By Christina Radish
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Laurell K. Hamilton signing her latest release Danse Macabre at Barnes & Noble in Long Beach, Calif. on July 12, 2006 |
Having achieved a level of success that most writers never even fathom, the collective work of best-selling author Laurell K. Hamilton (www.LaurellKHamilton.org) has become a pop culture phenomenon. Hamilton’s wildly popular, multi-genre Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series has developed legions of devoted followers since the release of Guilty Pleasures in 1994. With the latest installment, Danse Macabre (book 14), released this past June and debuting at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list, the 43-year-old St. Louis resident addresses the possibility that Anita could be pregnant, which is something that Hamilton feels was about time.
“She’s having sex with vampires and wereanimals, and they can’t get the usual diseases, as a general rule, so they don’t have to worry about that, but pregnancy is one of those things that’s still around,” says Hamilton, in an exclusive interview with MediaBlvd Magazine. “It was very interesting to watch Anita on the pregnancy thing because it made her look at the men in her life in a very different way. It’s a different criteria to look at them and go, ‘Who would be nice to go out with on a Saturday night? Who would be good to go clubbing with?’ And then, you look at that same group of men and go, ‘Who would be a good father?’ That’s a different list, of who would stand their ground and actually do this with you, and who you can see changing diapers. It gave me a whole new perspective on the characters, some of which I’ve worked with for over a decade. You get to see parts of the characters -- the men, and Anita -- that you haven’t seen before, which is really cool this far into a series.”
The fact that Anita Blake is not just your average woman makes her possible pregnancy that much more of an issue for her. She’s a federal marshal, she raises the dead for a living and she’s a vampire executioner, none of which are conducive to raising a child. And, to top it off, Anita also has to deal with the largest gathering of American master vampires in history, coming to St. Louis for the final performance of the first all-vampire dance troupe.
{quote_top}“In the midst of Anita worrying that she’s pregnant, you have these masters coming, and many of them have their own political agendas. So, while she’s going through one of the most major, intimate crises of her life, she’s also having to deal with vampire politics, which is never easy. It was very interesting to watch Anita have to do the very tough negotiating and the magical maneuvering, while she felt like her personal life was falling apart. It was a very hard book to write because I tend to be like a method actor. Anita was very distressed by this news and very emotionally upset, and I started getting really upset and very moody. I thought, ‘What is wrong with me?’ I finally realized, on this book, that to a certain extent, I adopt my character’s emotions. I really need Anita to go on vacation, so I can write a vacation book where we just go off to a tropical island and dance, or something. But, of course, it would be an Anita vacation, so something would go horribly wrong because I don’t think I could behave myself for that long.”
Success was not easy coming for Hamilton, who was even asked to leave the creative writing program she was enrolled in at college, instead opting for a degree in English literature and biology. “About two years into the program, I was asked to leave by the head of the department, as a ‘corrupting influence on the other students.’ It was a small Christian college and, though I had put in stories -- one was a vampire story and one was a horror story that even had sex in it -- she accepted me into the writing program. It took me two years to realize that she meant to convert me. She meant me to use my gift for good and not evil. I began to butt heads with her, after she stated in an upper level writing class, that all genre writing was trash and she would no longer accept it. Since that was all I wanted to write, that was a problem. I continued to write what I wanted to write and, about half-way through the semester, half the class was writing genre of some kind because I didn’t buckle.”
But, Hamilton’s conflict with that creative writing professor didn’t end there. “We had a moment in class where she said, ‘It’s all trash,’ and I raised my hand. I’m sure, by that time, she’d come to dread me raising my hand in class. I said, ‘Well, what about Tolkien?’ It was a Christian campus, so Tolkien got a pass. I said, ‘What about C.S. Lewis?,’ and, of course, C.S. Lewis got a pass. I said, ‘What about Shakespeare?’ She said, ‘What about Shakespeare?’ I said, ‘Well, A Midsummer Night’s Dream has fairies, Hamlet has the ghost, and you have witches in MacBeth. If you take out the supernatural, many of these plays fall apart.’ So, she gave me that. I said, ‘How about Dickens?’ She looked at me and said, ‘What about Dickens?’ I said, ‘Well, A Christmas Carol is a ghost story. And, Moby Dick is just a monster movie.’ That’s when she told me to shut up and sit down and, about two days later, I was called into her office to be told to leave the writing program. So, I’m not a big advocate of going to college to learn to write. I think you should go to college to learn how to think, and it also widens most people’s repertoire of what they read. As a writer, one of the most vital things you can do is read widely, not just in what you want to write, but read philosophy, read non-fiction. That’s what books are for, so you don’t have to go off to Timbuktu, since it’s really hard to do that, in between carpools or studying. Books are our window onto other worlds and other existences. It’s surprising, the number of people who want to be writers, who do not use books to the capacity that they could.”
