The Midnight Brew Presents: Lilith Saintcrow

Today's guest was born in New Mexico, but as an Air Force brat, Lilith Saintcrow (yes, that's really her real name!) bounced around the world. When she was ten years old, she fell in love with writing. This very prolific writer has written The Society series, The Watcher series, and most recently the Dante Valentine series and the Jill Kismet series. Nowadays Ms. Saintcrow lives in Vancouver, WA with three children, a houseful of cats, and assorted other strays. The Midnight Moon Café has the pleasure to welcome urban fantasy and paranormal romance author, Lilith Saintcrow. MMC: Do you remember the first paranormal romance you ever read? Lilith: Do LeGuin's The Tombs of Atuan or McCaffrey's To Ride Pegasus count? Or Lackey's Diana Tregarde series, I suppose. The trouble with saying "paranormal romance" is that so much can fall into that category, from Keats's Lamia to Stoker's Dracula. I think Tombs of Atuan must count, as well as LJ Smith's YA novels. Later I grew addicted to Christine Feehan (still one of my favorite guilty pleasures) and I suppose those were the first "modern" paranormal romances with covers that fit in the rest of the genre. MMC: When did you first become interested in writing paranormal romances? Lilith: I've always been interested in the paranormal. It's hard not to be when you're an avid reader of comic books, not to mention HP Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Colin Wilson—you know, all the greats. So writing books with paranormal influences and aspects really dovetails neatly with my obsessions. As for the romance half, I've always admired romance authors. Especially in the heydays of Harlequin and Silhouette, they have to turn in product under very tight deadlines and find a story within very rigid conventions. So from a craft standpoint it was tremendously interesting to take my own turn producing under those conditions. Plus, the first editor who ever gave me a chance was at ImaJinn Books, where romance is the order of the day. So I fell into it sort of by default. MMC: Who influenced you the most in your writing? Lilith: I'm an avid and omnivorous reader. My most-favorite author is Tanith Lee, and I have favorites in every genre. I've been influenced most by a list of people: Lee, Stephen King, Robin McKinley, Anne McCaffrey, John Julius Norwich, Edward Gibbons, Chris Claremont, JRR Tolkien, Dorothy Allison. . .the list is endless, but those are the biggies. Any good book you read, in any genre, can and will influence you and inform your own work as a writer. It's food for the creative brain. MMC: What is your writing schedule like? Lilith: Let's see. I resurrect in the mornings and am met by my four-year old the morning lark. (I cannot believe I birthed such a being.) After getting both of us breakfast, I sit down, check email, and blog. By the time I finish my eight-year-old and the teenager are up, and they get breakfast. I hit the treadmill for a bit, make lunch, and settle down to write. Normally I write between eight and ten hours a day, working up to and after dinner and into the night. I take after my maternal grandfather—we're both night owls, so the majority of my good work comes out after dark, when everyone's in bed. I don't ever have a day when I'm not writing. It's just what I do. MMC: How much time do you dedicate to research for your stories? Lilith: A lot. But I cheat. Research is one of my great passions, and working at a bookstore means I get to cherrypick interesting books and have a network of other book people with all sorts of interesting things in their heads. I can find something interesting in any research I do for a story, and I try to talk to people obsessed with the subject. People love to talk about their hobbies, and for the price of a few beers you can pump a geek on just about any subject. Plus, it's like, "Tie me up and force me to read! Go ahead, torture me!" I love research. MMC: Let's talk a little about world-building. How did you come up with your backstory for the Watcher series and the Dante Valentine series? And how does that setting affect your main characters? Lilith: It's a funny thing about characters: they do all the heavy lifting building a world. I just watch. I "see" books as movies inside my head, and the locations are so detailed I can smell them. So the world just shows up as an extension of the characters, since my characters are largely expressions of their environment. Take Danny Valentine, for example. She's very much a product of her society and time, and she is very definite about what she wants me to mention in any scene and what she considers unimportant. That bleeds over into the worldbuilding. Her world is very neon and pavement, dark and rainy and full of the sights and smells of someone who's functioning with more than five senses. It's seamless. The Watchers each have a backstory constrained by the conventions of romance and the pattern of the very first Watcher books. They're much more crafted instead