Look Who's Here! It's Katey Hawthorne And Another Countdown To GRL Celebration Giveaway!

I absolutely love working with illustrators. Every book needs a cover, so when I first created The Dangers of Fairy Compacts as a free read on a prompt from Miya Kressin for the Goodreads MM Romance group a few years back, I knew just the kind of thing I needed for a cover image.

Luckily, Courtney Bernard was willing to work with me and provide a perfect image to describe the burgeoning and occasionally ridiculous relationship between my two main characters, the fairy Aeron and the human Tammas.

But when it came to the sequels, I knew I wanted to take it further and get some internal illustrations happening. When I think of fairies, I think of visuals; from the Cottingley hoax photos that tricked even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the modern works of everyone from Brian and Wendy Froud to Amy Brown—there are just certain images that appear in the mind when I hear the word ‘fairy’. (Not all of them are pleasant or pretty, but that’s another issue for another time.)

So I contacted an illustrator with my proposal and was lucky to find Ruxandra Lache interested in working on a queer fairy/human romance story with me—lucky me! We talked about some of the possibilities for scenes to illustrate from the second installment, Life as a Fairy Thrall, and what she came up with… well, here’s a smallish version of one, just to show you what I mean.

When Ruxandra sent me the sketches for this picture, the scene really came to life. She’d gotten the bare-bones, unedited version from me to help her envision the scene, but when I got her finished image, certain details caught my eye that took it to another level for me. Lovers reunited, flashy wings, cool, soothing water, all the good stuff was that much more real to me thanks to Ruxandra’s vision.

And that’s why we’re working together on the third and final installment of the Fairy Compacts series right now. Fairy Bound will be available next month, and her illustrations are pure magic—inspiring me to be a much better writer, too. Check out her painting for the cover and—well, you’ll see what I mean.

Now that’s what I call a fae tree house.

They say you should be careful when you make a bargain with the fae… and maybe so. But with pretties like this, who can resist?

The last book is coming out next month, but there are two out already–the first of which is free. Here are the buy links for the two extant ones:

1. The Dangers of Fairy Compacts (FREE READ)

2. Life as a Fairy Thrall

And the WATCH THIS SPACE ad for the next and FINAL one:

3. Fairy Bound

THE GIVEAWAY: THIS CONTEST IS NOW CLOSED