Isabelle Drake

It’s still hot, pumpkin spice season may be on the horizon, but you have summer weekends left. Let’s craft one properly. Lets' do this quiz and make it happen. Pick your answer in each set and add up the points  You arrive at: 7 a.m., before another soul 11, like a civilized person 4 p.m., for the good light After dark You set up: Up by the dunes or in the middle of some trees, away from everyone Right at the water or wherever the best view is Wherever the umbrella or camp chair already is Wherever you can see everything that’s happening In the bag: Your laptop, which you swear you won’t open A paperback you’ll actually finish Three magazines you won’t Sunscreen, cash, and nothing else In your glass: A cold beer, no ceremony A thermos nobody gets to ask about Something frozen and ridiculous Whatever gets handed to you Your company: No one, gloriously One person who doesn’t need entertaining The whole loud crowd Someone you met an hour ago At sunset you’re: Asleep under a towel or b...

Daniel McKenzie walked away from the glittering underground world when he enlisted. Military service would give him purpose. Discipline. Control. Or so he thought. Back in his canyon farmhouse overlooking the LA coast, he's restless. After his best friend drags him to Tigers, one of the city's exclusive clubs and one of his old haunts, he finds himself back in the life he thought he'd left behind. A connection takes him deeper in and soon he is delivering intimate experiences people can't find anywhere else. Helping couples and singles discover new styles of physical intimacy. A husband who hasn't felt anything since the war. A wife who never confessed her desires. A woman who fled her hometown and the shaming memories there. All encounters contracted, consented to, and finished before the sheets are cold. He's skilled. He's needed. He's burned out. Months of shapeshifting for others leave him empty. When he retreats to the isolated Northern California m...

I spent a chunk of July doing something I'd been avoiding, reading my own blog. Not all of it. But enough. I'd been meaning to assess things and tidy the place up for over a year, and cleaning means going back through, and going back through means thinking, considering, and making decisions. I’ve been keeping this blog for over twenty years, so, yeah, a lot to think about and go through. I got to work. I deleted posts that no longer serve anyone: contests that closed a decade ago, giveaways for books that have since gone out of print, announcements about events that came and went while some of you were off living your best life elsewhere. Nobody needs a link to enter a drawing that ended in 2009. Or do they… No, they don’t. Next up, the labels. If you'd clicked one before, or looked at them, you might have found a mess. I had eighty-three of them. There were labels used once. There were three different ways of saying the same thing. I got them down to twenty-three, so n...

A character I named Belmont showed up in my book, Servant of the Undead, due to necessity. He's lumpy and easily over-looked but with time he grew on me. He's been to, lived in , and escaped, the place where Hayden, the poor struggling main character, is just now arriving. This section below was one of my favorites to write. It gave me the opportunity to consider how humor can function in horror. The laughs make the terribleness even more terrible.  Excerpt from  Mistress of the Undead Belmont pushed himself off the floor, shuffled to the bathroom, not bothering to flush the toilet after he pissed. Still naked, he made his way to the kitchen, set the kettle on, grabbed his French press. He reached into the cabinet over the sink for the bag of coffee beans but all he found was an empty space. Rolling onto the balls of his feet, he reached further back, felt around the vacant space, smacking the bottom of the cabinet. “Don’t bother looking. I drank it all.” Hayden froze. Waited ...

If you are a reader who also drinks, and if you're here, I'm going to assume yes on both counts, this cocktail was practically invented for you. If you go looking for this recipe online there are versions everywhere, and some of them have gone completely off the rails. Blue curaçao? Crème de menthe? We are not doing that. We're doing the version from Greg Seider, a New York bartender who also wrote Alchemy in a Glass, which means he has both the credentials and the vocabulary to be trusted. His Tequila Mockingbird is a spicy margarita riff built around something we don't use nearly enough in cocktails: watermelon. And I know, watermelon sounds like it should be easy, but it's actually a bit of a diva. Too little and you can't taste it. Too much and it waters everything down. Get it right, though, and you have something bright and juicy and just a little dangerous. The good news is you don't need a blender. Just a muddler, some fresh watermelon, a jalap...

1. It's the first real warm Saturday of the season. You: A) Drive to the nearest body of water with a tote bag full of snacks and a book you've been saving since March. B) Text five people "what are we doing today" and let chaos decide. C) Open every window, put something good on the speaker, and spend the morning just… existing in it. D) Start planning. Itinerary, reservations, the works. Summer doesn't organize itself. 2. Your summer drink is: A) Whatever's cold and comes with a little umbrella. B) Something spicy...a jalapeño margarita, obviously. C) A big glass of iced tea on the porch, no rush. D) Champagne. It's always the right answer. 3. Pick a summer shoe: A) Sandals you've had for six years that go with everything. B) Sneakers because you never know when you'll need to run toward something fun. C) Bare feet, honestly. D) Wedges. You didn't come here to be comfortable, you came here to look good. 4. Your ideal summer read: A) A big, sw...