Tag: Guilty Pleasures

30 novels in 30 years – Happy 30th anniversary to the Anita Blake series!

“My first Anita Blake novel, Guilty Pleasures, was rejected over two hundred times.”

            October of 1993 Guilty Pleasures hit the shelves. It was the very first Anita Blake adventure. After over two hundred rejections from almost every publisher possible and moments when I wasn’t sure I’d ever publish another book, I finally had the first book in my series published, and better yet I knew there’d be at least two more, because I had my first multi book contract. When I signed on the dotted line the contract was for three Anita Blake novels. I still remember the thrill of knowing there would be at least three books in the series! I’d already had one series end with the first book, Nightseer, because like most first novels it hadn’t sold well enough for the editor to buy more. It was supposed to be four books and now it would never be, but Anita would get at least three novels. I was giddy with the just that.

            Anita Blake lives in a modern-day America where everything that goes bump in the night is real and everyone knows about it. The first book starts two years after Addison v Clarke had changed the definition of life and death by declaring vampires were legal citizens with all the rights that entails except for the right to vote. If you see a zombie on your street the police will come and keep you safe until an extermination team arrives with flame throwers in hand. I actually got rejected by a couple of publishers because my monsters were out of the closet. The editors said that without the mystery vampires aren’t scary. I’ve been proving them wrong on that for thirty books now. Another publisher offered to buy my book if I would make all my monsters a secret like every other horror novel I’d ever read. Anita Blake works full time at Animators Inc, where she raises the dead for her money hungry boss, Bert Vaughn. She consults with the police on supernatural crime part time and is one of the new legal vampire executioners because once a vampire starts to murder people for blood, they don’t stop. There was no way to go back and change Anita and her world, so I just kept collecting my rejection slips until then Penguin Putnam said, yes without wanting to change a thing. They bought me because it was something new that they’d never seen.

I had no idea that Guilty Pleasures would launch my career, or that I would ever get a chance to write the thirtieth Anita Blake novel, Slay that’s coming out November 7, 2023. My goal was to be able to support my family. I had no ambitions beyond that, because what was the point? All I knew then was that I was contracted for three books and if it all fell apart, I’d have at least a trilogy under my belt. If I’d told myself how successful I’d be as a writer way back in 1993 I wouldn’t have believed myself. I wouldn’t have believed a lot of things. The first three books have pagers and telephone booths as the high tech. Somewhere in The Laughing Corpse, or Circus of the Damned Anita gets a cellphone, but it’s nothing like the smart phone that we all live on and through now. It wasn’t just my career I couldn’t have foreseen, but the changes in technology that would reshape the world. Not a single science fiction writer, or even scientist saw that coming, so I don’t feel too bad. I would arbitrarily update all the tech in the series somewhere in the middle novels. It’s a tradition in long running mystery series that the main characters don’t age as fast as the rest of the world, and that you update history to keep the main character current with the present like changing their military service from Korea to the Middle East. I say mystery instead of horror, or fantasy, because at the time I was creating Anita, I had to turn to mystery series to read twenty books or more with the same character, no other genre had that at the time. Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, John D. McDonald’s Travis McGee – none of them ever age out of being able to outthink, out fight, or just be tougher than anyone they’re up against. If it’s good enough for the greats of the genre, it’s good enough for me. I do have the added benefit of Anita Blake’s supernatural powers helping her age slower than normal, or perhaps she’s stopped aging at all, we’re really not sure yet.

People keep asking me if each book is the last Anita Blake novel, because a lot of my fans are from horror, fantasy, romance, and not as much mystery, so they’re used to series stopping at three, four, maybe six books if you’re lucky, but that wasn’t the template I used when I was planning my series. I went to mystery and studied some of the longest running series out there at the time. There are 21 Travis McGee novels, so I’m already ahead. Robert B. Parker wrote 40 Spenser novels before he passed and other writers were invited by his estate and publisher to continue the series. Ace Atkinson wrote 10 and has just passed the mantle to Mike Lupica who’s first Spenser book, Broken Trust comes out in November. Just hitting the 40 that Parker did is ambitious enough. Rex Stout wrote 33 novels and 41 novellas and short stories. If you add it all together that’s 74 Nero Wolfe adventures. Now that’s a goal.

25 Years Since Guilty Pleasures Was First Published

We’re celebrating twenty-five years since Guilty Pleasures was first published. It came out in time for Halloween that year, and I got to add that to all the other reasons October is my favorite month. I love autumn. Late summer as the weather begins to turn cooler all the way through the end of October is my favorite time of year. I was raised without air conditioning, so the heat and humidity of summer going away was part of my love of fall. It’s easier to bundle up in jackets and sweaters for warmth than to stay cool in less clothing. But September was the beginning of fog. Sometimes the fogs were so thick that the start of school would be delayed for hours. Once I was old enough to drive, the fog wasn’t so fun; but when I was younger I thought fog was magical. It turned the ordinary into something mysterious. A foggy world was full of hidden dangers, monsters, or maybe a fantasy world that you could accidentally walk into through that soft, wet, gray cloud cover. From the trees blazing with color, fog, rain, cooler temperatures, it always made my muse happy even before I realized that I wanted to be a writer.

But now autumn means something else to me: boot weather! Boots and shoes in general weren’t that important to me until after I created the character, Jean-Claude. He walked on stage fully formed and very who he was from the first scene. He was a serious clothes horse from the beginning and elegantly fashionable. I was none of these things. I have pictures to prove that I dressed by picking the T-shirt on the top of the pile, jeans, and tennis shoes. I never wore makeup. I just didn’t care. I was raised that what I looked like didn’t matter, what I could do was what mattered. And then Jean-Claude came into my life and onto the pages of my novel. To be able to design his clothes and keep him dressed in the style to which he demanded. I bought my first copy of Vogue and other fashion magazines. I watched fashion shows on TV. I so could have used Fashion TV back then, but it was the late 1980s, so I went to the library to find research books on clothing through the ages, and costuming. I’d never worn a pair of stilettos, but researching for Jean-Claude opened up the world of shoes to me, and his voice in my head was what helped me learn to walk in heels higher than three inches. Writing him as a character made me more interested in clothes, makeup, even trying to gain control of my curls. I don’t think I would have needed a second closet just for shoes if it wasn’t for researching clothes, and especially boots, for Jean-Claude. So, now autumn doesn’t just mean, “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” as John Keats wrote, or apple picking and apple cider, or a dozen other wonderful things. Now it means boot weather.