Cast of Characters: Guest post by Carole Nelson Douglas

Carole Nelson Douglas: Cast of Characters

“Write the story you’ve always wanted to write.”

That was the instruction to 28 veteran authors from anthology editor Lou Aronica, a New York Times bestselling co-author, novelist, and former Publisher of Avon Books and Berkley Books.

I’ve written about 35 shorter pieces of fiction, most linked to my Midnight Louie and Irene Adler mystery/suspense series, or my Delilah Street noir urban fantasy series.

So I decided to step outside the box into the darker side of mystery with a stand-alone suspense story with a surprise ending, “Don’t Breathe.” (A free PDF download of the story is on http://carolenelsondouglas.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/12DontBreathePDF.pdf.)

CAST OF CHARACTERS is a mammoth short fiction anthology that may be flying under the radar for mystery readers. Its stories range from suspense to romance to fantasy to poignant character pieces by twenty-eight veteran authors, many of them such New York Times bestselling authors as Heather Graham, Angie Fox, Katie MacAlister and Jo Beverly.

Lou Aronica, now publisher of The Story Plant and Fiction Studio Books, is also president of Novelists, Inc., a noted organization comprised of multi-book novelists, says: “In CAST OF CHARACTERS, you’ll meet a collection of unforgettable personalities. The devoted wife who discovers her husband’s devastating secret. The Black Death survivor who reinvents herself. The woman who hears ghosts. The small-town beauty queen with a world-class mean streak. The inventor who fears his invention. The stalker who understands too late who he is stalking. These are only a few of the figures who will leap from the page.”

These are all creative and compelling stories, and I certainly enjoyed writing “out of the box” story that was more “Jack-in-the-box.”

Carole Nelson Douglas, author of more than fifty fantasy and science fiction, mystery, mainstream, and romance novels, was an award-winning reporter and editor for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. After writing some bestselling high fantasy novels and SF thrillers, she imported fantasy notions into her Midnight Louie mystery series, which features a hard-boiled Las Vegas PI who's a feline "Sam Spade with hairballs." Her Irene Adler historical series made Carole the first author to use a woman from the Sherlock Holmes stories as a protagonist in the 1991 New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Good Night, Mr. Holmes. She's won or been short-listed for more than fifty writing awards in nonfiction, sf/fantasy, mystery, and romance genres, including several from the Romance Writers of America and Romantic Times BOOKreviews magazine, and the Cat Writers' Association. In 2008, RT BOOKreviews magazine named Carole a "pioneer of the publishing industry. Carole and husband Sam Douglas, a former art museum exhibitions director and kaleidoscope designer, are kept as pets by five stray cats and a dog in Fort Worth, Texas. Carole Nelson Douglas was inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame  in October.