By Christina Radish

Photo by Timony Siobhan

With numerous short stories that have appeared in Realms of Fantasy and Weird Tales magazine, among other publications, and four published Kitty books to her credit, Vaughn is juggling work on the 7^th Kitty novel with contributions for the Wild Cards series, edited by George R.R. Martin. Vaughn recently spoke with MediaBlvd Magazine to give hints about what might be going on in Kitty’s world, in the future.

MediaBlvd Magazine> How long have you been writing, and have you had any actual training?

Carrie Vaughn> I’ve been writing my whole life. I’m one of those kids that scribbled stories and things when I was very young. I just kept at it. I had no real training. I went to the Odyssey writing workshop, 10 years ago (I was there in 1998), which is a 6-week summer writing workshop with a lot of group critiquing. Everybody writes stories and then critiques each other’s work. But, Odyssey also has a lot of instruction from Jeanne Cavelos, who is a former editor at Dell, and that’s probably the most I have had, in the way of training. Mostly, it’s been a lot of peer critiquing and review, and just writing a ton. I tell people who ask about getting MFA’s or taking creative writing classes that, if you have the self-motivation to sit down and do it yourself, you can learn just as much. My degrees are in English Literature, so I did a lot of reading to figure out how other people did it.

MediaBlvd> When did you first know that you wanted to make a full-time career out of writing?

Carrie> Probably in college, just because I decided there was really nothing else that interested me, career wise. I also didn’t really have anyone around me, telling me how hard it would be to make a living at writing. I just knew that it could be done, so I decided I wanted to do it. I wanted to have a career that I loved doing. I didn’t want to just be in it for the money. So when I graduated from my undergraduate college years, I really started in earnest. I started mailing out stories and working on novels. It still took a long time, and I worked day jobs in the meantime. I decided pretty young that it’s what I wanted to do, but success is unpredictable. You don’t know how much money you’re going to make, from year to year. A lot of it is really arbitrary. When you see that firsthand, it can be really scary, and I was just working in total ignorance. I just assumed, “Here’s how you do it. Here’s step #1, here’s step #2. It’s taking a little longer than I thought, but I’ll get there.” There really was nothing else I wanted to do. The other thing about writing is that there are lots of different kinds of writing. Non-fiction is much more profitable, at least from a day-to-day working standpoint. If you’re writing magazine articles, that kind of non-fiction pays a lot better than fiction. I was really setting myself up for a difficult road. I didn’t just want to write. I wanted to write fiction.

MediaBlvd> In what ways did your background and childhood influence your writing?

Carrie> I’m a military brat, which I think had a huge impact, not just traveling around the country, living in a lot of different places, but also having to rely on myself, for a lot of things. When you’re always moving, you’re always being uprooted. You have to make new friends and start a new school. So, I’ve noticed that my immediate family is very close-knit because they’ve been the only continuous, stable things, throughout my childhood. My younger brother and I are very close. I just learned to become very self-reliant in entertaining myself on the long car rides, during moves and for vacations. Just being in a new place, I developed a very active imagination and a very internal, thoughtful life. I’m sure a psychologist would have a lot to say about that, but it’s a way to help yourself adapt to new surroundings. You can build up that internal life a little bit, so you have an anchor. It’s something that keeps you going, from place to place and from move to move. My parents were also very encouraging. They really appreciate the arts, and really encouraged my brother and I to pursue the arts. My brother is a set designer for the theater. And, they always took us to museums and concerts, and things like that. They were very encouraging of us to go out and explore and, because of that, I explored a lot of different things. I never really focused on one thing. When you’re a writer, you don’t have to know any one thing real well, but if you know about a lot of different things, that can be very helpful because it gives you more to write about and you know where to go to look for more information. Everything you know and experience becomes fodder for your stories.

MediaBlvd> Did you have an interest in werewolves, vampires and other creatures, when you were a child?

Carrie> No, not really. I’m a huge science fiction and fantasy fan, from a very young age. My parents were both science fiction readers, so I grew up watching Star Trek and Star Wars. I have fond memories of watching Clash of the Titans. I grew up in the 70's and 80's, and the whole vampire/werewolf thing wasn’t as big. Vampires were still limited to the old Dracula image. Anne Rice hadn’t really hit bit yet, and it hadn’t gotten beyond that. With werewolves, it was American Werewolf in London and The Howling, and the really grotesque, Jekyll and Hyde creature template. There wasn’t a whole lot of variety, so I wasn’t very interested. I thought I was going to be a hard science fiction writer, at that age. I thought I was going to write space stories, like Arthur C. Clarke. My interest in it developed really late, and it developed more as wanting to comment on what other people were doing. I saw the same stereotypes being done, over and over again, and it just was not very interesting. I became interested in it, just for the sake of twisting it and seeing what different things I could do with it.