Before she was making a living as a writer, Hamilton briefly counted herself as part of the masses of corporate America, as an art editor, even though she admits that she cannot draw. However, she quickly learned that lifestyle just did not suit her at all. “We artistic types don’t do well there. I was there for a very short amount of time and, while I was there, I wrote my first book. I would get up at 5 am and write before I went off to corporate America. I am not a morning person, but by the end of the day, after eight hours of work, I couldn’t think, let alone be creative, so if I was going to continue my writing, it had to be in the morning. I’d drag my butt up at 5 am, write for an hour or two, and then, I would get ready and go off to work. I wrote most of my first novel, two pages a day, five days a week, minimum, with no revising, as I went.”
In her experience, Hamilton believes that writers have a tendency to want everything to be perfect, which can keep their work from ever getting finished. “Perfect is what you do in re-writing. Perfect is not the first draft. I talk to a lot of writers across the country, and I’ve lost track of the number of people that probably have the perfect first chapter, or the perfect first three chapters, but they’ll never finish the book that they’ve been working on for years because it will never be perfect enough for them to get to the end of the story. For me, as a writer, the second draft is when you go back through and fill in the holes with the research. That changes some of the story, but by the time you get done, you have a book. It gives you the confidence you can actually do this. If you try to make it all perfect, you’ll never get those hundreds of pages, sitting beside your computer.”
For her debut novel, Nightseer -- the tale of a woman known as sorcerer, prophet and enchantress -- Hamilton admits that she did seven drafts, before it was finally ready to be published, in 1992. “I had done six drafts, and then, when I got accepted by an agent, I did a 7th draft and then sent it off. If I had tried to be perfect with my first draft, I doubt I’d have ever finished a book, let alone 20-something. For your first five or six books, I have what I call the 70/30 rule. 70% of any first draft is trash, and 30% is gold. But, you’ve got to write the whole 100% to get to that 30% because you don’t know where it is. It’s scattered throughout the garbage. 30% is keeper, but it’s studded in like raisins in your bread, and you’ve got to bake the whole loaf to get to the goodies.”
When talking about the origin for Anita Blake, Hamilton says that the character was a rarity for her, since Anita evolved out of specific goals she had, as a writer, in developing a long-term series. “Anita came out of reading hard-boiled detective fiction, for the first time, just after college. At that point, there were very few female writers out there, writing female hard-boiled detective characters. The male writers and male characters got to cuss, they got to kill people without any remorse, and they got to have sex, fairly casually and on stage. The women, if they killed anybody, had to feel really bad about it. If they had any sex, it was either off stage or very sanitized. And, they didn’t get to cuss. I thought, “God, this is unfair. How sexist is this?’ I wanted a character that could be as tough as the men, or tougher. I wanted a woman that could come in and make this inequality, as I saw it, go away. I may have over-compensated with Anita, but that was the grain of the idea.”
Once that spark was there, everything began to fall into place and there was no turning back. “I began to go back and look at mystery series and see how they were organized, and I realized that people get bored between book 5 and book 8, even if they keep going on with the series. Some people can keep the ball rolling, and the first book is as good as the 20th book, but very often, some spark seems to have left them. I thought, ‘What would make me bored by book 5?,’ and I knew I couldn’t do straight mystery, where you only have the mundane world to play in. I thought, ‘Well, I love vampires, zombies, ghouls, you name it. I love the monster movies Let’s make a world where that’s true.’ My history background is highly oriented toward politics, so I know how government and the law really works. I’m not, by any means, an expert, but it gave me an idea that I wanted to create a world where you plop the monsters down and they’re just real, and our society has to deal with them. And then, as I was doing all this research and thinking, I ended up coming across some articles on voodoo in some magazines, and I had never read anything about it before. That began to make me think, ‘What if you could raise the dead? Could that be a job?’”
