"a calendar year's journey through the lives of couples who believe in love, live proud, and embrace the future" text over pink red white and blue swirl frosted cupcakes with sparkles and cover image of Frosting on the Cake 3: Still Crazy After All These Years by Karin Kallmaker

The Cupcakes are Everywhere!

Karin Kallmaker Book News, Frosting 3 - Still Crazy After All These Years 1 Comment

ON THE PAGE

It’s celebration time!
Frosting on the Cake 3 is now available everywhere. After recent court decisions, maybe it’s more important than ever that we find stories where our love survives the test of the good times and the bad. Stories of living proud, loving hard, and making it work.

Like me, they’re all crazy enough to believe in love and the future.

Get Crazy With It!

Enjoy the cake, the icing, the sprinkles and sparkles. As I say in the foreword, you can have whichever cupcake of delight you want, in the order you want, and when you want. You’re a grown up. Nobody has to know. Kidding aside, I’m done with people who think they get to police what and how other people read. No.

Here are all the stories in this volume of tasty treats that take place over a calendar year of life and love.

Starting in December…

  1. Making Up for Lost Time: December – Cookies and Kisses
  2. Warming Trend / My Lady Lipstick: January – Mona Lisa
  3. Captain of Industry: February – Extraordinary Thing
  4. Simply the Best: March – All That and a Milkshake
  5. Simply the Best: April – Reflections
  6. Wild Things: May – Having Faith
  7. Painted Moon: June – Living Canvas
  8. Roller Coaster: July – Heartline Roll
  9. Maybe Next Time: August – Turtles, Adagio
  10. Above Temptation: September – Kindling
  11. Because I Said So: October – The M-Word
  12. Car Pool: November – The World Heals at the Kitchen Table
  13. Paperback Romance: December – Merely Players
  14. Notes: “And Now for the Sprinkles on Top”

The Linkapalooza!

Hands down the fastest way to find it is to go to your favorite site and search for kallmaker frosting 3 crazy and look for the cupcakes.

I had hoped that “karin kallmaker is crazy” would work, but it’s not precise enough, even though it might be kinda true…

Sapphic Community Sites

 
Signed Paperback from the Author
Paperback and ebook from the lesbian-owned sapphic-community bookseller that carries many publishers and independent authors.

Shop at Bella Books

Retailers and Apps

Amazon / Kindle Around the World, paper, ebook, audio (pre-order)
 USA    UK    AUS    CAN    DEU    NL    ITL    ESP    FR    JPN    MX    BRZ    IND 

 
Dark-haired woman holds a headphone. In front of her in a cafe is her phone and a greyish blue cup of coffee on a matching saucer.

Audiobook Available July 22

Read by the fabulous Angela Dawe, you can pre-order at

The audio version will make its way slowly to library services like Hoopla and Libby. It just takes time.

Your Stars Make YOU a Star!

It cannot be overstated how much simple star ratings or written reviews matter to the visibility of sapphic stories for readers trying to find them. Wherever you read, give a sapphic story a rating. Your rating or review may be what balances the sly 1- and 2-star ratings from organized review bombers who are trying to use the algorithm to hide LGBTQ+ books.

Everyone who takes a moment to tell other readers how a story made them feel gets FIVE STARS from me!

four gold stars on wooden blocks against a light blue background. a fifth gold star is being placed next to them

You make the book world turn and give me a reason to stay at the keyboard. I’m still crazy after all these years – and I tend to think all y’all readers are too. As the saying goes, “normal” is not normal.

 

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array of brightly decorated cupcakes with sparkles and sprinkles

The Dysfunctional Family Reunion

Karin Kallmaker Book News, Frosting 3 - Still Crazy After All These Years 0 Comments

It’s really quite bothersome that I have no one to blame but myself.

If my novels are seen as children – and most of the time, that’s how it feels – I have more than 30 of them. All with two main characters, a bunch of friends, family, and the occasional villain. In this volume of bonus short stories, the earliest novel is from 1993 and the latest from 2023.

That’s 30 years of life. For 60 main characters. And the friends, family, and occasional villain for 60 characters.

To add to the “fun,” some of the novels already birthed extra short stories, so there were new friends, family, and occasional villains, plus the actual happenings in the short story. Wild Things, for example, has a short story in both previous Frosting volumes, and one in this one.

That explains why, when medication gifted me brain fog, I couldn’t think my way around any of the stories because of all the voices. That’s a lot of voices running around in my head in one long stream of consciousness event.

Because the thing is, when the brain fog cleared, it didn’t get a lot better. What a bunch of opinionated, delightful, vivid personalities all in one place! Living and loving loud and proud.

I mean, Who did this?

Me, that’s who.Read More

A wee puppy with a curly tail is climbing very steep brown stone stairs with caption "Fine. I won't give up. But I will cuss the entire time."

