October 2003
Laurell K. Hamilton
St. Louis, Missouri

Laurell K. Hamilton's grandmother, Laura Gentry, was responsible for Laurell's interests in things that go bump in the night. Mrs. Gentry related tales of horror originating in the hills of Arkansas, the state where she grew up. From those stories, Laurell got this lesson: "Rawhide and bloody bones will get you if you aren't good." When Laurell was 13, she discovered a short story collection titled Pigeons from Hell. "It was the first heroic fantasy I'd read. It was fights, swords, monsters. I decided not only did I want to become a writer, it was this I wanted to write." She chanced upon another book in the high school library: The Natural History of the Vampire. She read it so many times she nearly memorized it. When it's suggested that her choice of creepy films and stories were unseemly when her friends' companions were dolls: "I wasn't like most girls," she said.

Laurell was born in Heber Springs, Arkansas, but grew up in Sims, Indiana, a hamlet with a population of 100. Laurell's mother was killed in a car crash in 1969. Laurell's mother, Suzie Kline, and her grandmother had been the other's strength, with Mrs. Gentry the one who kept the household together. Her mother's death, her grandmother's role in raising her, and growing up with no male in the home are "the three things that made me who I am," she says. Though she still believes she would have grown up to be a writer regardless.

Laurell is the author of two New York Times Best Seller series that mix mystery, fantasy, magic, horror, and romance. Her 11 Vampire Hunter novels from Ace books, featuring necromancer and crime investigator Anita Blake, began with Guilty Pleasures and continues with the just-published Cerulean Sins, in which Anita's complex personal and professional relationships with a master vampire and an alpha werewolf continue to evolve. Her new series from Ballantine is about Fey princess Merry Gentry, who is also a private investigator and began with Kiss of Shadows, continued with Caress of Twilight. The third book in the series, Seduced By Moonlight, will be published in Spring 2004.

Laurell lives in St. Louis County, Missouri, with her husband, daughter, three pug dogs, and an ever-fluctuating number of fish. She invites you to visit her website at www.laurellkhamilton.org.

Do you know the point at which you decided to try to publish, the moment you knew you wanted to do this professionally?
I began writing stories when I was 12. All my characters were my age—which helped me keep track of it later on, one of those nice coincidences. I finished my first story—completely through—at age 14. Somewhere between 12 ½ and 14, I decided I wanted to be a writer. Somewhere also between 13 and 14, I picked up my first copy of fantasy and science fiction stories and horror, which I didn't know existed. Up till then, fantasy for me had been talking animals and Charlotte's Web—children’s stories. Then I picked up a copy of Robert E. Howard's Pigeons From Hell. It's a short story collection with baroque fantasy, horror—a wide range, everything but science fiction. And not only, after reading that collection, did I decide I wanted to be a writer, but this is what I wanted to write. I wasn't sure this was actually possible—I’ve always been a practical romantic—but then at about 14, I read the biography in the back of an Andre Norton book. It said something about the fact that she'd had to quit college due to ill health and that she had cats. It made her seem like a real person—and she was alive—because most writers, of course, are dead. When you're living in the Midwest in the middle of nowhere, across from a cornfield, all writers are dead people—usually dead white men. This was a woman and she was still ticking, and it seemed less like an ivory tower dream and more doable.

I decided I wanted to do this early. My earliest stories were very Louisa May Alcott—another of my heroes—and then, by the time I was 14 and I finished a story, it was a bloodbath. I started off doing cozy warm stories, but I could never finish them. By the time I finished one, I was doing hack and slash. Everyone died but the baby. My family did the only thing they could: they patted me on the head and said “very good” and didn't send me off to therapy. Which was nice of them. But from that moment on, I knew I wanted to be a writer and I set about doing it rather methodically. I found the magazine The Writer and Writer's Guide, which let me find out there was a writer's market, and those were enough tools to teach me how to do proper format on a short story--so when I sent in stuff, it was professional. The writing may not have been professional, but by god the format was! My aunt actually let me borrow a typewriter and I taught myself how to type. By the age of 17, I was getting good rejection slips, the kind that are form rejection slips but with a handwritten note scribbled at the bottom "Nice try" or "Try us again." I didn't know at the time how really positive those were. If I'd known I might have tried harder, but at the time I was already turning down trips to the beach because I owed myself a story. I was going to finish or I couldn't go. I was very serious.