“Originally, Anita was only going to raise the dead. She wasn’t going to be a vampire hunter. I have the beginnings of the first book somewhere and there are no vampires in it. The world was flat. Anita didn’t work as a character. Nothing worked. It wasn’t until I made her work with the police to help them on preternatural crimes, and included the vampire hunting, that she became alive, as a character. I knew I had hit it when she hit paper and began to attract other characters. If you put a character on paper, even in a test scene, and other secondary characters and plots gather to them, then you know you’ve struck gold. For me, it is character first, and world building second. The character has to work. When you get it right, other characters gather around like your main character is fire in the night, and they come warm their hands.”
As Hamilton expected, the addition of sex scenes in the Anita series is something that has become a topic of conversation, among fans and critics. Admitting that, over time, she has since lost all inhibitions when it comes to writing them, initially she was very embarrassed.
“I actually never meant to write sex scenes. I stated, loud and long that I would never have a vampire as a romantic lead. They’re a walking corpse. I believed that, sincerely, when I started this series. So, to get around that, since we were never going to have sex on paper, I thought I would make every kiss and every caress, so amazingly romantic that you wouldn’t need it. What I ended up doing, instead, was writing myself into a corner when, in book six (Killing Dance), we’d finally had enough foreplay and I suddenly had to do the deed on paper. I had described violence with the camera never wavering. I had described every kiss, in intimate detail, with the camera wavering. And, I thought, ‘What does it say about me that, for an actual intercourse scene, I want to do that 1940's pan to the sky?’ Well, it says that I’m very American. We use sex to sell everything. We have sexual innuendo everywhere. But, if you’re actually having sex, you will be hated, especially if you are too vocal about the fact that you’re having sex, and that sex is a good thing. You’re allowed to tease in America, but you’re not supposed to follow through.”
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Laurell K. Hamilton with her husband Jonathan at a book signing appearance held at Barnes & Noble in Long Beach, Calif. on July 12, 2006. |
“Somewhere between book 10 (Narcissus in Chains) and book 15, which I’m writing now, I pretty much lost my embarrassment. One of the things with the horror genre, if I’m still in the horror genre -- some people say I’m romance, other people say I’m mystery -- is that all sex is punished. If you actually have sex, it has to be bad sex, in some way, or something really horrible has to come out of it. If you’re going to have sex in my books, I want it to be good sex. I want it to be really fun sex, and I don’t want you to be punished afterwards. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with sex. Sex is a good and wonderful thing. But, I was raised in this society too, so it is also an uncomfortable thing.”
Having become one of the most popular authors on the planet means that Hamilton’s work is now ripe for adaptations and merchandising ventures. Dabel Brothers Productions (www.DabelBrothers.com) is publishing what they hope will become a monthly comic book adaptation of the Anita Blake series, starting with Guilty Pleasures in late July.
“I’m a very visual person, but I can’t draw, so I wanted to see somebody do the visuals of the books and the characters. The thought of it excited me, from the beginning, but it had to be the right person and the right company, so we were waiting for that to happen. There are still people out there who, as popular as the books are, haven’t read them, so the comic book will reach a new audience. But, also, for the long-time fans, as well as for me, it’s a visual to look at, to help solidify some of the scenes. It’s been very fun and very interesting watching the artwork come in, and going over the script. Thank God, my husband, Jonathan, is, as he puts it, a comic book geek because he’s been able to explain the process to me, where I would have been somewhat lost.”
{quote_middle}Hamilton’s husband is also working with her to develop Guilty Pleasures into script format, in the hopes that it will hit the big screen. “I find that writing scripts from scratch that are new ideas and new scenes is much easier for me, as opposed to actually taking the book and adapting it into a script. It’s like trying to re-breathe air, for me. Jonathan has a much easier time of taking the book and putting it into something that looks like a script. And, once it looks like a script, I can edit it. I have no idea why it’s so hard for me to look at the printed page of the book and try to visualize the script, but it is.”
