Her novel ‘Middlewitch’ could be described as Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Jeeves and Wooster and was inspired by her life in a small English village, although naturally there are no witches or ghosts there—as far as she knows. She should perhaps add that none of the characters bear any resemblance to her friends and neighbours—particularly those in the Women’s Institute.

She has won prizes in several major literary competitions and many of her stories and articles have been published in popular magazines including The People’s Friend, The Weekly News and The New Writer. Other publications include Space and Time, Bards and Sages, Abandoned Towers, Big Pulp, Glassfire, Expanded Horizons, Sniplits, Woman’s Weekly, Outercast, Hackwriters, The Ranfurly Review and others. Her stories also appear in the Out of Line Human Rights Anthology 2009, Little Sisters Mystery Anthology and the upcoming Sonar 4 and Absent Willow Review anthologies.

Being a witch isn’t always easy. Alicia Meldrew has managed to learn love potions with only one real mistake, and that was hardly her fault. She can whip up a mean maths retention spell, but it’s not all cake and roses. Take dating, for instance. As Alicia herself puts it, how does one even bring it up? “Hobbies? Yes, I usually practise the black arts on Mondays, Thursdays and every other weekend. You?”

Alicia is a young witch with a mission: to protect the citizens of Middlewitch, a sleepy little hamlet consisting mostly of a church, a senior citizen’s home, a pub, and two constables. You’d think such a small town wouldn’t have problems with dark forces, but you’d be wrong. With the help of her cats, Domino and Tango, the Women’s Institute, and even the Vicar, Alicia faces down demons, vampires, satanists, an American…and even the City.

She finally has a boyfriend, but is she really able to learn to share her life with James? And if she can, is she strong enough to learn to get on with his mother?

E. Grace Diehl started devouring folklore and fairytale anthologies at a very early age, and her folktale habit has only gotten worse with the propagation of online collections. She often used world folklore in English translation as a teaching tool when she taught high school ESL (English as a second language) in Japan. Her bachelor of arts degree was in Musical Theatre, and in the course of her studies she played the parts of fairies, damsels in distress, and even the odd toad. She is currently working on an MFA in Asian Performance and can add the Chinese folktale heroine White Snake to the list. Naturally, folk and faerie tales have so strong a foothold in her that they can’t help but come out in the stories that escape her pen. Her other literary influences include William Shakespeare, Dr. Seuss, and Niel Gaiman. Kinlea Keeper is the first in a series of mixed-folklore/fantasy stories about Keepers and Haneth’s End. The series community can be found at http://kinleakeeper.com and the author’s personal homepage (which details her other writing and acting work) can be found at http://worldsofwords.org.

Kinlea Waltham has spent his entire life being told he’s dying. He’s never left his house or made a single friend. Everything changes when his parents send him to stay with family friends in the country (to “die in cleaner air”), and his hosts tell him that he is not actually ill. Instead, he discovers that he has been cursed with a powerful enchantment.

Born to be the Keeper of Haneth’s End, a small but pivotal corner of the world’s magical realm, he must stand up to enemies he can’t understand in order to protect everything he loves. His enemies want something besides Kinlea’s death, but he’s not sure what. Their perplexing actions endanger his Keep, the world, and even magic itself. It’s his job to stop them, for without Kinlea to stand in the way, everything might fold in upon itself, and the world might have to learn the true meaning of the words “the end.”