**To enter to win an autographed copy of the hardcover of Bone Crossed, the fourth book in the best-selling Mercy Thompson series, please send an email with your name and mailing address to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it with BONE CROSSED in the subject. The contest ends on May 22, 2009  after which the winner will be chosen randomly and notified via email. Only one entry per mailing address.

New York Times bestselling author Patricia Briggs ( www.PatriciaBriggs.com ) currently has two highly successful urban fantasy series, with legions of devoted readers. After receiving degrees in history and German, Briggs set out to write fantasy and published her first novel before the age of 30. Now, she divides her time between writing about Mercedes Thompson, a mechanic who shapeshifts into a coyote, and alpha werewolf Charles and his newly acquired mate, Anna.

Briggs spoke to MediaBlvd Magazine about achieving success as a writer, juggling two book series and keeping her job fun.

MediaBlvd Magazine> Where are you from, and how long have you been writing?

Patricia Briggs> I was born and raised in Butte, Montana, which was a mining town. It was the third city in the world to get electrified, which is kind of awesome, because there’s a big copper mine there. Butte is really cold -- it gets down to 40 below in the winter -- but it’s full of storytellers, so I grew up with a whole lot of people telling stories. My mom was a librarian and we had books all over the house. My older sister read science fiction and fantasy, so I got into it too. I have degrees in history and German from Montana State University in Bozeman, which are terrible degrees to get, unless you’re going to write because you can’t get a job with them.

MediaBlvd> Have you had any professional training?

Patricia> Most of my informal training actually came after I published my first two or three novels. I’ve done a lot of writer’s groups and things, and sometimes they’re more helpful than others. With books, they’re hard because you have to have somebody who is willing to read a chapter at a time, and then remember what’s gone on in your book, along with 400 people’s short stories and things. I attended a writer’s group in Eugene, and that was awesome. I learned quite a bit from them, but most of it I just picked up. You read a lot and you get a feel for the rhythm of a book and how long things should be. Mostly, when people ask me what they need to do to write, I say, “Go get an education.” It doesn’t really matter what your education is in because you’ll use whatever you get. And, you have to read.

MediaBlvd> Had you explored writing in any other genres, or did you always just prefer fantasy?

Patricia> This was always what I preferred. I read everything from mystery to romance, and everything in between. But, when you’re writing a story, you have to write it for a long period of time, and fantasy was the only thing I could stay interested in for the nine months or a year that it takes me to write a novel. Since then, I’ve found that it has a lot of other really big pluses. I can put sex scenes in a book, or I don’t have to, which is not true of most genres. And, I can write any kind of book I want to. As long as the plot turns on magic, I can write mysteries or spy novels or war novels, or whatever I want to do. In a way, it’s a more broad genre than any of the other genres are, at least for me. Fantasy plays to my strengths. I’m a horse person, so I can bring that in. I’m a history major, so I can bring that in. It just clicked.

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

Patricia> Writers were like movie stars to me. If somebody had told me, when I was in third grade, that I could be a writer, I would say, “Oh, absolutely, yes!,” but I just never planned on it, not even after I published the first couple books. When I got the first one sold, I thought, “Oh, that’s so awesome!” And then, I found out how much I got paid for it, which worked out to about $1.25 an hour, and I found out how slow the publishing industry is. It’s always been a dream of mine to sit down and write full-time, but it wasn’t really until Dragon Bones came out that I was able to say, “Okay, I’m not going to substitute teach anymore. I can make more, sitting down and writing.”

MediaBlvd> How did you initially come up with Mercedes Thompson?

Patricia> I had just finished Raven’s Strike, which I wrote in a very short time period because I forgot when it was due. When my editor called to ask if it was done yet, I was on page 50. It took me about three months, and it was the longest book I’ve ever written. Most of my books take me a year to write, so by the time I was finished, I was really burned out. I had emailed my editor and said, “I could do a sequel to Dragon Bones, or something else in the Raven’s world, or maybe an urban fantasy because I read them a lot.” She called me up about three days later and said, “Patty, we just missed an auction for an urban fantasy. Would you write one?,” and I said, “Okay.”

MediaBlvd> Was there a specific inspiration for Mercy?

