Karen L. Mead

Welcome to Karen’s home on the web. Back in ye olden tymes, Karen wanted to pursue a career in animation, but that didn’t work out. She went back to school for the humanities and graduated from SUNY Albany with a BA in English. For some reason, she then decided to become a professional webcomic artist; this did not go quite the way Karen planned. Nevertheless, she created a comic and posted it online for several years.

Eventually she kind of fell into writing for newspapers and ended up writing and editing for two local weekly papers. Newspaper work was challenging, but very satisfying. Eventually, after a few years, she left newspapers to a)have a kid and b)explore writing novels.

Karen took the characters and settings that she had developed years ago in her comics and brought them to a new genre with Demonic Café (originally called The Familiar Series), an urban fantasy novel series. She is currently working on Book 6 in that series. She also publishes other urban fantasy works, like the parody novella Penguin of Fortune and an upcoming Mermaid book.

Karen would love to go back to the world of comics and illustration someday, but for now, she’s kept busy by her novels and the need to get dinner on the table occasionally. She also spent some of her time getting a Master’s Degree in English and teaching as an Adjunct Professor at a local university, except managed to time it so that she started teaching RIGHT when every college student in existence started writing all of their papers with AI; timing this bad is actually kind of special.

She lives on Long Island, New York with her husband, daughter, and zero cats. She would like to have a cat someday, but for now she has to make due with two greedy guinea pigs.

Want to email Karen, obviously about turning one of her books into an epic HBO drama that will be SO MUCH BETTER than Game of Thrones?? Drop her a line at karenlmead99 [at] gmail.com.