MediaBlvd> Why do you think stories about that sort of thing have become so popular?

Carrie> I don’t know. That’s a really good question. There were several different stories, in a couple of different genres. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series became very popular, at about the same time, and I think that really expanded the way people looked at heroines in those stories. Before then, the women characters were always the Mina Harker, fainting victim. Those characters became a vehicle for telling stories about strong women characters, and I think that really resonated with people and really made those stories popular. Vampires and werewolves, and the whole paranormal genre, became a really good way to talk about and depict strong women characters.

MediaBlvd> How long did it take you to get a publisher seriously interested in your work?

Carrie> It depends on where you count the starting point. Kitty and the Midnight Hour was actually the fourth book that I tried to get published. The first three were not paranormal. They were all traditional fantasy. But, I went the standard, traditional route to get published. I wrote the book, found an agent, the agent shopped it around to different publishers, and Warner Books (now Grand Central Publishing) made the best offer. Their first contract was for two books. They bought Kitty and the Midnight Hour, which I had already written, and a sequel to that, which I then had to write, after we signed the contract. That’s pretty much the standard way that it works. You find a publisher who’s interested, and then they publish it. Hopefully, they like it enough that they want more, and then you write more. Once I found the agent, it happened very quickly. It took me a couple of years to find a good agent, but he sold the book within about six or seven months.

MediaBlvd> When you wrote the first Kitty book, had you always thought that there might be more books about her?

Carrie> Kitty got her start as a short story. I got the idea and thought, “This is such a silly idea, I couldn’t possibly sustain it for an entire novel.” So, I wrote a short story and I should have known better, at the time, because my first draft of the short story was way too long. There was just too much stuff in there. I managed to cut it down, sold the story to Weird Tales, and it was published in 2001. At that point, I still had a ton of ideas of what this character could do, but I didn’t think that people would get into it, all that much. But then, Weird Tales asked for another story, so I wrote another story for them. By that time, I had the character’s whole life all mapped out. I knew exactly what had happened. I had to have some kind of conflict and story arc and, once I had that settled, I wrote the novel very quickly. And, there were all these ideas that just didn’t fit in the first novel. So I put them in a computer file, and had a notebook full of notes. I thought, “If I can manage to sell this one, maybe I’ll write another one.” Nowadays, it happens quite a lot that, when publishers buy a novel, they want to know if there’s a sequel. It’s a way for them to build up name recognition, and build a brand. So when my agent got it, he shopped it to publishers, and they wanted to know if there was a possibility for sequels. I sat down and wrote outlines for three more novels after that, just to show that it could be a series.

MediaBlvd> When you made the decision to evolve those short stories into a full novel, was it something you were confident that you could do?

Carrie> I was pretty confident that I could. I waited until I had an arc, and that arc ended up being her coming of age. She starts the radio show, and then that starts this avalanche of her, realizing that she has to get out on her own and find the courage to do so. It’s a really classic coming of age story. And, once I had that story, I could use that as a frame to put all of the other events into. I was pretty confident, mostly because I felt like so much of it was already there in my head. I just had to give it a shape.

MediaBlvd> Was there a specific inspiration for Kitty, originally?

Carrie> It was a little spark that grew. Something that characterizes all of the paranormal heroines, from the mid to late 90's, is the soap opera nature of the drama. There are very entangled relationship problems. I was working in a bookstore, at the time, and Dr. Laura had just published her first book, 10 Stupid Things Women Do To Mess Up Their Lives. I hate that book, I hated that title, and I had a real hate for Dr. Laura. But, thinking about the whole paranormal thing that was starting to happen then, I realized that Dr. Laura would have absolutely no idea what to do with the problems of Buffy Summers, if she called in to her radio show with her relationship issues. Dr. Laura would just be speechless. But in a world with vampires and werewolves, they would have to have their own call-in, radio advice show. And that’s pretty much exactly where it started. I decided that Kitty was a werewolf because I was tired of vampires, and I didn’t think I had anything new or interesting to say about them. And a werewolf named Kitty is just too much fun. The thought I had was, “This is completely ridiculous. Nobody will buy this.” But, what I discovered was that the format of the radio show just opens it wide up. I can talk about and comment on anything. I wasn’t interested in vampires and werewolves, per se, but I am interested in commenting on the way that they’re presented and perceived. The radio show turned out to be absolutely perfect for analyzing those stereotypes. And Kitty turned out to be such an interesting character that it really carries the whole thing. She’s so much fun to write about. I wasn’t expecting to have all of these different avenues to explore.