Patricia> My editor wanted a female protagonist with a complicated love life, and it had to involve werewolves and vampires. So, I sat down and thought about what would be fun and what I knew about. It was something completely different for me. I was really burned out on the medieval fantasies I’d been writing, although I still love them, and I thought, “This sounds really fun!” We’ve owned Volkswagens for years and loved them. They’re little quirky cars, and they’re just a hoot. We had a mechanic who lived in the Tri-Cities, who was just awesome, and Zee is roughly based on him. He’s just a very shy person, and it came out as being really cranky, but once he decided he knew and liked you, then he was just terrific and a lot of fun. I thought, “Well, I could do a Volkswagen mechanic because I know a lot about that.” I thought that would be cool. And, I wanted a strong female character, but I didn’t want it to feel like I was copying from somebody else. I thought, “The one way she could be pretty tough is if she was kind of underpowered,” which is my favorite kind of character. If you make characters overpowering, then you don’t have any range. So, I decided to take somebody who was horribly underpowered and let her be raised by werewolves and, from there, it was just about what that sort of upbringing would do to you. How could you hold onto your individuality and your own self-determination, when you are bombarded by these uber-macho control freaks? That’s how Mercy came about.

MediaBlvd> For those who might not be familiar with the series yet, can you talk about who Mercy is and what your intention was for the series?

Patricia> I wanted to do books that were complete within themselves, so that the storyline for each book has a beginning, middle and end. At the same time, I was a big fan of the Marvel comic books, where the storyline would end, but there were always things going on and there was continuity. I wanted the story to be a finite thing for each book, and mysteries and adventures work very well that way. So, it’s a series of adventures that progress in complexity, as we go along and I become more comfortable in the world and what’s going on with it. The main character, Mercy, is a mechanic. That’s her day job. She owns her own shop, which means that her time is not free. She can’t just run off and do things without having consequences, which are usually financial. She hasn’t owned the shop forever, and she’s making payments to the bank, so she has to be pretty conscientious about keeping her shop open, which provides a nice tension for the story. She’s called a “walker,” which is not really a skinwalker, as they’re evil witches who can change into animals, using the skin of various animals, usually coyote or wolf. They’ll look like animals, but they’ll have human eyes. They exist to go and hurt other people. And, Mercy is not like that at all. She’s a shape-changer. She changes into a coyote, which is right along with a whole series of Native American myths. The idea that their medicine men and women, and their holy men and women, can shift shapes very easily, is very common in almost any of the Native mythologies that I’ve read, particularly with the Blackfeet. Mercy is half-Blackfoot. The myths of the Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon area tribes are all full of these shape-changing people and animals, so I thought that worked really well. I knew she was going to be a shape-changer, in with all of these werewolves, and I thought, “She’ll change into a coyote,” which is kind of like the wolf’s little cousin. Once I did that, I thought, “Well, she’s got to be Native American,” because werewolves are a European phenomena. The stories of werewolves were brought over to the U.S., but they originated in France and Germany, mostly. The books are pretty much a series of mysteries, and occasional thrillers or police procedurals. The first book, Moon Called, introduces the paranormal world. The second one, Blood Bound, delves further into the vampires than Mercy had gone before. And, the third book, Iron Kissed, specifically has to do with Zee, but also with the fae, at the reservation in Walla Walla.

MediaBlvd> How soon after you developed Mercy, did the secondary characters come into play?

Patricia> I love people and characters. They fascinate me. Usually, what I have to do is not put new characters in and use self-control. The minute I conceived of Mercy, I knew that I had to have Zee. She’s in her 30's, and somebody had to teach her all of this. Some of the characters started out because they needed to be there. Samuel was hard for me because writing two alpha male characters and have them not turn into the same person, when you’re writing, is a tough thing. There’s a surface layer of Samuel that most people don’t get past, and then underneath he’s very different. On the surface, he’s funny, outgoing and laid back, but he’s got this second layer. He’s very old, and Mercy didn’t know that. She’s known him all her life, and she didn’t realize how old he was until the middle of the first book. He’s very complex, and he hides who he is from everybody. That underneath person and Adam are very similar people, which is one of the reasons why she finds herself drawn so closely to both of them. When I knew that Samuel was going to be a real character was when he stuck his head out the window, in the first book. When they’re driving down the road and he’s in wolf form, and he sticks his head out the window and his ears start making flapping sounds, I thought, “Yes, he’s good.” It’s a lot easier for me to pull in characters than it is for me to say, “No more characters.”

MediaBlvd> Did you intentionally develop the dynamic between Mercy, Adam and Samuel?