“Scripts are mostly dialogue. You don’t have to do all the description and internal stuff. I love dialogue. Dialogue writes really fast. We’ve actually ended up coming up with ideas that are not related to the book series, that are just script ideas, because I’ve become enamored with the thought of writing pages that are mostly dialogue. I’m blessed that I’m a very fast writer, and I type incredibly fast. If you strip away to just dialogue, you can do pages so fast.”
With a growing legion of devoted fans for the Anita Blake series, after she had done five books in a row, back to back, as fast as she could write them, Hamilton knew that it was time to develop another series, to give herself a much-needed break from Anita. In 2000, she introduced readers to L.A. Detective Merry Gentry, aka Meredith NicEssus, a faerie princess of the Unseelie Court, where politics is a blood sport.
“One night, I had a job anxiety dream, but it was Anita’s job anxiety dream. I dreamed that Anita and Edward were trying to bodyguard somebody at a science fiction convention, except it was me and not Anita, and I was armed, and there were too many people and too many crowds. I literally woke up going, ‘Oh, my God, we’ll never make it. There’s too many people.’ Then, I thought, ‘This is not my life. I’ve got to write something else for a little while.’ So, I came up with several ideas for series and floated them, and Merry was the one that the publisher liked. I’m very glad that the publisher didn’t pick one of the other series ideas I had because, at that time, I didn’t know I was like a method actor, and so, I didn’t realize how much of the persona I adopt, when I’m writing a book. The other series was really dark, and I would not have wanted to live in that world, in that series.”
When creating Merry, Hamilton wanted a character that was not only different from Anita, but different from herself, and who was somebody with a new voice. “Merry was specifically done as older, so she’s 33. She’s over 30, and there’s something about a character, and a person, over 30. You just relax more, and you’re usually more at peace with yourself. I wanted a character that didn’t argue with me all the time because Anita always argues with me. I wanted a character that was more comfortable with her sexuality because, when I created the Merry series, Anita was still very uncomfortable with her sexuality, and so was I. I also wanted to create somebody who wasn’t a small-town, mid-western girl, which both I am and Anita is. What I didn’t realize was that, by making Merry’s voice more different from mine than Anita’s is, it makes it harder to write Merry because she really is her own character.”
In an interesting contradiction to Anita’s personal struggle with her possible pregnancy, Merry is desperate to become pregnant, so that she can become queen of the Unseelie Court and, in effect, save her own life. On December 12, Mistral’s Kiss, book five in the series, will see Merry further analyzing the life-altering choices that she faces.
“Book five is where Merry has finally found something worth fighting for. She’s fighting to be queen, but she doesn’t really want to be queen. She’s being queen because to not be queen is to die. And, there’s also nobody else good to take the throne, but her. But, it’s not really what she wants. In Mistral’s Kiss, she finally begins to look at her life and go, ‘What would I really want? If I had a choice, if I could do what I wanted with my life, what would I want to do? What do I want out of life?’ With Anita, I planned on her being monogamous and marrying early in the series, even though that so didn’t work. With Merry, I planned on her never choosing and very much playing the field. Maybe I’m perverse in my own character, but my characters are certainly perverse because, where I tried to make Anita monogamous and now she’s got multiple men, and she’s living with two on a regular basis, Merry is beginning to narrow her field down. It’s not that she’s stopped having sex, but her heart is beginning to choose who she wants, and I’m going, ‘No, you’re not supposed to want to be monogamous. What’s with that?’”
“It’s one of those nice ironies that the character that was supposed to do the white picket fence thing for me is probably going to be polyamorous for her entire life, or close to it. And, the character that was supposed to be polyamorous is looking around going, ‘You know, this is nice, but this would be nice too.’ Whoever gets Merry pregnant is who she has to marry, so we have the potential for setting up Merry, the readers, and the writer with a real heartbreaker. If Merry falls in love with someone and they aren’t the one that gets her pregnant, that will break my heart. Merry is setting us up so that she’s either going to get her heart’s desire, and it’s all going to work beautifully, like a fairy tale, or it’s going to break everyone’s heart. My hand to God, I do not know which way it’s going to go. Anita has taught me to take my cards off the table and not try to force my characters. I lose, anyway. Merry has finally found something she was willing to look out at me and argue about, which actually made me feel at home, since everybody in the Anita books argues with me.”
