lkh_lashouts | Interview Reanimation--Orbit Books, UK

LKH in bold, interviewer in italics, me in plain. This interview took place pre-CS.

Laurell K Hamilton has written eleven Anita Blake novels to date, and the series is a regular visitor into the upper reaches of the New York Times bestsellers list. Her novels, blending preternatural horror with cunning sleuthing and unforgettable characters, are now required reading for any fan of vampire stories, horror and well ... just fabulous storytelling. We caught up with her at the launch of Cerulean Sins for a chat about life with Anita…

I know that kissing ass is now mandatory for any interview LKH consent to, but goddamn.

With eleven Anita books now in print are you finding the stories come easier each time, or are the plots more difficult to develop?

The plots come easier because I find the further into a series I am, the world and characters come so much more to life and give me ideas. A lot of authors seem to find it the opposite, they get tired. I am not tired, I am having a wonderful time. It is easier to come up with ideas, but I am also finding it is more complicated due to the characters' development and the events my characters have gone through.

Translation: "The plots come easier because there aren't any. I know those lesser hack writers get tired, but I don't know what the word tired means. Seriously. I threw out my dictionary. And without the plot and the first seven books of Sex for Dummies in my increasing how-to library, I find it's much easier to vomit forth a new pornish doortstop every few months. The only problem is that I have all that pesky backstory and previous character development to tear to shreds."

At the beginning of the series it was much easier because they were more linear. One book would be straight mystery, one book would be straight horror. But as I've got further into the series I'm using all the genres: every book has a romance element, every book has a horror element, every book has a mystery sub-plot, or a mystery spine that the rest of the book hangs from. So you have to do justice to as much of that as you can and that does make it hard.

Granted, the mystery element has been harder to work in there because it's hard for Anita to fight crime on her back, but I'm told I blend sex and horror better than any author in the known universe. Many of my fans have reported screaming, nightmares, and mounting therapy bills due to my unique "romance" passages.

There are so many strong central characters in the series - is it hard not to be drawn off at tangents and into each of their back-stories, rather than sticking to the central plot? And related to this, do you have any plans to write stories from Jean-Claude / Asher's early years?

No, I am absolutely not attracted to the idea of back-stories. I am a first person narrator. Anita is my only "eyes" on this series. So I am not attracted to other peoples back-stories.

It'd be far too much work to flesh out these characters with a backstory after I've castrated the lot of them.

If Anita doesn't know it, then usually I don't know it or at least not much beyond what she knows. I have no intentions of writing Jean-Claude or Asher's early years. What we will get will be in memories or flashbacks. But that's all.

Usually involving sex because that's just where my imagination is.

What happened to Edward? Will he appear again?

Edward is back in New Mexico, still engaged to Donna. I am hoping he reappears in the next book, Anita Book 12 which is as yet untitled.

But I promised Edward in book eleven, twelve, and thirteen, which just hasn't panned out yet, so who can say?

What first got you interested in all things preternatural?

I have tried to answer this question before, but for the life of me I think the real answer is: I came this way. I used to blame it on being raised on Ozark Mountain ghost stories and the early tragedies in my life. But I now realize, as I look back over my childhood, that I was interested in horror movies and scary stuff long before those things happened.

I'm just special, man! Worship the specialness!

Also, my daughter who has not been raised on horror movies and ghost stories - I purposely did not do this, she has had a much more 'normal' upbringing - also loves and is attracted to scary stuff. Not the same things I was as a child, but she decorates her playhouse as a haunted house. I am beginning to think it is just genetic.

She, too, is a prodigy.

Was it difficult to devise the rules that make your alternate reality seem so, well ... real?

Yes and no. No, it wasn't because this is the way I think. I have a rather concrete way of thinking for a writer, strangely. But I think what helped me a great deal was that I have a degree in biology as well as literature. The sciences will help you think well and more orderly than most of the more literary type classes.

I am sure biologists the world over are just thrilled to have you representing them. And orderly? Really? Really?

It is a different way of looking at the world around you even if it is a 'soft' science like biology. I think my background in science was very helpful in creating the rules that work and make the world more concrete.

It translated nicely to the sex. Who would've known when I started in GP that I'd one day be glad I knew so much about the sexual organs of cats?

Have you been surprised by the level to which readers have become absorbed into Anita's world? What do you think gives the books their extraordinarily addictive quality?

Yes. I wanted the series to be popular but every writer does. But the vehemence and depth of emotion people have invested in this series and the characters is somewhat surprising.

Yeah. Old habits die hard. But they die.

As one of my friends says, these are my imaginary friends, these are people I have made up and put down on paper. And some people tend to treat them as more real than I do, they talk about them like they are real people. Which I do to to some extent. I have almost bought them Christmas presents before I realize that there is no way for them to receive them.