MediaBlvd> Did you have any specific goals to make Kitty different from all the other characters in the urban fantasy genre?

Carrie> I did. I wanted her to not be like the character from Underworld. I didn’t want her to be so violent and brutal, kicking ass and taking names, and toting a gun. I wanted her to be very normal. She doesn’t want to get into fights. She actually considers herself to be kind of a coward. She’d rather avoid fights. I didn’t want her to be the total stereotypical, kick-ass, leather-clad heroine. I wanted her to be just a normal, non-violent person. I’ve had people comment that they’re really surprised when they find out that she’s a submissive member of the pack. She’s not an Alpha. It’s people’s default to write about strong characters, and make them the alphas, and make them the most powerful person in the room. I didn’t want to do that with her because it wasn’t as real to me. Now, she’s turned out to be a very strong character, but she’s strong in different ways. She’s not as confrontational as a lot of those other characters are.

 MediaBlvd> Does the humor in the books come from you, or is that something that has evolved form the character?

Carrie> A lot of it has evolved from the character. I don’t think I’m all that funny of a person. I appreciate a really great sense of humor. I appreciate really great comedy. The comedy of Monty Python and The Muppet Show was a really formative part of my childhood -- humor that is funny, in itself, but is also a commentary on the world. I can’t tell you where, specifically, it comes from because, most of the time, I’m kind of quiet and I let other people make the jokes. I might have a pithy comment, here and there. With Kitty, part of it is that I decided, early on, that she’s a real big-mouth. She’s a radio DJ. She can’t shut up. It’s her job to run her mouth and talk. It’s a first person narrative and, the first time I started writing, I would have her thinking all of these asides, and then I realized, “No, she wouldn’t be thinking that, she’d actually say it because she’s that much of a big mouth.” When somebody says something that, normally, nobody would ever say, that, in itself, becomes funny. And it’s ballooned since then. It’s gotten totally out of control. But, I really enjoy it. The humor comes out of the characters and the situations. I consider my main characters pretty intelligent, witty people. If you get people like that in really bizarre situations, they’re going to say funny things.

MediaBlvd> It is often said that there is a part of every author in their characters. Do you think that Kitty is like you at all?

Carrie> It’s really hard for me to comment on that because I’m not quite sure how other people see me, so I’m not sure which parts of me people would see in her. What I have found is that people who don’t know me quite as well see a lot more of me in Kitty than people who know me very well. My very close friends and family say that they don’t see me in Kitty at all, but acquaintances say that they do, which tells me that maybe a lot of my surface personality is in there. I can tell you the way that I think we’re different. Kitty is much more outgoing and brazen. She talks a lot more. In some ways, she carries herself with a lot more confidence and, in other ways, maybe she doesn’t. That’s a way that we are kind of similar. You have to have a certain amount of confidence just to want to be a published writer. But, at the same time, there’s a lot of insecurity there. I’m an English major, and she’s an English major. I did that on purpose because I wanted to be able to insert my own literary analyses and book references, and things like that. To some extent, all of my characters start out being me, just because it’s me sitting there going, “What would I do, if I were in this situation?” But then, that has to turn into, “If I were this person, what would I do in that situation?” So, the character changes quite a bit. You add things and you subtract things, in order to get the kind of character you need for the book.

MediaBlvd> In Book 3, Kitty Takes a Holiday, Kitty had to take more of a leadership role, in helping Ben. Was that a natural progression or her character, or was that a situation you intentionally wanted to put her in?

Carrie> Both. I wanted a situation where she had to nurse somebody she cared about, through that particular hardship. It was a natural step along the journey into being a stronger person, and that’s been the whole point of the series.

MediaBlvd> Did you feel it was time for Kitty to have a boyfriend?

Carrie> Yes, I wanted Kitty to have a boyfriend. A lot of book series set up these romantic triangles, quadrangles or octagons, that become pretty unbelievable, after awhile. I wanted to blow right through that and tell a story about people who are in a relationship and actually trying to make it work. Being in a happy relationship isn’t necessarily the end of the story.

MediaBlvd> Are the love scenes easier or more difficult to write than you expected them to be?

Carrie> The most difficult part about them is knowing where to fade to black, go talk about something else for awhile, and then come back. As a reader, I’m not really fond of really explicit sex scenes unless, for whatever reason, it’s really appropriate to the plot, and something interesting actually happens during the scene, rather than just having it be a titillating description of two people having sex. So I tend to move off stage for a lot of that, which makes it easier. The other hard part about it is just finding new, non-cliched ways to describe things. There actually exists a book, called The Romance Writer’s Phrase Book, that gives you set phrases and words to describe various things that might show up in such a scene. So I try to avoid that kind of thing as well. But, sex scenes are a really fun way to get at your readers. You can manipulate your readers and get an emotional response from them, and that is, ultimately, what the whole point of writing a book is about.

