The idea to start Parisian Phoenix Publishing came as a fake publisher on a design project Gayle Hendricks, our art director, did for the faculty art show at school. She thought it’d be cool to design a box set for the chick lit/horror novels that I was pitching to New York City agents at the time. She needed a publisher, so she invented one.

I thought, amidst my pandemic angst, I would publish my novels as a way to preserve them in an age where technology rapidly changes and computer files corrupt. Somehow, it snowballed.

My self publishing project became a vanity press as I enlisted the help of friends. That vanity press became a real publisher as we covered more genres and solicited submissions from the outside world for our nonfiction anthology.

But I haven’t addressed why my Fashion and Fiends series mixes elements of “chick lit” with horror…