Patricia> Oh, absolutely! That was one of the things that my publisher specifically asked me to do, and it was probably the most difficult thing, as a writer. I don’t play games with people, and I don’t like characters that do. Mercy just really couldn’t play them off each other. She had to figure out which one it was that she was really in love with, and then cut off the other one. You don’t mess around with people you care about, and she does care about both of them, very much.

MediaBlvd> Did you have any idea that the romantic triangle would end up where it has?

Patricia> Oh, no. I throw characters together and they tell me what they’re doing. I say, “I know what you want, I know who you are and I know what you want out of this,” and then I throw another character in, and see what happens. Until I wrote Iron Kissed, I really didn’t know which way she was going to go, but I did know that I was going to resolve it pretty fast because I think it’s a very uncharismatic thing to do, to play one guy off the other. These are two dominant wolves who would kill each other, if she sat on the fence too long, and she knew that. But, there are still romantic complications. There are a whole lot of things that come up.

MediaBlvd> Will you continue to explore the ramifications from Mercy’s rape, and how that affects her?

Patricia> Absolutely! Getting over something like that takes time and work. It’s a very canine thing to deal with the problems at hand, and not worry too much about the future. The wolves are worse about it than she is, but that’s what she does. It’s one day at a time, one minute at a time. It came up pretty hard in Bone Crossed, and it probably will not be as big a deal in Silver Borne. It will be part of what makes her who she is, but it’s not going to be the defining moment of her life.

MediaBlvd> Was it difficult to find the right balance with that scene and with what’s happened to her since then?

Patricia> It was harder when I was fighting it. I write from the characters and, when I got to that point, I knew what Tim, the villain, would do and I knew what he had. All the artifacts he had are real artifacts in mythology. I just went through and picked out my favorites and stuck them there. When you write, you make decisions and then you live with them, and that’s how you make the book work. If you make your life difficult, that means it’s a good book. So, he had this arsenal of stuff that he could do things with, and Mercy didn’t stand a chance. That was just what happened. And, I kept trying to say, “I don’t really want to go here. I don’t want to do this to her.” Finally, I sat down and said, “This is where the story goes, and if I don’t do this than I’m saying that anybody who is raped would never make a good character in an action-adventure story,” which is garbage. I know rape survivors who are doing just fine, and they’ve taken their lives back into their own hands and dealt with the issues. You can’t just bury the issues. You have to deal with them, but you can go on with your life. It is a cheat, when a major character goes through something like this, and then gets saved at the last minute, and I didn’t want to do that. That scene was really tough to write because I didn’t want anybody confused about what was happening, but I didn’t want it graphic enough to be horrible, and I also didn’t want it graphic enough that somebody who’s twisted like that might get off on it. So, it was a balancing act to make sure that everybody knew what was going on without drawing a diagram.

MediaBlvd> How do you find the right balance between the action and the emotion of the books, so that one doesn’t overshadow the other?

Patricia> That’s always a matter of opinion. People will say, “This book is too slow,” or “This book is too fast.” For me, it’s like music. You feel it. You read enough that you know the kinds of books you like. When I’m writing, I’ll go, “Okay, the story is slowing down. I need some more action.” But, it’s paced towards my preferences. You can only write what you like. So, I’m sure that some people would like more action, and some people would like less. That’s a writer’s call. But, I always keep in mind that what I’m writing is urban fantasy, which is a conglomeration of fantasy and horror with a little bit of romance thrown in, rather than paranormal romance, which is romance with a little bit of horror and fantasy thrown in, so that affects the pacing quite a bit. The romance really has to be secondary. It’s not secondary to the characters, but it should be secondary to the plot.

MediaBlvd> Does the humor in the books come from you, or is that something that evolves from the characters, as you write?

Patricia> It’s 50/50. I really wish I could be a smart-mouth like my characters. Usually, I think, “Oh, I wish I would have said that.” The nice thing about being a writer is that you can go back and add it. There are things that every writer does that are specific to their books, and I like to make worlds pretty dark because I think the world is pretty dark. Terrible things happen to wonderful people, and nobody goes through life unscarred. But, you can take those things and let them make you grow, or you can cower in a corner. And, if you have to face them anyway, then facing them with a little bit of humor really helps. That’s how I live my life. When terrible things happen, you either laugh or you cry, and I have a tendency to laugh. It gives the terrible things in your life much less power over you. The kinds of books I write, which are junk food, are the kinds of books that help people carry on because they don’t pull you down.                    