MediaBlvd> In Book 4, Kitty and the Silver Bullet, Kitty learns that her mother has breast cancer. Did you develop that storyline because it was something personal that you drew from, either within your own family, or with someone you know? Or, was it solely for the purpose of getting Kitty back to Denver?

Carrie> It wasn’t personal, though I was aware it would be for a lot of people, so I really tried to get into that head space. I needed to get Kitty back to Denver, and I realized something like this would be almost the only thing that would do it. Also, it gave me a chance to explore some of the issues of lycanthropy as a cure for illness, and what that would mean for Kitty.

MediaBlvd> Having spent so much time with these characters, do you feel like you really know them now, and that you know what to expect from them, in any situation? Does the world and the characters come easier for you now?

Carrie> The characters are very familiar, but that offers a new set of challenges because I don’t want the books to become too easy and fall into repetition. So, I have to find new conflicts, new ways to push them and new obstacles. I want the characters to keep growing, so hopefully there will always be a bit of surprise there.

MediaBlvd> Without giving anything away, can you give any hints as to what will be happening with Kitty, in the future? How many books are you contracted for now, in the series? And, do you have an endpoint for the series yet, or are you writing it open-ended?

Carrie> I have a contract for three more books. I have more ideas in the pipeline. I do have an endpoint in mind, but right now, I don’t have a firm of idea of where that endpoint will come. As long as the ideas keep coming, I’ll keep writing. Kitty’s going to travel a bit more, and have more adventures. And, I haven’t forgotten about Cormac. He still has things to do.

MediaBlvd> In what ways do you think you’ve changed as a writer, since the first Kitty novel?

Carrie> I’m getting better at plots. That was my weak spot for awhile. The fun thing about the Kitty books, and the thing that I’m really working on getting better at, is having a lot of things going on, plot wise, and having them all tie together, at some point. Writing these books has really taught me a lot about how to have three different plot lines going on at once, and how to juggle those and have them all relate to each other, and making sure everything develops in a satisfying way. It’s made me think about developing the same character, from one book to the next. If you told me, 10 years ago, that I was going to be writing a series of werewolf novels, I don’t know what my response would have been because it’s not something I had planned on doing.

MediaBlvd> Now that you have this successful book series, do you feel more secure in your work now, or are you still concerned with the possibility of failure?

Carrie> The insecurities are never ending. I don’t feel so bad because most writers that I talk to are like that. I have four books out now and, with each one, I was convinced, at least for a short time, that it was utter dreck and my career was over. Every book I write, I have moments of thinking it’s horrible and that I don’t know how to write. Mind you, none of that is rational. But, as long as I keep sticking my neck out, I’ll always consider the possibility of failure.

MediaBlvd> When you get feedback from readers, what have they said they relate to with Kitty, and what have they said they want to read more about?

Carrie> I get a lot of comments about how real she is, which is very gratifying because that’s what I was really going for. They say that she seems like a real person. She is somebody that people feel like they would want to know. She’s not superhuman. She’s not preternaturally talented and beautiful. So it’s very gratifying for me to hear that because I want her to feel like a real person. I think the reason people really like Kitty is that she develops, as a character. She grows in really normal, real ways. I’m trying to make the world of the books very close to our own world. I want people to feel like this is their world. I have pop culture references that are pop culture references in our world. And, the other comment I get is that people really like Cormac.

MediaBlvd> Are there any characters that are particular easy or fun for you to write, and are there any that are more difficult for you?

Carrie> Kitty is actually a lot of fun, and pretty easy. I’ve been able to write the first novel, and the subsequent novels, because the stories just grow out of her. You just put her in a situation and watch her go. A lot of writers talk about losing control of their characters and having their characters take over the story, and that had never happened to me, before Kitty. Kitty really does just take over and, sometimes, I really do feel like I’m sitting back and watching, to see what happens. Cormac is a little more difficult to write because I’m really trying to strike a balance with him. He’s another character that I want to seem real. I wanted him to feel like somebody that you could really meet on the street tomorrow, so I gave him that kind of background. A lot of characters like that have these ultra-weird, para-military backgrounds, and I wanted to give him something that was much more backyard to my experience, so he grew up on a ranch in Colorado. He’s homegrown. He’s a normal guy with some things that happened to him in his background that put him on the path he’s on. And, the vampires are a little more difficult to write because I’m trying to strike this balance between wanting to portray the stereotype, in order to make fun of it, and also having them be deep, well-rounded and interesting. I’ve gotten a couple of comments on Alette, in Kitty Goes to Washington, because on the one hand, she does come across as a stereotypical, power-mongering vampire, but then you find out about her background and learn that she has a very different set of motivations than your stereotypical vampire. I appreciate that people have commented on that because that was me wanting to play with a stereotype, and I had a lot of fun doing that.            

