Julie Particka Gets Comfy

Hi all! I'm Julie Particka, author of the Paranormal Response Team series (Book 1--Pretty Souls is available now from Decadent Publishing). I also write adult fiction under another name, but I talk about that a lot as is, so I'm going to stick with being this me while I'm here. Hope that's okay.

Honestly I hate introductory posts. I'd much rather just settle into a new place and get comfy. So I'm going to pretend it's just you and me hanging out.

You: Tell me about yourself.

Me: I'm the youngest of six kids and the only one that was planned. No, seriously. My five siblings were born in a six-year span, and then my parents waited seven years to have me. I look at it this way, they're Polish and Catholic. It took them five times to figure out what they were doing and at that point, the church kept telling them not to stop.

Anyway, basically I was raised in an environment with five moms (fortunately my brother never took on the mantle of playing dad)...which messes with a kid's head a bit. (That whole "it takes a village" thing? Yeah, I don't buy it.) Anyway, I tended to spend a lot of time with books to escape the everyday, and in the process fell in love with the...non-everyday. Sci-fi, fantasy, talking animals...I ate it all up (at different times).

After years of trying to be all serious and Plan B about my future, plan A (writing) started to crop up more and more. Then I ended up a stay-at-home mom and decided I was taking the opportunity to give Plan A a chance.

You: LOL that's awesome. So tell me about Pretty Souls and the Paranormal Response Team.

The PRT came into being in a rather bass-ackwards way. My husband and I were watching a show called The Middleman (never heard of it? Don't worry, not many have. Hence why it was canceled.) and it had the tagline "Saving the world so you don't have to". Which also happens to be the tagline for a series of books by a woman who used to be in my writing group. We started talking about how taglines get re-used and blah, blah, blah. And, somewhere in this conversation, I changed the tagline to "Saving the world before breakfast". (Yeah, I think I might have been hungry at the time.) Anyway, I liked it so much I wrote it down and pinned it to my handy-dandy little board.

I was working on a different project at the time, but the tagline kept staring at me. Little by little pieces started to fall into place. First, I knew it had to be about teenagers. Somehow, the "before breakfast" thing just screamed "before school" to me. Then I had this image of a group arguing about naming their little "super group" (which is basically the naming scene that made it into the book). And then two of my nieces came into play.

We were at a family party, and I was watching them and thought to myself "They could be sisters, but they aren't." It was a total lightbulb moment. So I have two foster sisters and I knew there was going to be a supernatural element somehow. Generally, werewolves and vampires are shown as enemies in fiction, and I loved the idea of going against that stereotype. That's where the PRT came from. It's envisioned as a 5 book series (I'm hoping to submit book 2 this fall).

Pretty Souls is the first book, and really anything I tell you is going to be what is in the trailer. So just to make things pretty, go ahead and check this out.

If you hate trailers, the book deals with my two heroines--Elle and Cass--tracking down a demon spawn who is ripping the souls from people in their town. Along the way they have to deal with school, tutors, bullies, and boy troubles. It's available from Decadent Publishing as well as Amazon and a bunch of other places. I hope you'll check it out!