MediaBlvd> Without giving anything away, what can you say about your latest book, Bone Crossed, to interest people who might not have read the series before?

Patricia> With a series, I think it’s really important that you can pick up any of the books and get a story. It’s fun for the people who read them in order because they get more of a background, but I don’t want to make a secret club where, if you didn’t read Moon Called first, Bone Crossed  will be hard to follow. Mercy is a mechanic who shape-shifts into a coyote, and she’s stuck in a world of vampires and werewolves, where she’s trying to keep herself and her friends alive. It’s set in the desert of Washington, and she has to deal with a really particularly nasty vampire, and some ghosts and things in Spokane. I had a lot of fun with it. I’ve always wanted to write a ghost story, so this was my chance.

MediaBlvd> How do you decide which species of creatures you’re going to focus on, in any given book?

Patricia> I’m not as good at plots as I am at other things. It works better for me, if I start with the characters and say, “Okay, where are you right now, and what can I do to you to make it worse?,” because happy people don’t make good stories. So, for Bone Crossed, I thought, “We haven’t dealt with Stefan. I’ve gotta do something with Mercy’s friend, the vampire. We should have something horrible happen to him because we didn’t see him in Iron Kissed at all.” So, I needed to deal with Stefan and Marsilia, the vampire queen who has a grudge against Mercy. When you have a really powerful vampire who doesn’t like you, it’s really dangerous, when all she can do is turn into a 30-pound coyote. I just throw things out and say, “What happens here?,” and then I go, “Who would make a really good group to be involved in this, that would make it even worse?” 

MediaBlvd> Do you title all of your books?

Patricia> I’m terrible with titles. My editor does good titles. She did Blood Bound, which I thought was a terrific title. I had Coyote Moon as the title, but it wasn’t quite right for that book. The more clever I try to be, the worse it is. I have a little notebook with a list that I keep, but most of them never make it. Sometimes, I luck into titles. Steal the Dragon had about four different titles before that one came up, and all of them felt wrong. And then, Steal the Dragon just happened and I thought it was a cool title.

MediaBlvd> What do you think about your book covers?

Patricia> I lucked out. Daniel Dos Santos was not particularly well known when he did Moon Called. He had done some books for Scholastic and Tor, but Moon Called really jump-started his career because that was just the best cover ever. A funny story about the cover of Moon Called is that they asked me, initially, to give Mercy a tattoo, and I said, “Yes.” At that point in time, Daniel had the coyote paw print on her belly, since I’d mentioned that in the book. And then, the second sketch that he did, she had tattoos everywhere, and the art department said, “Okay, let’s pull them back.” The Tri-Cities is really conservative. You don’t see a lot of tattoos there, on everyday, average people who want to make a living. But, when the cover came out, she still had the tattoos on her arms, and we were passing it around at my writer’s group and they said, “This is an awesome cover, but you’re just not going to see somebody like this, in the Tri-Cities. You see them in Portland and Seattle, but you don’t see tattooing like this, in the Tri-Cities.” And then, the door opened and this girl walked in, who looked like she came right off of that cover. It was awesome! She had the low jeans and the shirt tied up high and she had tattoos, up and down her arms and belly. I thought, “Okay, point made. I’m wrong.” Daniel and an art director got together and decided that, since Mercy doesn’t really have the arm tattoos, they’re just going to change the tattoos for each book, which is why for Blood Bound, you see the vampire motif on her arms and chest.

MediaBlvd> Do you have a favorite character that you’ve written, or is there one that was particularly difficult for you to write?

Patricia> The characters that I like are mostly men. I put myself a lot into the female characters, so while I enjoy them, they’re not my favorite. I like Ward and Oleg, from Dragon Bones and Dragon Blood, a lot. Both of them were a lot of fun to write. The hardest character for me to write was Sereph, from Raven’s Shadow and Raven’s Strike, because she’s so different than I am. She was a real reach for me because I don’t have a hot temper and I generally like people, and she has a terribly hot temper, she’s acerbic and she doesn’t like people very much. She was a real hard viewpoint character for me. Trying to get all of that in, and still make her likeable, was hard. Mercy is fun. She’s got all of the best qualities of the people I would like to be. She’s fun, she’s funny, she’s tough and she’s smart. I don’t know that I’ve written any characters that I don’t like. I couldn’t get in an adversarial relationship with my characters and still write them well. If I feel like I’m doing that, then I have to change them. I even have to like the side characters -- not so much the villains, but the villains have their own charisma. For characters that I’m writing for the protagonist -- even the sidekicks and small bit-part characters -- I have to know how they run, and when I know what’s making them tick and why they’re doing the things they’re doing, then it’s really hard not to like them. I just can’t imagining hating your character, as you’re writing, and keeping them that way. I have occasionally gone, “Oh, I don’t like this person,” and then I step back and go, “Why don’t I like her?,” and fix it. I always figure, if I can’t like them, then nobody’s going to like them.