MediaBlvd> Are you the type of author that likes to plot everything out first, or do you prefer to see where the story and the character takes you?

Carrie> I tend to plot out everything. I really like to know how the story ends, before I start writing it. I have to have a destination, otherwise I’ll wander around and not know where I’m going. I don’t do huge outlines. I don’t map everything out in a great amount of detail because I do make a lot of discoveries along the way. I usually start with a pretty basic outline of a couple of pages that just says what will generally happen, and then I’ll start writing. Then I’ll get to a point where I need to know more details, so I’ll take a break and I’ll outline the next couple of chapters, just so that I can pinpoint details. Then I’ll write a little more, until I get to another point, where I’ll have to take a break and pinpoint more details. So, it’s a multi-stage process. But, I usually write the last chapter before I’m done with the whole book.

MediaBlvd> Are you ever surprised with the direction a story takes?

Carrie> No. Knowing where the story is going to end up means that I know the broad strokes of what’s going to happen. What usually surprises me are the little connections that get made, and the little details that crop up, that become important. My initial outline is pretty broad, so I trust the writing process to fill in a lot of those details. Sometimes, I’ll come up with some detail on the fly because Kitty happens to be somewhere, where she has a conversation with someone. And then, that character will actually become very important  because they provide the catalyst for things that happen later on, when I had not intended that. What always surprises me are the seeds that get planted, and how those connections get made.

MediaBlvd> Have you ever had an editor come to you and want you to make changes that you didn’t agree with?

Carrie> Not yet, knock on wood. I’m very lucky. The revision process is very important to me. I tend to write my first drafts very quickly, which means I leave a lot of stuff out, and don’t connect a lot of things that should be connected, so revising it and going back and flushing everything out is really important.

MediaBlvd> Do you like to do research for your work, or do you prefer to rely on your imagination?

Carrie> I do research. For Book 3, Kitty Takes a Holiday, I did quite a bit of research, just because there were some different magical systems that came into play, and there was some traveling. For Book 2, Kitty Goes to Washington, I also did a lot of research. I visited Washington before I knew I was going to be able to write the book, because it was before we had sold the first book. But, it gave me a lot of ideas and I took a lot of notes, just about where things were located and what things looked like. And then, I did a lot of research online. All the buildings that I mentioned are real buildings. Researching that book, www.firstgov.gov became my favorite website because I could go into the National Institutes of Health and see how they were set up, where Dr. Flemming would have his office, where the committee meeting was going to take place, and what the conference rooms look like. I don’t know what people did before the Internet. I also had a map of Washington, D.C. pinned up on my bulletin board, above my computer, with circles saying, “Here’s where Alette’s house is, here’s where the Crescent is, here’s where Ben’s hotel is,” so that I knew. It was very important for me to have all of that be real. Since I do want these books to be taking place in the real world, I don’t want to be making stuff like that up. And I do a little bit of musical research, too, to get the play lists and to make sure I have new and different music. I also research some of the pop culture references, and things like that.

MediaBlvd> How did it feel to have your first published book, Kitty and the Midnight Hour, make the USA Today best sellers list? Was that something you had hoped for or ever expected?

Carrie> You always hope for it. You always dream about something like that. But, I was utterly shocked, when the reality happened. When you’re 13, you believe that you’re going to win a Best Actress Oscar someday. You dream about it, but you figure, in reality, it’s not ever going to happen. And that’s the same thing as this. I was very shocked. It was almost a relief that it was only on the list for a week. There was that initial push, when the book first came out, and then it was a relief because, when you have that kind of success with your first book, it becomes very stressful when the second book is released and you wonder if it’s going to have the same kind of success. You have to do better with the second one, and you wonder if you’re ever going to be able to do better. So the fact that it got to #129 for a week was a lot of fun because the chances that the second one was going to do better were pretty good. It was really cool when that happened. It was very gratifying. It made my publisher happy, which was great because they offered me the contract for the next two books, after that.

MediaBlvd> Was it hard for you to ignore that pressure, when you had to sit down to write Book 2?

