Hello all,
So a wonderful author that we reviewed her book Midnight Magick came to us regarding doing a guest post. Melanie and I will never turn an author away so we jumped on the bandwagon.
So without further Ado, please welcome Ms. Katerina Martinez as she talks about herself and how Wicca is not only part of her book but a part of who she is.
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The Siren Song of the Paranormal
As a Wiccan and a firm believer in the pulse of the invisible, it’s no wonder why my predilections as a writer draw me to the paranormal. We as a species are fascinated by the myths and legends that humanity’s ancient past has cooked up, and can we be blamed? The world is so ordinary! Fantasizing about vampires and werewolves and witches living in the same ordinary world, sometimes dealing with the same ordinary problems we have (paying rent, relationships, picking the right outfit) adds a little spice to our existence. At least, that’s the way I see it, and it’s the reason why I write what I write. I can tell you where it started (it being my own personal love affair with contemporary paranormal fiction) but I want to tell you about a terrible experience I had as a child in one of the houses I used to live in.
There was a storage closet at the end of a corridor in my house, adjacent to my bedroom. It had no door and was full of old appliances, toys, clothes, that kind of thing. I’m not sure when the first incident was, sometime around my eighth birthday, but I started seeing people walking out of that storage closet at night. They’d take a step into the hall, look into my bedroom—always black silhouettes—and continue their walk to nowhere. We moved before I turned nine, but the nightmares didn’t stop until… well, they haven’t. I mean, I don’t have them as often, but they still come occasionally.
Yes, life is ordinary. Maybe I imagined the things I saw as a child. Children are very impressionable, after all. But what if I really did see something I shouldn’t have seen? I’m not going to call them ghosts or spirits, but what if…? Ultimately, that’s what a writer does. We ask what if. So now I write books drawing from my own experiences, injecting a healthy dose of imagination into them!
Contemporary paranormal fiction is a lot different to what it was like in the 70’s and 80’s. Back then, vampires, werewolves and witches belonged in the horror genre, but we’ve romanticized all that now and turned them into sexy mockeries of real people; just fantastic enough to be imagined, but real enough to be relatable. We’ve all watched shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which I’ll argue was the first show to really turn paranormal creatures into creatures we can relate to) and Charmed. More recently shows are surfacing like Supernatural, the Witches of East End, True Blood and the Vampire Diaries to name a few. But TV, I feel, isn’t doing the paranormal subgenre justice like it used to.
I remember when The Craft came out and squealing with glee as I walked into the theatre to watch it. I was a Wiccan by then, so watching a movie where they heavily fantasized real witchcraft was like my call to action. I always knew I wanted to be a storyteller, but I’d never done anything about it until after watching that movie. In many ways Midnight Magick is my love letter to the Craft (if you’ve read my book/ watched the movie you’ll immediately see why), and it’s because that movie got it all right. Since then, many shows and movies I’ve watched are lackluster at best. Luckily, this is where written fiction picks the ball up and drives it home!
Many of the best TV shows and movies are adaptations of written fiction—a trend that’s occurring more and more these days—which makes this a very exciting time for any fiction writer worth her salt. I might be new to the world of being an Indie Author, but I’ve spent many years researching the real occult world (witches, demons, myths and legends) and I want to bring all of this knowledge to the table in an exciting and unique way. Thrills, mysteries, forbidden fruits and dark temptations all wrapped up in a cozy blanket of accountability for one’s actions are the kinds of elements I truly enjoy out of a good paranormal story, and that’s exactly what I plan to deliver with future works.
If you’ve read Midnight Magick and enjoyed it, that’s awesome! Stay tuned because I’m working on many more stories, each sharper than the last (including a juicy sequel—or four). And if you haven’t signed up to my exclusive Inner Circle yet, click here and get the details and deals no one else gets!
Thanks for reading my post and thanks to my lovely hostesses for having me! I hope to write for you guys again soon!
Kat