MediaBlvd> When your first novel was published and the sales weren’t as good as you hoped they’d be, did that discourage you from doing it again?

Patricia> No because, by that time, the bug had bitten me. If you are writing just to get published and make money, then don’t do it. The writing industry will suck you dry and leave your bleeding husk on the side of the road. I know some terrific writers who can’t get published because the kinds of books they like to write aren’t doing very well right now. If that’s the only measure you have, of whether writing is worth it to you or not, then you better not be writing. You have to write for yourself first and, if you get bitten by the bug, you can’t do anything other than write. Of course, getting published is nice and making money is wonderful because then you can justify all of the hours you spent, typing away, but even if I never got published again, I’d still be writing stories because they kick me. And, when you send your work out to publishers, rather than worrying about it, you just need to go onto the next book and enjoy yourself, otherwise you’ll end up in a funny farm. The publishing industry moves at glacial speed. Once you get paid for it, there’s pressure, and when there’s pressure, it’s not nearly as fun.

MediaBlvd> How did it feel to find out that the Mercy series was as successful as it has been? Was that something you had hoped for, or ever expected?

Patricia> No. It was just a total shock. I knew it was going to do better than the medieval fantasies that I’d previously written because the urban fantasy genre is doing better, but I had no idea how much better they would do. I first realized it about two weeks after Moon Called came out and I went to do a book signing, and none of the bookstores in the Tri-Cities had any copies left. My editor told me, “Oh, it’s gone back to second printing already,” and that was really cool. It felt like I had just won the lottery. It’s that random. There were other books published that month, that were much better than my book. You write the best book you can, and you write something that you enjoy and like, and you throw it out there and hope somebody else likes it too. Nobody had any idea that it was going to go this big. It’s a matter of telling a good story within the framework that you’re given. I just got hit in the head with the good publishing fairy. I’m very grateful. You have to write good books to have them do as well as the Mercy books do, but I’m not the only good writer out there. I’m certainly not the only good writer in urban fantasy. The reason the books did so well is that they have terrific covers, and they came out at exactly the right time and caught the right people’s attention.

MediaBlvd> What were your thoughts when you first found out that you were making the switch to hardcover?

Patricia> It scared me. My editor said that, because Ironed Kissed hit #1 on the New York Times best sellers list, the powers-that-be said, “Keeping it in paperback any longer isn’t going to win any more of an audience, at this point in time, so we need to move to hardcover.” It’s a scary thing because you can lose your audience when you shift from paperback to hardcover, but writing is always a crapshoot like that. Fortunately, it seems to be doing quite well, but I was pretty scared. There are a lot of book collectors out there that like to collect all the books, who have their shelf for whatever series, and they like to have it all look the same. But, the Science Fiction Book Club picked up the first three books and put them together in a hardcover omnibus edition, so I tell collectors to go pick that up. It even takes up less shelf space. We were talking about moving some of the earlier books to hardcover, just for that market. They’re not expecting great sales, but that way, people who really want the hardcover can have a hardcover of it. But, that’s still in the talking stage, so I don’t know if it will happen.

MediaBlvd> Can you give any hints for the next Mercy book?

Patricia> The next book, Silver Borne, which will come out at this time next year, deals with the fact that Mercy has a book on the fae that she borrowed from a bookseller, and she needs to take it back. It’s going to be much more difficult for her to get that book back to him than it should be. And then, I’ve got to deal with Samuel. Samuel has been tormented and tortured for the last several books, so I’m going to make everything worse before I make it better. It’s fun stuff.

MediaBlvd> When you wrote the “Alpha and Omega” novella, did you have any idea that you would be turning that into a series?

Patricia> Not at all. I would have made my life so much easier, if I had changed five lines, at the very end of the story, to get the two series to work together, at the same time. It would be really nice to get the two series to run together.

MediaBlvd> What made you decide to turn it into a series?