Bunny Screaming – Thoughts I Am Finding Comforting

Karin Kallmaker LIFE + STYLE 6 Comments

I’ve been mulling over what the people currently abusing their power want. What is it that they’re longing for as they ban books, cancel cancer research, and outlaw human beings? My conclusion is that they want a time based on the past where they were somehow even better off than they already are.

What do all those magical days of yore have in common? They ended. All of them. They couldn’t survive the future.

I’m reminding myself of this almost daily. What they want never survives. They always fail. Yes, they can wreak havoc and despair, and bludgeon entire ways of life, but in the end, their center cannot hold, as the poem goes.

Many times when reading the accounts of some new outrageous behavior this administration then denies ever happened, I realize it sounds so familiar. Steal a list of names to hunt for enemies so you can persecute them, for example. Watergate anyone? Tech today lets them do it from a computer instead of hiring burglars, but OMG, they’re no trickier than Nixon.

Why hold a red-hat protest in a park historically safe for gay or trans people? Same reason the white conehat people marched in Skokie. For people younger than me, the bottomless pit of spite and cruelty feels new, of course, but I see in it the same-old-tired same-old-thing.

Their entire game plan, that they think they wrote all by their own little selves, is stolen from old playbooks for ways of life that failed.

The echo of “Have you no decency? Have you no shame?” is loud in my head. By the way, if you haven’t watched Good Night, and Good Luck recently, treat yourself. You will recognize the tactics. Right out of history, including archival footage – watch how the lies withered, and the witch hunt failed.

None of which is to say we don’t fight and resist. We have to. And we’ll win, and our children will win. Again. The foreseeable outcomes of their recklessness toward science and health are nothing but bad, and I don’t mean to make light of that. It’s very real. I share in the mass despair of “Not this again, do we really have to win this again? Seriously?”

Maybe it’s because I make a living with creativity that, on top of all the reasons I find these people universally contemptible, I also feel a pitying disdain for their copy-paste goals stolen from failed regimes.

 
black girl holding stuffed bunny radiates magic light and power while yell - shot from Thor Love and Thunder

So many lies. So much intellectual dishonesty. So much bad faith. So much open intent to simply hurt people because they can. Sometimes you have to grab your bunny and scream, “There are four lights!” Yes, I know I’m mixing up fandoms and I don’t care.*

History tells us how to resist: in big and little ways. There is no single best way. Every way matters. Individuals make a difference and yet we are still strongest together.

They want our joy, and they can’t fucking have it. And, yes, I will cuss the entire time.
 
 

*Fine. Screenshot from Thor: Love and Thunder of a really pissed off Asgardian girl. Quote from Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 6, Episode 11 wherein Picard can gain safety if he’ll only say there are five lights.

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Banner with Cover, Black Velvet and that Little Boi Smile by Karin Kallmaker. Text: #1 Bestselling Short Story. A butch-femme lesbian romance about desire, discovery, and one night to forever

Black Velvet and a Little Boi Smile – The Linkapalooza

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ON THE PAGE

The exclusivity term at Kindle Unlimited has expired! You can get Black Velvet and a Little Boi Smile almost everywhere as of now.

One of the reasons I made this story exclusive to Amazon for the first 90 days was so those readers who rely on Kindle Unlimited would get a chance to read the story. And they did – it ranked #1 in its category during release week, and lingered in the top ten for the first 30 days. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Linkapalooza

Here’s the massive linkapalooza for it’s entire distribution.* Or, you can go to your favorite book place and search for “kallmaker black velvet.” The story is still only 99¢ in $US, or the equivalent in your local currency. If you read via your library it’s free.Read More

With its deep taproot The dandelion stays calm As its head explodes - from the Tricycle Haiku Challenge author and date obscured by paywall.

Dandelion Times: Our Heads Explode

Karin Kallmaker Business of Books 4 Comments

To my author friends, regardless of how you publish

When times are uncertain and consumer confidence plummets, perceived luxuries are the first things people give up. Books, movies, subscriptions, branded merch/clothing, and travel, to name a few.

Boycotts are one thing. Economic chaos and mass sudden unemployment are another thing, and they are very bad news for anyone whose income is from the “luxury” sectors. We are having Lockdown 2020 rolled together with Global Economic Crisis 2008 and post-9/11 all at once.

This chaos at home causes a chaos tsunami around the world which rolls over us all again at home. And so on. We’re not isolated.

Some of the sales results we are seeing aren’t boycotts. They’re economic anxiety, and they are beyond our control. That’s a hard thing to accept. I know – I’ve had to accept many changes in my 35+ year career and it’s not fun.

Hopes and dreams are being disrupted everywhere. IMHO, it’s going to get worse before it might get better.

Control what you can: your work, your plans to stay safe, your connections to other people, and the ground on which you stand.

Love and support to all.

(The pictured quote is from the Tricycle Haiku Challenge. Author and date are obscured by paywall.)

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