It's generally when I've forgotten my lithium.

What has been disturbing has been the people that have either tried to decide that because I write this, this must be how I live and they seem to have trouble dividing me, Laurell, from Anita the character.

NOOOOOOOOOOOO. Why would people have trouble differentiating the short, busty brunette Anita with the short, busty brunette LKH? Why would we think there was any connection between Richard and Micah and LKH's divorce and remarriage? Why would we think the exact same personal history for both author and avatar would be significant? Why would the exact same phobias reflect on LKH? It is a puzzle, a genuine puzzle.

Those are disturbing, as are the people who want my life to mirror the books. I am afraid I am a disappointment to them.

If only you knew.

The people who can be the most painful to be around are those who have taken the whole series of books so much to heart that they will blame me if the character or story is not going the way they want.

You know, logically. And why would people blame the author if their series goes to hell? That's just not fair.

Of course there is no way to please everybody, so there is always someone who is unhappy with you. I have had people react as if I had dumped their brother or best friend - to which I want to remind them that these are fictional characters.

Or maybe they reacted as if you were just being a spiteful bitch and canon-raping your own characters. Some readers can pick that sort of thing up.

That level of emotional investment did really surprise me. At the same time, it is very gratifying to know that people are that interested in people I made up in my own head.

Or just, like, ripped out of real life and gave them a freakishly large dick.

I don't know what gives them such an addictive quality. I wish there were a formula I could recite. I have looked at other series that have a long life and sizeable readership, to see what everything has in common.

OMGZ. There's no formula? Fuck me, don't rinse, repeat.

There are only two things they all seem to have in common: strong characters, or characters you can sympathize with or love or hate, and a world that is unique enough that you would want to visit it.

*sighs nostalgically*

Now maybe with Anita you would only want to visit if you got a safety pass where you knew you would come out the other side alive.

Along with sane and relatively unfucked.

But you feel like you could walk the streets there, shop and live there. I think that level of realism is part of the appeal of all long running series. Other than that I don't know how to answer the question.

This used to be true. When was the last time, however, Anita went anywhere other than to her next ardeur feeding? Seriously? The last aspiring doorstop of a book was spent in the same freaking building. Most if it happened in one fucking room.

Which of the books are you most happy with as a writer?

Happy as a writer is a hard question. If you want to know which mystery plot I was happiest with, that would be one question. If you want to know which character development am I most happy with, that is another question. For just sheer happiness on how the mystery came out it would be Guilty Pleasures, The Laughing Corpse and Lunatic Cafe. For favourite villainesses it would be Lunatic Cafe, because it is the first time we meet Raina, a perennial love-to-hate. The only person you can kill and not get rid of.

It's comments like this that make me think LKH is not beyond reason.

The Killing Dance, because I did something on paper I swore I would never do on paper because they usually are not well done: a sex scene. But I muscled through and did it, and I think did it well.

And then she says something like this which is so absolutely contradictory of every single fucking thing she's said for the last three, four years that it makes my head explode. *picks up pieces of head and sits down with Krazy Glue.*

So for me, highlights are things I have never done on paper, or not done as well as I would have liked. But each book has it's own special points for me. Obsidian Butterfly not only let me learn more about Edward but, because the supporting cast was not there, I learned a lot about how I write. And believe me Edward is not a joyful travelling companion. But it made me realize just how character driven a writer I am. Having to create new characters for Anita to interact with made it take longer. I hadn't realized how familiar the supporting characters were, almost as familiar as Anita herself. It was wonderful to see New Mexico, which I had never been too. But that is where he insisted he lived in my head. He argued with me that even though I had never been there that is where he was from. So I went, and it was just perfect. I have learned to quit arguing with my imaginary friends.

No, you haven't. Liar. Richard is still bludgeoning you to death for canon-raping him.

I love all the books, but for very different reasons.

I'm particularly fond of the ones in what I call my Post-Plot period.

How much of Laurell K. Hamilton is in Anita Blake?

Mostly my stubbornness. My grandmother use to call it sheer cussedness. That depth of your personality that when people tell you 'No, you cannot do that' you try harder. Especially if they say it is because you're a girl. Anita and I both hate that a great deal. It just makes us more determined to do it.

Oh, ye gods, we KNOW. Woden will smite thee!

Other than the perverse stubborn streak, the voice. We sound very much alike in speech rhythm and cadence.

As well as political opinions, sexual philosophy, self-martyrdom, hypocrisy, narcissism, god complex, superiority complex, inferiority complex...

I used to joke that Anita was me before therapy. We were more alike early in the series, but I went off and got married, had a child, and live in suburbia with three dogs.