I also had done enough research to know I probably wouldn't make a living at it. So I knew I needed a day job, and that meant, to me, that I needed to go to college. My original intent was to get a degree in English lit so I could teach at college and write in breaks. I ended up getting kicked out of the writing program at my college—for "corrupting" the class with genre. The instructor, I learned much later, thought she was going to "cure" me of wanting to write horror and fantasy. She thought all genre was garbage, but halfway through the semester half the class began to write genre. She accused me of trying to take over her class and told me I was a corrupting influence.

What was the road like getting from where you were to where you wanted to be?
My first success was my first finished story. My second success was my second finished story. My third success was the first time an editor took the time to write a handwritten note to me. I took Bradbury's advice very much to heart. Bradbury said, "You have so much crap in you, you need to write—and you will be rejected. Pick a small to medium-sized room in your house and when you can paper the walls with your rejection slips, you will have gotten your crap out and you will sell.” I picked a bathroom and I began to cheerfully collect my rejection slips. I did not anticipate selling a story in high school. There are people who have done it, but it's not the rule. And most of the people who sell that early, it's a fluke, and when they can't duplicate it, it destroys them. You have to have a foundation under you, otherwise success can be more ruinous than failure. So rejection slips were fine with me. I had other story ideas, I had more stories, I kept spinning them out. That's how it worked.

I didn't anticipate selling until I got good enough. I looked at my own writing and I knew there were things I didn't know how to do. When I first started out, I couldn't write a good fight scene, which was very frustrating because what I wanted to do most was heroic fantasy and that's all about fighting. I worked until I mastered that. Then I realized I couldn't do good dialogue. I could fight, but I couldn't talk—on paper. I would look at my writing and say, "What am I not doing well, who does it better?" And then I'd go read it and figure out how they do it. For fight scenes, Robert E. Howard is excellent. For dialogue, Robert B. Parker is one of the masters of witty repartee. If you want to know the rhythm of conversation, so that it's clear to the reader and yet sounds like how real people talk, Parker's one of the best.
I counted everything as a success if I met my own deadlines. As long as I had stories in the mail, that was a success. Then, the Writers of the Future program came out. Every three months I would submit a story. I got an honorable mention on a novelette. But my goal was to make myself ineligible to submit by winning.

Out of college, I went to work in Corporate America—hired as an art editor, even though I cannot draw, and told them that. The experience was baffling and frustrating and gave me my profound dislike of Corporate America. But while that was going on, I continued to write and finally came up with a book-length idea. I'd been working on this fantasy world since early college, which eventually became my first novel, Nightseer. I got up every morning at five A.M. and wrote for a couple hours, then got dressed and went to my job in Corporate America. I wrote most of my first novel that way. Two pages a day, no rewrites.
When I got fired—downsized: nobody gets fired these days, I was downsized—my first husband said go ahead and finish the book, don't worry about finding another job. It turned out to be a good thing, since he moved to St. Louis for his job. I finished the first draft in California and subsequent six drafts in St. Louis. But I finished the book, which was a huge success. I'd never written anything that long.

Then I set about figuring out how to sell it. That was a whole other animal.
Meantime, I still wrote and submitted short stories. I had two goals at the time, one to sell to Dragon Magazine and the other to sell to Marion Zimmer Bradley, specifically to Sword And Sorceress. She rejected one story but said if I had something else, send it. I did have something else. And that was the first thing I ever sold.

In between that and selling my first short story, something very important happened. I attended a writer's workshop at a local con [convention] taught by Emma Bull, Will Shetterly, and Steven Gould. There were about fifteen of us in the class. I submitted part of Nightseer and a short story about a character who would become Anita Blake. What that workshop taught me was not how to be a better writer but how to be a better editor of my own work.
By the time my first book came out, I had about six short story sales.