With two highly successful book series, Hamilton certainly has her plate full. But, whereas Anita is an open-ended series, the author sees a definite conclusion for Merry, sometime between books 8 and 15. “My original idea was that Merry’s a fairy tale, so she has to have a happily ever after ending. That may change, but that was my idea when I started it. I’m pretty sure we’re still ending in the same place. I have two endings for the series and, depending on what happens, it will determine which ending. They’re similar endings that are only slightly different. I know where I’m going with Merry, and have, from the beginning.”
“Anita is like an open-ended mystery series to me. I am still having a wonderful time, I’m still enjoying the characters, I’m learning new things about them and I’m learning new things about the world. One of the best things about this level of success is that you can write a series, as long as you want. Anita really helps me feel better. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve worked at it for over a decade, but it just seems wrong not to be doing an Anita book. Give me another decade, or so, and maybe I’ll have worked through the issues that drive me to the computer for Anita, or maybe not. Maybe I will never get to the point where the energy that drives me to write Anita ever dissipates. At this point, that’s how it feels. I have no grand finale for Anita. The series has gone so far off track of where I thought it would go that I don’t bet on it anymore. I just want everybody to be happy, and I’m not sure there’s any way for everybody to be happy.”
Something else that fans of Hamilton can expect this year is the release of a short story collection, Strange Candy (due out October 3), that is comprised of almost every short story the prolific writer has ever written. “I think half the collection has been previously published, and the other half has never seen the light of day. The first finished Anita story, Those Who Seek Forgiveness, is in there. I got wonderful rejection letters on that short story. I actually had an editor call me up on Thanksgiving, at my home, with my grandmother and my aunt there for my first grown-up Thanksgiving with my new husband. I was cooking the turkey, and he called to reject it. He loved the story, but he didn’t like that my zombies had a reason to rise from the grave, and I told him I wasn’t willing to have my zombies rise from the grave for no reason. It also has the Anita novelette The Girl Who Was Infatuated With Death, which appeared in Bite. It has several short stories set in the world of Nightseer, which are more traditional fantasy with elves, dwarves and dragons. It has the only superhero story I’ve ever done, Captain Housework, one of the first murder mysteries I ever wrote, another short story set in Anita’s world, that doesn’t actually feature any of the main characters and my only finished short science fiction story, I actually got one of my favorite rejections for. An editor said the story made her feel unclean. I was pretty pleased with that. It meant that the story worked.”
“Several of the stories are quite light and humorous, with a dark twist. They are definitely very different from what I write now, as my main stuff. The collection runs the gamut from as light and fluffy as I get, to almost as dark as I get. It’s a nice visit to how the inside of my mind works. It’s both very dark, and very funny.”
Once you achieve the level of success that Hamilton has currently attained, there is a certain amount of job security, but there is also a heightened expectation to continue to produce. “I love what I do, but it is a job and you have to treat it that way. I go to my office to work, so that I don’t get distracted because, like most writers, I’m a little bit ADHD. I have two desks -- one that actually looks out and had a window view, and another that stares at a blank wall. Some days, the concentration is just not good enough to have a window. I try to get to my desk between 8:30 and 9 o’clock, and I work until lunch, which is anywhere between 11 and 1, depending on what we’re doing. Then, I go back to work in the afternoon. I used to be very much devoted to one project at a time, which is still my preferred method of working, but, sometimes in the afternoon, I will switch projects, and then work until between 3:30 and 4. In the afternoon, I try to either get on the treadmill or lift weights, in the midst of doing homework with my daughter and trying to do dinner. Sometimes, if the muse is really hitting, I will go back for a couple of hours, after dinner.”
“When I first started out, my page count was two pages, minimum. My page count now is a minimum of between four and eight. Most days, knock on wood, I make more than that, if it’s my first draft, but eight pages is my preferred minimum per day. Because I do a page count rather than an amount of time, there are days where I’ll sit at the computer for 12 hours and not get my page count, and those days suck. And then, there are those glorious days where, two hours later, you have 10 or 20 pages, and those days are great.”