Patricia> My editor said, “Patty, could you do a second series?,” and I thought that I might be able to because I no longer had to work a second job, in order to survive. And then, she asked me to base it off of the novella because she really liked it, and I thought, “I could do that! That would be fun!” It’s a whole different kind of story than Mercy. Mercy is set in the Tri-Cities, and she had this balancing act between these guys. And, the Alpha and Omega series is just the werewolves. Charles goes out for his father when there are problems, so they go to different places. In the next book, they go to Seattle. Then, they’ll go somewhere else. It allows me to write two books a year because the series are so different. One is in first person and one is in third person. With series, sometimes you feel like you’re writing the same book forever because they just stop, and then you write another one. This really refreshes me, and I can actually write better and faster, writing these two series, than I could if I were just writing Mercy books. I could not write two Mercy books a year and still have them be good.

MediaBlvd> What was it about Charles that made you want to do the short story on him, in the first place?

Patricia> Charles is cool. Every once in awhile, I have a character who walks on and just explodes, and I know so much about them. That happened with Charles. I knew that Bran came over to the U.S. with David Thompson, who was a Welshman working with the British fur trapping companies, and I wanted Bran to have more than just Samuel. He was in the middle of the wilderness, with all these natives, and the French and Welsh fur trappers that came through did a lot of inter-marriage with the Native Americans, so I thought, “Charles is going to be half-Native American,” and what that implied was huge. He was born in the 1800's, back when the Native Americans were Native Americans. They still had their languages, they still had their religions and they still had their cultural beliefs. There was a huge amount of culture that was lost. So, I had this huge amount of stuff that I knew about Charles, and I couldn’t put it in Moon Called because it already had a cast of thousands. He had to just be one of the people that lent color to make Aspen Springs feel like a real place, instead of a pin I put on a map. The nice thing about series is that you can always say, “In a future story, I can explore this character.” So, when my editor asked me to write a novella for this anthology, I said, “I want to write a story about Charles.” I sent her the story, and she read it and just really loved it, and she wanted me to do a series.

MediaBlvd> How did Anna come about?

Patricia> Anna happened because I watch myself for trends, so I don’t write the same book over again. I had all these dominant werewolves, and I figured out that they were all very dominant werewolves because there aren’t very many submissive werewolves. The personality that makes somebody who does not need to be in control of everything, is not the kind of person that survives the Change, which is nasty. But, I wanted to write somebody different, so I thought, “I’ll make her not a dominant. I’ll make her a submissive type.” So, I wrote the very first part of “Alpha and Omega,” where they meet and Charles’ wolf -- for the very first time in his whole life because he was born a werewolf -- calms down and he’s like, “Wow!” I loved that scene. But, I couldn’t make her just a submissive wolf because they’re not that rare. In a wolf pack, there is an Omega wolf, and the Omega wolf’s job is like a Court Jester. They keep the dominant wolves from killing each other. The ones that go out and hunt, and are really necessary to the pack, are also very aggressive towards each other. The Omega wolf’s job is to come in and break that up, and they’re so low down in the pack that they can do it because they aren’t seen as a threat. So, I thought, “I’ll make her an Omega,” and then I played with it.

MediaBlvd> What can readers expect from the next Alpha and Omega book, Hunting Ground (to be released in August)?

Patricia> It’s set before Blood Bound because there was all this drama when the werewolves came out, and I couldn’t just leave that. So, Anna and Charles go to Seattle to meet with the European werewolves, who are upset with the fact that Bran is going to bring them out, without consulting them. He doesn’t care what they think, but he feels like they have the right to know what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. And, some of them are very upset with him because, if it comes out, then they are really up a creek, since some of them are not very nice. Bran is in a cool position because, for the last 150 years, he has been taming the werewolves so that it is possible for them to live in society. The European werewolves are not nearly as unified, and not nearly as nice, generally. They’ve done a lot of really horrific things, so if people find out they really exist, they’re going to go hunt them down, and that might then bounce back onto the American werewolves. So, the story is about what happens when they all get together and somebody dies. I bring the fae into this one, and a lot of Seattle landmarks. I had a great time. There will be death and mayhem, destruction and excalibur, and all sorts of cool stuff.

MediaBlvd> How many books are you contracted for, in each series?