Carrie> It was actually pretty easy because I was so excited to write the second one. The second one was already written by the time the first one came out, which meant there was no pressure. The first one sold in August of 2004, and it was a two book contract, so I started writing Book 2 immediately. I was chomping at the bit. I had all the notes. I knew what was going to happen. My creative process was just really angry at me for not sitting down and writing that book, but I didn’t want to jinx the contract, so I didn’t start until we actually had it. With the third one, there was a little more pressure, but by that time, I had already written two, so I was pretty confident that, “Okay, I know this process, I know this character, I know I can do this.” I’m very grateful that I’ve been writing for long enough to know my process well enough that I can really block out a lot of other things. I love the process of writing so much that, most of the time, I can just sit down and go, without letting a lot of that interrupt it. In hindsight, I’m really grateful that the second one was finished before the first one came out because it cleared up a lot of those issues.

MediaBlvd> Before this success, did you ever have any moments where you thought you might just give up writing and do something else?

Carrie> Yeah, a lot. I’d have these tearful phone conversations with my mother. Both of my parents are very supportive of my writing. The worst moments came when I started selling short stories. It got harder then because I expected it to get easier. When you start making sales, there’s this false sense of accomplishment that, “Oh, I’m going to make a name for myself and it’s going to be easier, and people are going to start knocking on my door.” And when that doesn’t happen, you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, it’s just going to be the same thing, over and over again, for the rest of my life, and it’s never going to get any easier.” It just makes you feel horrible. I felt so horrible, for a couple of years. I actually had an agent that I left, before I sold the book. I signed on with an agent and it just didn’t work out. I hadn’t sold a short story in awhile, so I was in this spot, a year before I sold the book, where I just felt like I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t keep mailing things out and have them get rejected. Getting an agent is supposed to be such a big deal. So leaving the agent felt like I had taken five big steps backwards, and I’d lost a year of my life. It was just so awful. I remember telling my mom, “I can’t do this anymore. It’s too hard.” And, she said, “Well, what else are you going to do? You’ve put so much time and effort into this, and you’re just going to throw that all away?” It was very shortly after that, that the agency that I’m currently with answered one of my letters and said that they really wanted to look at the book. They ended up taking me on and selling the book, all within a year. So, things did a complete 180, in a really short amount of time. I tell that story because the advice that I can give people who are trying to do this is that persistence really does pay off. You just have to keep at it. Keep sending things out because you never know what is going to come back in the mail tomorrow. I have been sending things out for so long that it’s pure habit now. I just keep sending them out. So that day that I decided, “I can’t do this anymore, I’m going to quit,” I already had a dozen things out in the mail. When one of them came back with a positive, I had no choice, at that point.

MediaBlvd> Do you like to read reviews of your work, or do you prefer to avoid the extra pressure of that?

Carrie> I do read reviews. I think I should avoid them, but it’s really hard not to read them. It’s another thing where I don’t know what people did before the Internet. It’s so easy just to type your name into Google and see what comes up. There are a lot of websites out there doing reviews now, and it’s really hard to avoid the reviews on Amazon. I’ve avoided negative reviews. I get warned. And I’m really lucky, in that there’s only a couple of them out there. You can tell from the little preview that Google gives you, if it’s going to be a good or bad review. My willpower is strong. I ignore the bad ones. I just read the good ones. My self-esteem couldn’t take the bad reviews.

MediaBlvd> You have so many different elements in your stories. How do you classify them, and does that ever match with where they put them on bookstore shelves?

Carrie> I don’t classify them anymore. I would say that these books are urban fantasy or dark fantasy, but I’ve seen them in the romance section. People have called them mysteries. I have no idea. The first time I heard somebody call them romance -- Kitty and the Midnight Hour, especially -- I didn’t know what to say because my first thought was, “There’s no love in this book. There’s a lot of dysfunction. There are a lot of really terrible things happening. There’s rape and abuse, and all that kind of stuff. I don’t know how you’re getting romance out of that.” Since then, I’ve discovered that the romance definition is quite a bit broader. The romance comes from there being a strong woman character, rather than there being all of the romance, love and relationships, and strong, husky men. I’m finding that not knowing about the definitions is just better for me. I just concentrate on trying to write a really good book, and putting in as many elements as I want. I hadn’t intended to write mysteries, but I guess that’s what I’m doing. For me, the mystery isn’t a genre so much as a framework, and it’s a good frame to hold a plot on. A plot is supposed to be about, “What does the character want, and how do they get it?” The mystery frame is when something has gone wrong or something has happened, and we have to figure out how it happened. It’s a very easy way to have your story say that something has happened to your character or around your character, or that your character is involved with something. And then, your character has to figure out what went wrong, how it happened and who did it. It’s a very convenient, interesting framework, which is why I keep using it. It’s also a way to explore things. There are not very many plots where your character just gets to go out and learn things, find things and discover things, and that’s very interesting to me.

MediaBlvd> Do you enjoy communicating with and receiving feedback from your fans?