of organic, I do a bit more planning for the Watcher books. But within that framework, they are very much their own people and have different things they want mentioned, different perceptions they want to express. Hanson the Watcher (from Storm Watcher) is interested in questions of absolute truth, because he used to be a con artist. Jack Gray (from Cloud Watcher) is interested in sin, because he used to be a priest. Both of them are interested in redemption, but in very different ways. So they do all the work and I just write down their natural expressions and obsessions. MMC: What attracts you about the paranormal characters you write about? Lilith: My themes center on self-sacrifice, redemption, and made families. When you have a character with abnormal powers, the drama of how to choose to use those powers becomes central. When you're exceptional, do you use your exception to benefit the people around you, or do you use it for personal gain? What do you sacrifice in order to do so? What do you sacrifice if you don't? How do you redeem yourself, how do you deal with choices you've made that shape your life, even when you had no idea of the consequences when you were young and stupid? Most of my characters have "made families"—families they weren't born with. You can't control who you were born to, but you can find your own tribe, and often marginalized people do so. I guess my experiences dealing with the homeless and street kids when I was young started me wondering about the families these kids tried to make on the street, how they worked and didn't work. Paranormal characters seem to be made for these types of issues. You can take a theme normal people deal with—redemption, for example, one of my biggies—give it rocket fuel and a katana, and watch the fun. It just magnifies everything and gets the adrenaline pumping. MMC: Who is your sexiest hero to date and why? Lilith: I suppose most of my readers would say Japhrimel the demon. But the character I find most intriguing (and sexiest by a long shot) is Delgado from the Society series. He's just so flawed and obsessive, and he tries so hard to do something he wasn't programmed for, something he was broken so badly he doesn't think he'll ever be able to do. And he just proportionately kicks so much more ass than my usual hero. He's got a Talent, of course, but it isn't very usable—he can break a mind open like a bank vault, but not without terrific pain and killing the person he's reading. So he has to use brains and brawn and old-fashioned endurance to get what he wants, since he isn't invulnerable. When he gets shot it hurts so much he wants to throw up. I just find that so utterly interesting. MMC: Let's talk about the Watcher series. Where did you get the idea for these stories? Lilith: It's funny, it just came out of nowhere. ImaJinn couldn't take a vampire novel I'd written, because of severe genre-busting (adulterous sex, illegal drug use, anorexia, and gore) and they gave me a list of what they were looking for. So I took a look at those conventions and thought, I can do this. I just opened up a blank file in Word and went for it, starting with Theo the witch. It just bloomed. I won't deny I was watching a lot of Buffy at the time, mostly the first two seasons. And I'd just finished a pretty intense course of reading Peter Carroll, S. Jason Black, and Phyllis Curott, as well as some old Sybil Leek. So the Watchers and the witches just fell out of my head. MMC: The second book in the Dante Valentine series, "Dead Man Rising," was released a few months ago from Warner Books. Can you tell us a little about it? Lilith: It opens up about a year after Working For The Devil ends, with Dante doing bounty hunting and her ex-boyfriend trying to keep up with her. Basically, Danny had some business left over from her childhood she just had to deal with, because it was time. There comes a time in every woman's life when you have to face whatever demons you have from your youth. It's dangerous and difficult, because you have to take back power from these things that scarred you, and you have to take responsibility for where you're going and the choices you're making. And of course, it's a Valentine book, so there had to be lots of katana play and guns. Not to mention vampires, werewolves, demons, the spirits of the dead, and murders. DMR is by far the darkest Valentine book. It's kind of a dark night of the soul for Danny, because she has to deal with both her childhood and with grieving for Japhrimel. She has to face that sometimes loving someone doesn't fix everything, and some circles and cycles in your life have to be completed no matter how dangerous it is for you psychically or physically. So there's Danny, and something is killing her fellow psions. The more she digs, the clearer it becomes that the one commonality in the murders is Rigger Hall, the horrific boarding school she just barely survived. It goes on from there, with Dante having to make a very real choice: does she live up to her own self-image