You treat the whole concept of Anita Blake more as science fiction rather than horror, which for me, at least, blunts the irrational elements common to most horror. Anita has some control, which is the one thing lost in traditional horror. Aside from the need to keep her alive for a series, did you have more in mind when you set it up that way?
Well, it's not a horror series. It's a mystery series. It's a mystery series that happens to have vampires, werewolves, zombies and any other creature that makes sense to me in this world. You're never going to see a centaur galloping down the street in Anita. Some things I'll use just because they're too nifty, but they have to get past my nonsense detectors. It is structured like a mystery series, which means that you need a strong protagonist who is capable, and you need a plot that is solvable, and at the end the bad guys get punished and the good guys triumph in some way and live to fight another day. It's not traditional horror.

ut of college, I started reading a lot of hardboiled detective fiction—Robert B. Parker in particular—and I read a lot of strong female protagonists. But there was one problem, a difference between the male and female protagonists of the different series—even the strongest of the women did not get to do some of the things the men got to do. The men got to cuss, the women rarely; the men got to kill people and not feel bad about it, if the women killed someone they had to feel really, really bad about it afterward and it had to be an extreme situation; the men got to have sex, often and on stage and very casually, but if the women had sex it had to be offstage, very sanitized. I thought this was unfair. So I wanted a heroine who would be as tough as the men or tougher, who would be able to address all these issues, and I wanted to strike a blow for equality. I may have gone a little far in that direction.

I had a short story with Anita and at first I had her just raising zombies. This would have been more traditional horror if she didn't do anything else. I wanted to push boundaries, so I began to flesh it out and add things that you don't normally find in horror. I went back to my idea of a strong female protagonist, so I thought, "She's going to have to use a gun, she's going to work with the police, she's going to have to be a private detective, a cop, or something." I began to do my research. I researched guns, I researched voodoo—she’s going to raise the dead for a living. I discovered that, in fact, that's a myth about voodoo. No one who truly practices vaudun claims to raise the dead like you see with shambling Hollywood zombies.
I set the first Anita book in St. Louis during one of the worst heat waves we ever had. The first two books, in fact, have a lot of heat imagery in them. I talked to a lot of police. From those conversations, I came to realize that no matter what I put in my books, there are people out there who have done worse things. Nothing I come up with is as bad as what has been done. So I decided that when there's a crime in an Anita book, it's based on something that really happened. You can look it up and find it. I refuse to give people new ideas about what kind of bad things they can do. The only exception to this is if there's a crime in an Anita book that can only be done within my magic system and can't be duplicated in real life.

After I wrote the first book, Guilty Pleasures, nobody wanted it. Everyone thought it was someone else's baby. The horror people thought it was science fiction, the science fiction people thought it was fantasy, the fantasy people thought it was mystery. Mystery people wouldn't touch it because it had monsters in it, the horror people didn't like it because my vampires were out of the closet—I was one of the first, if not the first, to mainstream my vampires. I did that with all the monsters. If a zombie comes shambling down your street in Anita-verse, you call the cops and they send an exterminator crew.

I love the conceit that constitutional rights are not limited only to the living. I thought that was brilliant. How did you come up with that?
Science fiction does this kind of thing better than any other genre, I don't care what it is—everyone thinks mystery is the logical genre. Uh uh. Science fiction is the logical genre, because science fiction starts off with a premise and says, "If this is true, what then?" And builds carefully, logical step by logical step from that premise. Nothing else does it to that extent. It's one of the reasons I don't write hard science fiction, because I can't be good that long. I can't follow my logic trail all the way through; I have to fudge. But the idea of it, with my background in biology, I know you have to prove your case all the time. If you can't prove it, it's worthless. With Anita, I decided I would take the tropes of horror and mystery and do with them what science fiction does. So I said, "Okay, you wake up in the morning and find that everything that goes bump in the night is real. What then? How does mainstream America cope? What happens next?" You would get a lawyer then and go to court. If everyone knows vampires exist, then they must have rights. Once they're declared legally alive, then we have legal questions. For instance, if you're a widow and you remarry, when your husband returns as a vampire, are you a bigamist? Your children inherited your money when you were declared dead, now you're declared alive again, do they have to give it back? Vampires own retail businesses and pay taxes, but they don't vote—taxation without representation. Back in college, I was two classes shy of a history major, and a lot of that was political science and its impact on society.

