So what would you say if one of the top writers in your genre asked you to be part of a new anthology all about that genre?

When Jordan Castillo Price (Jordan! Castillo! Price!) messaged me to see if I wanted to play in her sandpit, I think I broke my shift key conveying ‘yes’. Ten m/m paranormal authors, ten stories, incalculable amounts of sinister scares and ghostly goings-on, and a lovely big dose of gay romance to go with.

Here’s the deal:

Magic takes many forms. From malignant hexes to love charms gone amok, you’ll find a vast array of spells and curses, creatures and conjurings in this massive collection—not to mention a steamy dose of man-on-man action. Charmed and Dangerous features all-new stories of gay paranormal romance, supernatural fiction and urban fantasy by ten top m/m paranormal authors.

And the line-up. Which may have caused me to go running in circles and alarming the cat.

Rhys Ford – Dim Sum Asylum

Ginn Hale – Swift and the Black Dog

KJ Charles – A Queer Trade

Nicole Kimberling – Magically Delicious

Jordan Castillo Price – Everyone’s Afraid of Clowns

Jordan L. Hawk – The Thirteenth Hex

Charlie Cochet – The Soldati Prince

Lou Harper – One Hex Too Many

Andrea Speed – Josh of the Damned vs. the Bathroom of Doom

Astrid Amara – The Trouble With Hexes

A line-up of this calibre meant, of course, that the pressure was quite seriously on for a story. I chewed my nails; I may have uttered bad words (this will not come as a surprise to regular readers). And then I remembered something I’d been wanting to use for a while: the Victorian waste-paper trade.

Basically, the Victorians didn’t throw stuff away. If you’d finished with it, there was someone lower on the social ladder who’d take it off your hands and sell it. Old clothes, old bottles, old boxes and glass and rags. Bones and blood and broken things. Soot and ash. Dog excrement. (Seriously. ‘Pure collectors’ would pick it up and sell it to the tanners, who used it to make leather by soaking hides in what I can only describe as a dog-shit cocktail. If you were short of dogs, you could use pigeon crap instead, or simply resort to liquidised animal brains. Think about that next time you read a historical with a hero in gorgous sexy leather boots.)

The waste-paper trade, rather less revoltingly, was about selling on used paper. The waste-men collected printed matter, letters and documents, and sold them on to anyone with a use for paper: primarily shops and merchants to be used for wrapping or packing material. So if someone died, for example, rather than throwing out their old letters and documents, you’d get a waste-man to come and take it away for reuse, and he’d even pay you a few pennies for it.

Talk about plot bunnies. Huge amounts of Victorian fiction hinges on what happened to the paper. Novels are presented as bundles of letters, diaries, statements; plots are driven by purloined letters and missing wills. I’ve just written a Victorian-set romance that is all about hidden stories beneath written text. And here was the perfect set-up for a lost-paper story, just waiting for me.

Now, you may be thinking: Hang on, KJ, this paper thing sounds terribly sensible and environmental and all, but what story? Who? Why? Where is my paranormal romance?

So add the following…

…a terrifying and illegal style of magic that works by writing

…a warlock’s unexpected death, and a house clearance carried out before his apprentice can stop it

…a waste-man now in unwitting possession of a huge stack of very dangerous paper

…an apprentice warlock with cute freckles who needs to get it back before anything goes horribly wrong. (Yeah, right.)

I’m absolutely thrilled that my story, A Queer Trade, is part of this huge (as in massive, it’s about 180K words) new anthology, which publishes August 25th. Look out for it!

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

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KJ Charles is a writer and editor. Find her website and blog, or follow her on Twitter. Her next book is A Fashionable Indulgence, coming from Loveswept on 11th August.