Halloween Archives - Laurell K. Hamilton

30 novels in 30 years – Happy 30^th 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.

Happy Halloween!

I asked my friend and fellow Alternate Historian, Sharon Shinn for a guest blog for October. Here are her thoughts. -Laurell

A couple of years ago around Halloween, I had a chance to write a guest blog about my favorite urban myth—from the point of view of one of my fictional characters. I chose the “dead celebrity who’s not really dead” trope. But since most of my books are set in imaginary and secondary worlds, my protagonist wasn’t sighting Elvis or JFK. She and her friends thought the mysterious winged shape in the house next door was an angel who had supposedly been killed more than seventy years ago when the god struck him down with a thunderbolt. I thought of it as my “gothic angel” novella.

Even though I don’t use the real world for most of books, I do sometimes think about how my characters might function here on Earth. In my pile of unpublished manuscripts is a space opera series that features six wildly different characters with very strong personalities. I was pretty young when I wrote those books, so I spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of cars they would drive and what their favorite colors might be. I even came up with different handwriting styles and practiced their signatures. (Like I said…young.)

But I don’t think I’m the only author whose mind works like that! I was at a science fiction convention once when other writers started casting their books with characters from the Muppets and “Firefly.” (Even better: “Firefly” characters AS MUPPETS: http://www.cantstoptheserenity.com/2011/06/05/firefly-meets-muppets-artist-james-hance-is-supporting-csts/.)

Since it’s the Halloween season, lately I’ve been wondering how my characters would dress up for the holiday if it happened to exist on their worlds. Those who have read my Twelve Houses books might find these amusing: Senneth as the Human Torch, Tayse as Thor, Kirra as Mystique…

And that got me thinking about the main character in my newest book, Unquiet Land, which comes out November 1. Leah has spent the past five years in self-imposed exile, running away to a foreign country when she couldn’t face all the traumas at home. She spends her time spying for her regent, but she rarely makes friends or has much human contact. If she dressed up for Halloween during those five years, she’d have to be a ghost.

When the book opens, she’s just returned home, determined to make peace with her past and slay all her personal demons. This year I figured she’ll dress up as Buffy. Wooden stakes in both hands and ready to strike despair right in the heart.

Happy Halloween, everybody!

You can find more about Sharon at her website : http://www.sharonshinn.net and her new book Unquiet Land is out November 1st.

Leah Frothen has spent five years in self-imposed exile, recovering from a failed relationship and hating herself for abandoning her baby daughter. Now she’s back in Welce, determined to find her place in society and learn to be a mother to her little girl. Life quickly becomes complicated when the regent asks her to spy on mysterious ambassadors from a visiting nation and when an old friend unexpectedly shows up, wrestling with demons from his own past. Leah finds herself developing a dangerous friendship with an unscrupulous foreign woman and falling in love with a man she’s not even sure she can trust. And soon she learns that everyone—her regent, her lover, and even her daughter—have secrets that could save the nation, but might very well break her heart.

A Not So Scary Halloween Birthday!

I’m a horror writer, and back when there was a horror section in the bookstores, that’s where I was shelved. I’ve been called mixed genre, dark fantasy, urban fantasy, paranormal, paranormal thriller. I’m still shelved in science fiction and fantasy, because thats where horror goes now. We horror writers hang out on the street corners with the science geeks, and the Tolkien fans, teaching them about the darker side of their fantasies. Muhahaha! Because I usually write a darker version of whatever I’m writing, I get invited to a lot of Halloween events. Not as many as I used to get invited to, because I have a reputation for turning them down. I could have made a lot of press and publicity over the years if I’d been wiling to attend more Halloween events on All Hallows Eve, itself, so why refuse?

When my daughter, Trinity, was three I went to either World Fantasy Con, or World Con in California. I honestly can’t remember which con it was now, but they are both good cons for networking, finding agents, publishers, getting invited into anthologies, interviews, and a host of other things that are good for a writer’s career. If you are starting out as a writer I especially recommend World Fantasy Con for making good business connections. It was a smart business move so my friend and fellow writer, Deborah Millitello and I went. My ex, who was at that time still my husband, stayed at home like many spouses do for their other halves. Trinity was going to be Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and her best friend was going to be Glenda the Good Witch. My ex promised to get lots of pictures and our good friends and parents of the Good Witch were going to get video. My ex promised to get video, too. I hated to miss it, but I’d see the pictures and video later, and there would be other Halloweens. I was still searching for enough writing contracts to keep me busy and grow my career and that might not be able to wait for another year until next World Fantasy, so I chose and I went.

It was a very busy and fun convention in many ways. I had a lot of meetings with editors, publishers, agents, and even had an interview with a new magazine. It was potentially a very productive convention, if any of it panned out. Just like you have to send out a lot of stories to a lot of different markets so you can up your chances of getting a professional sale and getting paid, so the more meetings you have with more publishing professionals the better your odds for new contracts. But it’s a bit like fishing, you put a lot of bait in the water, you don’t always catch a fish.

As it turned out, not a single meeting turned into an actual paying contract for me. No new book sales, no new series sales, no anthologies that actually took off and became a reality. It was a lot of promise but no follow through, and . . . I’d missed seeing Trinity dressed up as Dorothy with her best friend as Glenda, but there’d be pictures and video.

Nope, both cameras and both video recorders broke. I had one fuzzy picture in the dark where I could see the ruby gleam of my daughter’s shoes, but that was it. Literally every tech device we had to record that memory malfunctioned. I missed that Halloween and I could never even see it.

That was my wakeup call from the universe that Halloween with my daughter, my only child, might just trump business even for a horror writer. I made the promise to myself that I would never miss another one with Trinity, and I have kept that promise.

