News

An on-line discussion prompted me to say that I don’t read or watch paranormal genre. I don’t, as a rule, but years back when the paranormal genre went from being me almost alone, the lone voice crying in the wilderness, to being more like a suburb with all sorts of neighbors, I did read some of the writers.

Charlaine Harris was one of those exceptions. Her background was mystery and the books reflected that making the plots and characters richer and stand out from a lot of the writers who jumped on the paranormal bandwagon. The Sookie Stackhouse series was a cozy mystery with vampires and telepaths. Charlaine told me she had been inspired to write her series after reading my Anita Blake series, but she made her vision new, fresh, different in the early books that I read. I have no problem if people use what I’ve done as a true jumping off point for their own unique world. And yes, it has now been made into the wildly successful HBO series, True Blood.

Mary-Janice Davidson writes a series as funny as she is in person, and she is a hoot. Her background is more chick-lit, and the books show that. Who else would create a vampire queen that had a shoe fetish to rival Imelda Marcos?

Sherilyn Kenyon found a way to explain her vampires that is, to my knowledge, completely unique to her. That’s pretty rare in a form of literature that dates back to the 1800s, and if you count stories about lamia and folk tales of vampires then thousands of years. That is pretty nifty.

Kathy Clamp & C.T. Adams created a take on werewolves that made me wish I’d thought of one or two of the small details that they created. I can’t remember reading anyone else that made me think, gosh, I wish I’d thought of that.

L.A. Banks combined hip-hop/rap culture, music, and the paranormal. To my knowledge no one else has done it as well.

If I’ve left people out, my apologies, but there are too many of them now. The genre is still one of the fastest growing in publishing. Some, were left out because reading them is like reading watered down me. Some of them make me feel like I should be charging a franchise fee. Some are not on this list because I simply have not read them, and cannot give an opinion. When I’m done at the end of the day, I don’t want to read anything similar to what I write. It’s not relaxing to me. Someone on line asked, “Doesn’t that mean you aren’t up on your genre?”

I don’t need to be “up” on my genre. My research and ideas come from nonfiction, folklore, mythology, real life interviews, true crime. I don’t get ideas from other people’s fiction. At best, decades ago I would read something and think I wish the writer had done this instead. I wrote both Anita and her world of preternatural creatues and Merry and her world of faries and myth because no one was writing vampries and shapeshifters the way I wanted to read them, and no one was writing Celtic myth the way I wanted to read it either. I wrote the first Anita short story in the late 80’s. The Merry Gentry series was begun over ten years ago. My world, my characters were pretty set long before paranormal was even a phrase in publishing. I was originally sold as mixed genre. Meredith Gentry and her Celtic band of characters owe their world to archeology, folklorists, and mythology. Oh, and pain. Anita Blake is still fueled by my own early tragedies, I’ve come to accept that. I didn’t know until books into it that Merry was fueled from the pain of my first marriage and divorce. Books come from places of deep emotion for me, so far, I’d write lighter if I could, but apparently if it doesn’t hurt somewhere I don’t feel the need to write it down. Most of us write because we are readers first, but there comes a point with most of the professional writers I know that we cease to read most fiction. It becomes a bus-man’s holiday. You know how the trick is done, and it’s hard to be fooled by the slight of hand, because you know where the magician hid the rabbit, and when it’s coming out of the hat. Hard to enjoy the show when you’re in the business.