Annette Blair’s Breaking News:  I just accepted an offer to write a contemporary comedic mystery series for Berkley Prime Crime! They’re still deciding on a name for the series but think ‘Stephanie Plum meets Bewitched.’  Not that I’m Janet Evanovich (unfreakingfortunately) but it’ll have my own brand of humor and yes, "something witchy this way comes."

The series is about a psychic fashion designer/soon to be a vintage dress shop owner, named Madeira, Maddy Cutler, who gets vibes, and snapshots in her mind’s eye, from vintage clothes that help her solve murders. (She’s psychometric, like my heroine in SEX AND THE PSYCHIC WITCH.)  Maddy’s mother was a witch, and, yes, eventually, the heroine will realize she has power too. The first book surrounds her sister’s wedding, an antique wedding dress, and the murder of the woman who wanted to take the bride’s place at the altar. I’m jubilant, psyched, ready to dance . . . except for the part of me curled up in a corner saying, "What did I do? What did I do?" 

Jumping out of one’s comfort zone is not always easy. I learned that when I wrote my first contemporary, THE KITCHEN WITCH, after nine historicals, but it was a great move creativity-wise, plus it put me on the bestseller lists and turned me into a paranormal comedy writer, which I love. I trust that jumping out of my comfort zone again to write mysteries will be just as rewarding. Plus I still get to keep writing bewitching romantic comedies.  Yay!

Change is always difficult, but change can be good as well. Sometimes that’s a hard pill to swallow when change is imminent, like now, with the blog. But the fact is that the Berkley Babes are so talented, there’s always a deadline looming, and it turned out that we all needed to strike a better balance.  We’re not really leaving you, because we all blog elsewhere. As a proud member of the delightful and talented Witchy Chicks, I’m extending a warm invitation from all of us–Candy Havens, Yasmine Galenorn, Linda Wisdom, Lisa Croll DiDio, Kate Austin, Madelyn Alt, Terese Ramin, and me, Annette Blair, to drop in and say hello.  http://witchychicks.blogspot.com/

Don’t forget that in a few weeks, August 7th to be exact, my newest releast, the first in my Triplet Witch Trilogy, SEX AND THE PSYCHIC WITCH, will be available.  Harmony, Destiny and Storm were introduced in THE SCOT, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE, so you might already know them.  In SEX AND THE PSYCHIC WITCH, the first triplet story is Harmony’s: 

He’s her psychic pot of gold . . . In an archaic island castle haunted by a malevolent spirit, the magnetic attraction between a psychometric witch and a sexy powerful castle-owner leads to the fulfillment of unspoken fantasies, and a struggle for dominance, in and out of bed.