Carrie> Yeah. Another surprising thing was that I wasn’t expecting as much feedback as I’ve gotten. I’ve really put myself out there with my website and my email is right on there, so it’s really easy for people to find me on the web. It’s just really cool. I haven’t gotten very much negative feedback. It’s mostly been people who are really excited about the character and the book, and that inspires me to write the next one. Knowing that there are people out there who liked the first one so much, encouraged me and made it easier to write the next book because I thought, “Somebody out there really likes this. I need to go back and do a good job because maybe I’m doing something right.” I haven’t really gotten any off-the-wall letters. I braced myself for something like, “Hi, I’m a werewolf. Can I be part of your pack?,” or something like that, but I haven’t gotten anything like that. Mostly, people are really polite. I have not ever gotten anything that was not polite, and not totally gracious and complimentary, so I feel like I’m lucky. I hope it lasts. What I really love about science fiction, fantasy and alternative fandom is that, in most cases, everybody is so respectful of everybody else’s thing. When you get into normal, mundane life, you’re like, “How do I explain this in such a way that they won’t think I’m completely out of my mind?”

MediaBlvd> Do you have a favorite story that you’ve written?

Carrie> The one that I end up talking about the most, and that other people talk about the most, is a story called, A Hunter’s Ode to His Bait. It appeared in Realms of Fantasy in 2003, and I have it up on my website. It’s my horrible unicorn hunter story because horrible things happen to the unicorn. It’s actually a love story about the unicorn hunter falling in love with a virgin that he uses as bait, and how they can’t consummate the relationship, or they’ll be out of a job. My critique group, at the time, just utterly hated it, not because it was a bad story, but because they couldn’t believe I was doing all those horrible things to unicorns. So, that’s one of my favorite stories because of that. I have another one that’s even older, called In Time, that I also have up on my website. It’s a very short story about Emily Dickinson and her dog because not many people know that Emily Dickinson had a dog. People think of her as the crazy writer in the attic and assume she had cats, but she had a big Newfoundland-type dog, named Carlo. When I was in grad school, I took this seminar on Emily Dickinson, and I hated the professor. She was the worst professor I’ve ever had, in my entire school career. She was a cat person. I wanted to talk about Emily Dickinson’s dog, and she didn’t want to talk about Emily Dickinson’s dog because she’s a cat person. And so, I wrote this story. It’s probably one that I’ve gotten more comments about than just about any of the other shorts stories I’ve written.

MediaBlvd> Have there been any writers that have particularly influenced you and your work?

Carrie> Ray Bradbury is an early one. He was the first writer who, when I read his work, I sat down and thought, “Okay, how did he do that, and how can I learn to do that?” His way of describing things puts you there. There’s the story, from Dandelion Wine, about the new sneakers, and I could taste the sneakers, just from his description. I was like, “Oh, my gosh, how did he do that?” He has very short stories that just twist your gut, and make you cry or make you happy, and I wanted to know how to do that. I wanted to know how to manipulate people, just by using these little words. Also, I would say Robin McKinley. She’s the second one that made me want to sit down and figure out how she did it and how I could learn to do it. With her, it’s the characters. Her characters are very real, and that may be where I got my love of ordinary heroes, in extraordinary circumstances. Her characters are heroes, but they feel like normal people who had to rise to the occasion, rather than being the stereotypical Joseph Campbell, swashbuckling heroes. 

MediaBlvd> Do you still try to find time to read?

Carrie> Oh, I love reading. I’m a slow reader, so I get very frustrated with everything. I have to keep reading. Writers who don’t read aren’t growing. I read almost exclusively outside of my genre. I don’t read very much in the way of vampire and werewolf stuff. I do, occasionally. I still read a lot of fantasy and science fiction that’s not paranormal. I read a lot of non-fiction, and a lot of that is due to research. I try to read things that make me excited, happy and interested, and it’s getting hard to find things that make me happy and interested, and that challenge me. When you’re a writer, you get very critical of other people’s writing, so it’s really hard to find something that engages you to the point where you forget to be critical.

MediaBlvd> Do you have any specific writing habits, like a particular location or time of day that you prefer to write in?

Carrie> I usually write in the late afternoon, early evening, either right before or right after supper. If I’m very busy, I don’t write until later at night. Those seem to be my prime times. I recently got a really nice laptop, so I’ve been spending more time out on my comfy sofa writing, instead of at my desk. My desk is becoming more and more associated with business, email and correspondence, and things like that, so I need to move out of there, in order to be creative.

MediaBlvd> Do you write every day, and do you have specified amount of time that you write for?