Her birthday is in October and one of her very favorite holidays is Halloween. She’s always been disappointed that I couldn’t hold out so she could be born on the actual holiday. For her birthday this year she wanted to go to Disney World for Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party.

It’s not a typical twenty-first birthday request, but it is very Trinity, so Jon and I went about making it happen. We told her to invite a friend, which she did. Jon, who has been Daddy Jon since she was quite small, and I, plus Spike and Genevieve, the other half of our poly foursome set about making Trinity’s birthday wish come true.

If you think that because I write horror and hard boiled mysteries that I don’t enjoy Disney, you would be wrong. In fact, all four of us are the type of adult that will watch our favorite Disney movies without a child as an excuse. Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re too old to enjoy the movies and things that make you happy, because they are killjoys that want to steal the happy-shiny from the world, and the world needs all the happy-shiny it can get. If Disney is one of your happy thoughts, then rock your bad selves!

If you go to Disney World for Halloween be absolutely sure you get tickets for Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party. It was awesome! Don’t miss the parade, either! The Headless Horseman rides out first, and the rest of the parade was equally fun. I particularly liked that the dancers from the Haunted Mansion had shovels and caused sparks to fly against the ground; it was a very cool effect. But make sure and get good viewing for the show at the castle, because this year is being hosted by the Sanderson Sisters from the movie, “Hocus Pocus.” It was one of Trinity’s favorite movies and one of Genevieve’s, too. The show is fabulous and the actress they have playing Bette Midler’s part as Winifred is spot on! The other sisters are very good, too, as was the whole cast. I can’t compliment the rest of the cast individually without giving away the surprises so I’ll wait until November to say anymore, but it was amazing! If you can go to this year’s party, do it, because all six of us loved it.

So, Trinity is twenty-one, and she’s trying to arrange with work so she gets Halloween off because she’d still rather spend it at home with us and the dogs. Someday maybe she’ll grow out of wanting to be with us for the holiday, but until she does, I’m home for Halloween. I learned my lesson, even horror writers should take Halloween off and play with the kids.

Halloween 2011

I went to bed with stars shining overhead, and woke with them still gleaming in a pitch black sky. A wisp of pale clouds trailed across the darkness like some huge remnant of ghosts that must have marched through someone’s dreams trailing cobwebby veils and offering to dance. There was the faintest touch of chill in the air, an autumn kiss. It is five days before Halloween.
Everyone thinks that this is a big time of year for me, since I write paranormal thrillers. I recently had a woman ask me what kind of paranormal I wrote, and after much going back and forth, I finally realized all she wanted to know was it vampires, werewolves, or something else. I told her all of the above and more, and she seemed happy. What does someone who writes about monsters do this time of year? Well, this year, I will be at the Annual Anne Rice Vampire Lestat Fan Club Ball on October 28th in New Orleans. Yep, I write about vampires and I’m going to a vampire ball in New Orleans, it seems perfect, doesn’t it? But my husband, Jon, and I are only staying a short time in New Orleans after the ball, because we need to get home to our daughter, Trinity. She still thinks we’re cool enough to hang out with on Halloween, and we’ve vowed not to miss spending the actual day with her until she decides that she has more grownup plans that do not include parents. All our other friends with teenagers tell us that this dreaded moment will happen soon, but right now she wants the holiday to be a family one, and that works for us.
Halloween has always been one of my two favorite holidays, the other being Christmas. I loved the dressing up, the trick or treat, the candy, the walking around on the chilly Indiana nights. One year we actually had snow and I had to wear a coat over my costume, I was so bummed. It doesn’t get that cold that early here in Missouri, and that’s just fine with me. Snow sucked much for trick or treat.
But its not me being a vampire writer, or going to the Anne Rice Vampire Ball, or having a child, or even nostalgia that makes Halloween truly special, it’s the fact that it’s one of the major holidays for my religion. We’re Wiccan, as in pantheistic, nature honoring, God and Goddess worshipping, as a rough overview. It’s like trying to explain being Catholic in a single sentence to someone who doesn’t know anything about it; try it sometime, harder than it sounds. The most important thing that every Wiccan agrees on is this; “So long as you harm none, do as thou wilt.” That harm none part means you, too, by the way, so harm no one, not even yourself. That means that every decision should got through this filter. You can do what you want, as long as you harm no one, not even yourself. Some Wiccans carry that to animals, and go Vegetarian, or Vegan. Not me, and my family, we’re carnivores, but one of the things that most Wiccans value greatly is their independence from having to follow the same rules that everyone else follows, we’re sort of the anti-organized religion, which is why the one bit of “harm none” is about all everyone can agree on. Our household are eclectic Wiccans, which means that even among ourselves we don’t all do the same thing at our altars, or call on the same Deities on a regular basis. Group rituals must be agreed upon, but beyond that it’s very individual. Halloween is All Hallows Eve, Samhain, for us. It is a time when the veil between the worlds is thin, and most Wiccans do a ritual to honor their dead. It is saying good-bye to the recently dead, or making peace with someone that did you wrong long ago. It can just be an honoring of the dead in general. For us, we still do a more typical American celebration of dressing up, trick or treat, and watching a marathon of Ghost Hunters, or favorite scary movie. I think this year we’ll be watching Ghost Hunters and whatever location wins their contest to be a live investigation on Halloween night.
But I’ll see some of you guys in New Orleans on Friday the 28, for the Anne Rice Vampire Ball, hosted by Voltaire, the musician and all around performer and artist, not the dead philosopher. It’s the vampire ball, but it’s not that kind of vampire ball. There will be other wonderful musicians, costumes, and fun to be had. Come on down to New Orleans, dance with some vampires, or at least people who write and sing about them, beyond that, can’t guarantee anything, but it is New Orleans, and it is two days before Halloween, you never know.