Secure in her job, and happy in her marriage and personal life, Hamilton admits that it has definitely led to an increase in productivity for her. “When you don’t realize you’re unhappy, it doesn’t really affect you that much. It’s only when you’ve realized the difference that you can really look back at it. I have to say, when I initially went through my first divorce, it almost sunk me. It was very hard because it was, in a way, very much a death -- a death of the life I thought I would lead, and the person I thought I was going to be with, the rest of my life. Being married to someone you actually want to spend a great deal of time with does mean that you don’t want to work in the evenings as much as you did. Looking back, I realize that I worked in the evenings as much as I did because I was miserable. It also made it easier to let him be with the baby. It was easier to go work out at the club and lift weights because I didn’t want to be home. If you’ve never been as happy as you are, and you’ve never had anybody that made you feel that good about yourself, it takes awhile to get used to. Jonathan goes with me on research trips. He really is my working partner. I come to a point in a book where I go, ‘I wonder how that will work.’ With my first husband, I would go to him and say, ‘I need to see if this bit of fight choreography will work,’ and he would look at me like, ‘You don’t want me to do that.’ I go to Jonathan and I go, ‘Okay, this is what I need you to do: stand there and see if I can reach you,’ and he doesn’t have a problem with it. He understands what I’m doing. He doesn’t look at me like I’ve lost my mind, or that I’m asking him something really weird, and I find that incredibly valuable.”
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Laurell K. Hamilton with her latest release Danse Macabre at a book signing appearance held at Barnes & Noble in Long Beach, Calif. on July 12, 2006. |
There are now more than 6 million copies in print of the Anita series, in 16 different languages. Such an overwhelming fan response is something that Hamilton is truly thankful for. “I am totally blown away by how many people have said that these books have helped them get through major life crises. We’ve had people say that reading the books has gotten them through the death of a child, or a loved one, and I can’t imagine. I write good books, but no work is that good. I am always deeply touched. I just told a good story, and the fact that it has touched people is amazing to me. One of the reasons they act so emotionally about it is that they really do feel a personal connection to the characters. The fact that I sit in a room by myself and play with my imaginary friends, and then it reaches out and touches and helps people, is amazing. One of the best things, for me, has been the number of people who have said they’ve gotten out of bad relationships because Anita wouldn’t have taken it. They have made better choices because they knew that this character would make that choice, and that’s an unexpected blessing. I didn’t think of Anita, or myself, as role models. The fact that the books help people learn how to be stronger in their own lives has been a very good, positive thing.”
“It wasn’t a purposeful message for my books, but with all the books, in both series, the main, underlying message is ‘You’re okay. As long as you’re not harming anybody else, you’re okay. Whatever you’re feeling, whatever you’re thinking, whatever drives you, as long as you’re not hurting anybody else, it’s okay and you’re okay. It’s okay to be who you are.’ That has certainly touched a cord with people.”
{quote_bottom}Raised at the poverty level, Hamilton knows how blessed she is now. “My only goal, as a writer, was to earn enough money to keep my daughter and I together, body and soul, with a half-decent living. You can’t plan on having this level of success. I thought I would be a mid-list writer who put out two books a year and made an okay living that was nothing to brag about. The fact that I am a New York Times best-selling author, and that I am getting all this interest, is not something I could have planned for. I’m just not egotistical enough for it. My goal was to have a series that I could continue to write, as long as I wanted, and that people would enjoy.”
Looking to the future, Hamilton would like to be able to focus on just one book series for awhile. But, at the same time, she has so many ideas that she knows that that probably wouldn’t last too long. “When Merry is finally tucked into bed and I’m down to one series, I think I’m really looking forward to writing just Anita. But, I think I will come to the point, like I did before, where I will need an imagination break, and so, I have some series ideas to do, down the road. I’m very lucky, as a writer. If I live to be 300 and never get another idea, I would still have plenty to be writing. At this point, I would love to just be able to write what I want to write and be as wildly popular as I am, or more. I am doing what I wanted to do, it’s just at a level I never anticipated doing it. I have the creative freedom.”