Carrie> I do write every day. I’ve found that good things happen when I write every day, so I try to cultivate that as much as possible. It’s superstitious, at this point, but I’m not going to complain because so many good things have happened that there’s no sense in messing with the pattern. I don’t have any really specific goals for each day. I don’t have a word count. Sometimes, I’m really lenient on myself, and sometimes I don’t write more than just a journal entry. I’ll sit down and handwrite a couple pages in a notebook, about nothing in particular. For me, writing every day just means putting words down on paper. A really complicated bit of revising or outlining counts as writing, for the day, as long as the creative wheels are moving forward and I’m actually sitting down and making time for that.

MediaBlvd> Have you ever sat down to write and just had nothing come out?

Carrie> Yeah, and that’s why I’m lenient on myself about the writing, every day. If I’m supposed to be working on a story or a novel and nothing is coming out, I’ll switch. I’ll go and spew out some random fan fiction of nothing in particular, or do a journal entry, or just do some free-writing. A lot of times, I’ll get stories out of free-writing. I’ll do just stream of consciousness for whatever I’m thinking about, at the moment. It’s really important to not let the inertia take over when nothing comes out. Even if you can’t specifically write what you meant to sit down to write, as long as something is coming out somewhere, it’s okay.

MediaBlvd> If you finished a story and it just didn’t work, would you rework it, or just toss it out and start over again?

Carrie> I do both. I’ve got a bunch of stories that I’ve finished, that just don’t work, so they’re sitting in a pile. Sometimes, I go back to them, years later, and go, “Aha, this is what was wrong!,” and I can fix it, or cannibalize it for ideas that I can use in other things. I don’t consider any writing, wasted writing because I’m always learning something or coming up with some idea that will percolate, and then come to something, years down the road. I try to re-work stories. It’s a good learning experience to try to figure out exactly why a story isn’t working and what I need to do to fix it. But, some stories just can’t be fixed. That’s the nature of it. That’s also why it’s important to write, every day. For every story that doesn’t work, you have one that does, just from sheer volume.

MediaBlvd> What kind of advice can you offer to aspiring writers who are looking to get published?

Carrie> Be persistent and get better. Every writer out there will tell you to be persistent. If you’re persistent, but your writing is not improving, you’re not going to go anywhere. That’s the caveat that a lot of writers leave out. Find a critique group, either online or in person. Find really good, caring people who can give you feedback on your work. Read lots of different things, and read with an eye to figuring out, “Okay, how did that person get that effect? I’m reading a mystery novel that’s actually making my heart rate physically increase. How did they do that? How did these words on the page give me this physical reaction, and how can I replicate that?” That’s how you learn. You improve as a writer, by just getting feedback from other people and trying new things. Don’t write the same things, all the time. If you always write in first person, try writing something in third person. Read a lot. Read advice books. Not all the advice books on writing are going to say things in exactly the same way. Sometimes, you need to read several advice books to get the one that says it exactly the way that you need to hear it, to be able to internalize it.

MediaBlvd> What accomplishment are you most proud of, thus far?

Carrie> Getting published. I haven’t had somebody supporting me while I write. I’ve worked the day job and paid my dues. You never stop paying them, and you shouldn’t. If you stop paying them, you stop earning accomplishments. That’s a very karmic way of looking at it, but I’m not done learning. Something else I’m very proud of is that I feel like I’m still getting better. I felt like I’ve learned something with each book, and I’m becoming a better writer, which means I just have so much more to look forward to, which makes me really excited and happy. I don’t think I’ve written my best book yet. I don’t think I’ve reached my peak. I still have a lot of things I want to do. I’m proud that I’ve done what I’ve done. I’ve accomplished a lot. I’m very proud that I can go into a bookstore and it just makes me grin, every time I see my books there. And, I’m not done yet. I’ve got so much more to do. That’s what makes me happy. If I felt like I had done everything, that would be kind of sad. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next.

MediaBlvd> What are you working on now, and what’s coming out next for you?

Carrie> I’m working on the seventh Kitty book. The fifth and sixth are due out next year. Also, I’ve been working on the Wild Cards series, edited by George R. R. Martin. It’s a shared world anthology about an alternate reality with superheroes. Inside Straight came out earlier this year, and Busted Flush will be out late this year. I have stories in both.

MediaBlvd> Do you have any idea what you’d like to do in the future, as far as your writing goes? Have you given any thought to other worlds or characters you’d like to explore, either as another series or for stand-alone novels, or are you just concentrating on Kitty’s world right now?           

Carrie> I’m always writing lots of different things. I’m always thinking about Kitty and working on her world, but I do have some stand-alone novels that I’m working on getting out there. I’m still working on short stories, and the Wild Cards project has been a lot of fun. You can check back with my website for more details.