So now I'm doing book twelve and every book has been a little more one thing than another—some are more mystery, some romance, some horror. I'm still in love with my world, I still love following Anita around, but the books have gotten longer because I'm trying to do justice to so many different elements.

Anita has been coming to terms, book after book, with her prejudices, learning to see her foes as individuals instead of as a group. When you began did you have it in mind to do this kind of maturity arc?
When I sat down to write the first book, I was 24. It has now been how many years? Let's just say that in her arc of development, when she first started out, she saw the world as black and white—and so did I. Most people in their early twenties see the world that way. Then somewhere in your thirties you begin to realize that the world is more gray. It makes it so much more difficult to make your decisions, because you aren't so right anymore. Some issues are still clear-cut, but not all of them. One of the things in the Anita series that led to her maturity—and mine—was that in the effort to get things right, I talked to real policemen, real people in the armed forces. People who have been on the edge, for duty, and had to make hard, life-and-death decisions. I talked to them and watched their faces. Anita would have been a very different person had these people not shared their stories with me!—and so would I. Consequently, I couldn't make Anita “easy.”

You've embarked on another series now. Tell us a little about Merry Gentry and the differences between her and Anita and why you wanted to explore those differences.
I'd written five Anita books in a row. I needed a break. I needed to write something different. I was dreaming in Anita's world. Some people might think that's neat, but I was horrified—I work in Anita's world, I don't live there. I put a proposal together for Merry Gentry. I wanted a character who wouldn't argue with me as much as Anita does. Not a pushover, just not as difficult as Anita can be. I wanted someone who wouldn't be so much in angst all the time. Merry is someone who was raised in the royal court, someone who was completely powerless there, so she learned to keep her mouth shut. She learned to be diplomatic. Anita, in Merry's world, would have been dead. She couldn't keep her mouth shut. I wanted to do fairies, the fey. Nobody had done it quite the way I wanted to do it.

So I planned the series to have a larger romantic element, to be more political, and I wanted to build on the fan base I already had. I wanted to mainstream the fairies the same way I mainstreamed the vampires in Anita. Instead of researching the English court—which most fantasy courts are based on—I researched the French court. Then I wondered, "If you had that kind of power for a thousand years, what would it do to you?” Having that kind of power ruins people with just a mortal lifespan. What would happen if you had that power forever?
Merry is different from Anita in another way, in that it's a close-ended series. Anita is open-ended, it could go fifty books. Merry is planned to between a seven and twelve book arc. It's a fairy tale. She has to become queen of everything she surveys and then she has to live happily ever after.

Anita will never let me do that.

Interview conducted by Mark W. Tiedemann, a St. Louis author and friend of Laurell K. Hamilton. The interview introduction comes from Hamilton’s webpage, noted in the text. Tiedemann is the author of Compass Reach, Metal of Night, Peace & Memory, and Realtime. He is a member of the Missouri Center for the Book’s board of directors.

Books by Laurell K. Hamilton
Seduced by Moonlight. Forthcoming 2004
Cerulean Sins. 2003
Caress of Twilight. 2002
Narcissus in Chains. 2001
Kiss of Shadows. 2000
Obsidian Butterfly. 2000
Blue Moon. 1998
Burnt Offerings. 1998
Club Vampyre. 1998
The Midnight Café. 1998
Killing Dance. 1997
Bloody Bones. 1996
Lunatic Café. 1996
Circus of the Damned. 1995
Death of a Darklord. 1995
Laughing Corpse. 1994
Guilty Pleasures. 1993
Nightseer. 1992
Nightshade (Star Trek ® The Next Generation #24)

And many short stories published in anthologies.