And then I DIVORCED THAT BASTARD that wanted me to be a Betty Crocker with a white picket fence! I am WOMAN, hear me ROAR!

Anita went on to have the highest kill-count in literature outside of a war novel. So our lives have definitely diverged. Now that she is nearing thirty we seem to be coming full circle and becoming more alike again.

When in the series were you not alike?

She is beginning to look at herself and be more introspective rather than just reacting.

*gags*

*chokes*

*expires with laughter*

Okay, wait, wait. Introspective, yeah. We might even call it whiny or navel-gazing. But she doesn't "just react" anymore? Bitch, PLEASE. She's got a harem of men whose sole responsibility is to shuffle her over to her next ardeur feeding, make her eat food, make her shower, make her sleep...get the picture? She's become a blow-up doll with aspirations to Zen Guru.

That is one of the hallmarks of being an adult - looking at your life and trying to be proactive instead of strictly reactive.

Yeah, it is. Which is why you and Anita Fail At Life. Your coping mechanisms consist of tea-boys and copious wailing.

Do you think Anita will ever settle down and raise a family, or has she gone way too far beyond the boundaries of normal relationships?

Well, that's a stupid fucking question. Who would she marry? Midget-man or her sort-of-son-cum-boyfriend? That just makes some delightful mental pictures.

Do you know what the future holds for her at this stage, or are there a number of potential paths ahead?

I'm guessing most of those potential paths involve the floor and a lot more "research" with the little man.

We are too far down the road for her to have the white picket fence sort of life.

I am sick to death of this metaphor. Will someone please beat this woman with a clue-by-four?

I am hoping though that she finds a relationship that works for her. I have talked to people while doing research that have non-traditional lives.

Funny that, when so many former fans with "non-traditional lives" are tearing at their hair.

Ménage a trois (two men and one woman) that have lasted more than twenty years. They are doing better than most marriages. I looked at non-traditional relationships because that appears to be where Anita is headed. I cannot see her dumping all the non-traditional stuff and becoming traditional.

Especially when she has to have sex on the hour, every hour. It's very hard to accomplish things.

Though there is still a part of her that desperately wants that.

Really? What part? Lately we've just been seeing the one part active.

Despite that, my bets are off the table. I have been wrong so many times on what would occur, who Anita would date, who would be her lover, who would be anything, that I have quit doing more than just giving Anita advice.

I prefer to just drop the magical sex CPD from hell on her.

Like any friend, she may take it, she may not. But it is not my life it is hers. She has surprised me before, so I am keeping my opinion to myself on this one.

It's possible there could be an involved debate on this point.

Anita books are often like a chose your own adventure book. I give Anita choices A, B and C. She almost always chooses the most difficult one. But what she decides makes a difference on where the other sub-plots go. So it is important. Richard gets three choices and he will choose D - none of the above and go off in a completely different direction. Not one I had planned at all. He is always surprising me.

*hugs Richard forever* Richard still want no part of this disaster.

Jean-Claude is the easiest. He always tells me to choose for him.

*snicker* At the risk of offending JC fans--this is me not being surprised.

I do know what mysteries we will be doing in the future, what themes and what monsters. But that is about it.

Yes, the Mystery of "Who's my non-existent baby's daddy?" It was riveting from page one.

Will Anita ever leave the US? A lot of your European and Australian fans would love to read an adventure set on their shores . . .

Funny you should mention that. Yes, we have tentative plots for Anita to go to London. Unless something else comes up, that will probably be the first out-of-country book for Anita.

The British fans just can't wait, after the smashing success with Byron, to see LKH try to take on a British accent.

And finally ... has Sigmund joined you in the UK? Do you think London is his kind of town?

Sigmund who? *scratches head* I have forgotten.

Sigmund did not get to go to London because, truthfully, none of us thought of it until I got back. And it was too late.

Translation: "I had to think for a minute to remember who Sigmund was. Fuzzy penguins aren't terribly sexual so we've kind of shuffled him off."

Also he has been travelling so much he really didn't want to get on another plane. But I think on my next trip he will definitely accompany me.

It is absolutely astounding that her phobias cross over not only to Anita but to a fictional stuffed toy.

Sigmund is not really a city boy. London is a lovely city. It was amazing seeing the Tower of London and the British Museum. It was wonderful to get to walk in the places I have been reading about since I was a young girl. And I know Sigmund would have been as awed by it as I was. But at heart we are both country folks. We got out to the Glastonbury area and that countryside was amazing. England is so green. It gets so much more rain than the middle of the United States where I live. The weather when we visited was sunny, bright and clear. Only rained one day and was cloudy one. I know all the gardeners were lamenting the lack of rain, but it was still wonderful. I look forward to coming again.

Hands up Brits who are awaiting this portentous visit with bated breath.