muscle that showed through the grey t-shirt he wore with black jeans. His skin was glowing with health, he was smiling, and his deep blue eyes were sparkling with a promise of delight and excitement.  As he strode towards me I stood still, waiting for his embrace.  He put a hand on the back of my head, drawing me close, and touched his soft lips to mine. 
    The kiss started out gentle but quickly escalated and I knew this wasn’t Jack; it was his identical twin brother Danny.  I pulled away, gasping.
    “Danny what are you doing?” I said breathlessly, my heart pounding,  “We can’t do this!” 
    He laughed and spoke in a low, deep voice, with a hint of growl betraying his werewolf lineage.  The sound rumbled through my body, setting off shivers of excitement that I tried to suppress. 
    “You know Jack will not mind, Jessica.” he said, “After all that we have been through I am sure you understand.” 

Thinking in #Hashtags (and the horror of no Blackberry services)

I have been driven insane by the current technical problems experienced by RIM for Blackberry. Tuesday night is my TV night. I watch a whole schedule of programmes, and tweet my reactions as we go along. This week I watched Gok’s Clothes Roadshow on Channel 4, followed by a new series of Vampire Diaries on ITV 2, followed by Mary, Queen of Frocks (on Channel 4 +1), and finally, the latest series of True Blood on Channel 4 real time.

Usually during the adverts (or commercial breaks) I grab my Blackberry and get tweet happy. I usually update my Facebook status while I’m at it. Sometimes I tweet and post every half hour or so. But this week my phone was not playing. I would pick it up in the vain hope that the magic Blackberry fairies had fixed it, only to be disappointed. I wanted to surf eBay and I couldn’t. Facebook and Twitter were stuck 12 hours behind. I was fed up of reading the same posts. My emails were coming through on a 5 or 6-hour delay. Shock! Horror!

It comes to something when I spend my days thinking in hash-tags. I do something, visit somewhere, see something, and feel a desperate need to broadcast it to the world. “Just had #breakfast nice and early for once.” “My #baby clapped her hands!” “Now arriving at the #shops.” These are some hypothetical nonsensical tweets I may have posted, had my Blackberry actually been working during the last 3 days. Of course, I do have a tendency to forget my inspirational tweets, or get distracted by chores, baby or dog. It’s probably just as well.

Two years ago I barely knew what Twitter was. Now it is the first thing I see in the morning, and the last thing I check at night. I check, and tweet at regular intervals: while feeding my baby, walking the dog, even whilst walking from room to room and up and down the stairs at home. My hand feels naked without the Blackberry glued to it. I am starting to worry about my sanity.

And today, once again, I have no Twitter. No Facebook. No apps at all. My Blackberry has remained silent for most of the day, tucked into my pocket so I could check it frequently, just in case the problem had been fixed. While I was out with a friend it randomly came to life, bleeping a serious of quick alerts to inform me that my emails were arriving. They were only about 10 hours behind schedule. I think we can safely say I missed the web chats that I was interested in joining to network my recent novel and experiences as a writer.

How shocking, a mobile phone that only actions telephone calls and text messages. What has the world come to? No Twitter, no Facebook, no eBay, no emails. Since I was away from home I couldn’t even fire up our home computer or jump on the laptop. However did we manage in the good old days before social networks went mobile?

The Modern Paranormal Romance

When people hear the words ‘paranormal romance’ today they will most probably associate it with the popular Twilight franchise, and maybe even the HBO television series True Blood. It is strange to think that the original horror novel Dracula was actually a romance of sorts, although it was grotesque and evil to reflect Victorian values.
It is no longer acceptable to have a truly evil vampire who preys on innocent humans. We have evolved in our society to a point where we realise our arrogance in the face of such stereotypical views. In contemporary paranormal romance novels, vampires, shape shifters, and other non-human creatures are often treated as another race, a group of people that should not be discriminated against, but that are reviled for their supernatural abilities and nature.

I have recently finished reading Dead Reckoning by Charlaine Harris. It is the latest of the Sookie Stackhouse novels, and I really enjoyed it. There was a clever mix of supernatural activity, and everyday ‘normal’ human life. The heroine, Sookie, spends her evenings fighting manipulative and unpleasant vampires and shape shifters, and her day time hours are filled with household chores and paid employment. She struggles to fit in her human friends, and their baby showers and weddings, and all of the standard rites of passage that humans live by, and that are safe, happy events.

My novel Love Hurts follows this pattern, or at least that is what I intended. My heroine is a human (or so she believes), who runs a small business with her close friend. She is dating a vampire, and once she discovers his hidden secret (because in my Britain, supernatural creatures still remain hidden from society), she then struggles to merge her human life with her supernatural one.

This is where I am drawn in with the genre. I love the idea that mundane life can be livened up with a different cultural perspective, especially an apparently violent and volatile one. It makes life interesting. We need an escape from our daily household routine, and our regular pattern of work and play. That is what paranormal romance offers, and I love discovering new and exciting authors who weave their own perspective and experiences into their tales.

I hope that other people will read Love Hurts and will feel the same excitement and enjoyment that I did when I wrote it. And that those same people will follow my heroine Jessica Stone, as she stumbles through a relationship with a vampire and his identical twin werewolf brother, while supporting her human best friend with a new baby. Oh, and she has a gay best friend who is a werewolf too, just because I can!