Patricia> They’re open-ended. After Bone Crossed, I have three more Mercy books under contract. And, I have Hunting Ground and one more Alpha and Omega book under contract. But, the idea is that, if the readers like them and I like them, and I still feel like I can tell fresh stories, we’ll keep going with them. If I get to a point where I need a break from them, then I’ll go do something else. I’ll go write traditional fantasies. I’ve got several ideas that I really want to do, with the traditional fantasies, but for right now, I’m having a really good time. I really like Mercy. She’s a nice friend to spend six or eight months with. She’s interesting and fun to work with, and her cast of thousands is pretty fun too. And, the Alpha and Omega series is really growing on me. I’ve always loved Charles. For some reason, Anna was really hard in Cry Wolf. I had to make her realistic, but she kept trying to turn whiny, so I had to play games. The whole bit where she speaks Latin came about because I had to give her a way to get back at the bullies. Otherwise, she came out as a wimp. So, I gave her that and it worked. She had to have some way she could get back at them. But, in Hunting Ground, she’s got two feet on the floor and she’s running with it. She’s a hoot and I am really having a great time.

MediaBlvd> Do you have plans for any more anthologies?

Patricia> St. Martin’s Press has an anthology coming out in July, called Strange Brew, which is about witches, and I have a story in that. It’s about two characters you haven’t met. It’s a wolf from the Emerald City pack, which is in Seattle, and a witch, and they go take out a coven of witches. It was pretty fun to write. After that, I think I’m going to pull in my short story horns. They’re hard for me to write. I’m a character writer, not an idea writer, and that makes short stories a lot more difficult to do. If you put characters in them, it’s really hard to put a lot of plot in them because they’re too short. Once I get caught up with my contracts and I’ve gotten done what I need to do, then maybe I’ll take some contracts for some short stories again.

MediaBlvd> Do you have an specific writing habits?

Patricia> Yeah, I have an office. I have to have a space where I go, and that’s all I do, when I’m in that space. I usually will sit down and play a game, to put my head in the right place, and I will turn on music, so that it cuts out the rest of the world, and then I can sit down and write. I have a goal of five pages a day. Usually, if I can get five pages, I can get 10 or 15, but it’s that first five pages that pull and crawl. Sometimes, I’m really lucky to get five pages, and then the next day, the first thing I do is delete those five pages and revise that scene. But, that keeps me honest and keeps the pages going. Once I’m sitting down, in the middle of writing, then I can go for a long time, until my brain turns to mush and I can’t talk anymore. When I was doing Bone Crossed, I had a weekend where I did 150 pages, in three days, which is usually really odd for me. Five pages a day of keeper pages is pretty good. In the last three or four years, I’ve been able to do bigger chunks, so I hope that continues because I have lots of stories to tell and they take me a lot longer to write than I would like. There are some days I sit down and I can’t turn off the editor, and then I have to just say, “I can’t write today. I have to go do something else.” I’m such a bad self-critic that I’ll put myself into such a bad place that I won’t be able to write the next day either, if I don’t just go do something else.

MediaBlvd> What kind of advice can you offer to aspiring writers, who are not only looking to get published, but who would also like to have a career as a writer?

Patricia> Don’t plan on supporting yourself with your writing because it’s really hard to do, and it puts a lot of pressure on your writing that can make it not fun, and writing ought to be fun. It’s still work, but it should be fun too. The first thing is to find something else that pays your bills. Even when you’re publishing steadily, the money is very unsteady. Most people can’t get a check and then live on it for six months, which is what you have to do as a writer. Don’t give up. Find other people who are writing because they’re the ones who are going to understand what you’re going through. Writing is a lonely enough business that it really matters that you find somebody else who’s doing the same thing. If you’re writing genre, go to all the science fiction and fantasy conventions that you can because other writers hang out there, and the people who have made it are really happy to lend a hand to the people who aren’t there yet. It’s a tradition. We’ve long recognized that a good writer is good for the field. J.K. Rowling has done marvelous things for the fantasy field because she’s increased the number of people who are buying fantasies. Being jealous of another writer doesn’t make any sense, from a writing standpoint, so other writers are usually very helpful. Also, science fiction conventions usually have a workshop, where you can have your work critiqued by published writers. Don’t go there expecting a pat on the back because they won’t do that. They’ll tear it to pieces. But, if you really want to learn and grow, that’s a really good thing to do. And, read a lot. When you read, take apart the books, especially the ones you don’t like. Figure out why you don’t like them and what’s wrong. When you can figure out why you don’t like them, then you can make sure you don’t write that way.