as the tough girl, or does she break and become a coward? It's never an easy choice. MMC: What do you enjoy most about writing the Dante Valentine books? Lilith: Adrenaline. I am an adrenaline junkie from way back, but having kids has forced me to get my jolts from writing instead of risking my life. When I finish a good combat scene or a spine-tingling cliffhanger, I get the jolt I used to get from high-risk scenarios. It's a cheap thrill, but I like it. MMC: What challenges have you faced in the process of writing those stories? Lilith: Some of the things Dante deals with hit close to home. Of course, her issues with trust and abuse are taken to the nth degree, but in a very real sense a lot of those things exorcise some hard demons for me. Being taken over by a character and a story that touches on your own emotional experience (if not physical experiences) is never comfortable. There's the desire to flinch, to punk out and look away and to make everything shiny and glossy and happy-happy instead of dealing with the blood and guts and dirt. It's hard to retain emotional equilibrium when faced with those old ghosts. MMC: Let's say you've just landed a movie deal, and you get to pick the actor who'll play the hero from one of your books. Who would you pick and why? Lilith: For purely aesthetic reasons I'd probably pick Karl Urban to play Japhrimel. Because he's who I had in mind—him and his eyebrows—when Japh showed up at Danny's door. The Russian hit man in the second Bourne movie with Matt Damon is who I had specifically in mind, because he gave me goosebumps. Though Crispin Glover would probably be a better choice, since he's got the menace and the ugly-pretty face I'd look for in a Japhrimel. Whoever plays him has got to be able to scare you just by looking at you, and as much as I love Urban's eyebrows, I think Glover would probably do it better. MMC: For those not familiar with your work, which book would you recommend to read first and why? Lilith: I always recommend the Society series first. (The Society and Hunter, Healer) Mostly because that's the most accessible set of books—I describe at as my "psychics-chased-by-the-guvmint" series. And it doesn't have a lot of the more-controversial aspects of my other works. Plus I just think it's a more fun read. MMC: Any more Dante adventures coming up? How about new releases? Lilith: In December '07 the fourth Valentine book, Saint City Sinners, was due on the shelves, and the fifth, To Hell and Back, followed in January '08. In the works are the first two in the Jill Kismet series, about the things that go bump in the night and the woman that bumps back hard, and the next Watcher book, Mindhealer. Another book, The Demon's Librarian, is resting with the editors at ImaJinn and waiting for its turn in the production queue. And there's Serafim, the comic book I collaborate on with my buddy Josh Carter. So there's no shortage of stuff in the works. MMC: Now for the fun questions. What's something that your readers may not know about you? Lilith: Truth time? I am terrifically, painfully shy. Despite my brassy public persona I an really, really cripplingly shy. I am terrified of public speaking or meeting new people. I am even afraid of the phone, I won't pick up unless Caller ID says it's someone I know. I am even afraid of my voicemail. Go figure. MMC: Do you have a favorite food/beverage/music do you always have on hand while you're writing? Lilith: What I call fizzy water—carbonated mineral water. I'm addicted to it. And I listen to a lot of different music while I'm writing. I do up soundtracks for my books, of different songs that express characters and events. I listen to just about everything except rap and modern country. MMC: Can you give us an idea of what your writing/working area looks like? Lilith: I do most of my writing sitting cross-legged in a papasan chair, with my laptop balanced on a lapdesk on the footstool. My chair is surrounded by drifts of books (my TBR pile helps hold my chair up) and my research bookcase is directly to my right, where I can reach out and touch it. To my left is my Latin/classics bookcase. It's in the living room, which is full of plants, bookcases (there are an additional three with the favorite books, as opposed to the six in the dining room/office that hold the rest of the collection), three altars, a tonsu with a CD player and stacks of CDs, and the detritus of Little People around the house. Oh, and the cats underfoot everywhere. Under the bowl of the papasan chair is a huge chunk of bloodstone I call my "grounder" and whatever knitting project I'm currently working on, as well as two or three decks of tarot cards and a secret cache of pens. MMC: Do you have any obsessions? Collections? Lilith: Other than plants, kids, cats, and other strays? I like elephants, odd antique glass bottles, fishing floats, huge odd chunks of rock, and editions of Tanith Lee books. I love Bauer pottery bowls in that gorgeous celadon green and old editions of classic books—my prize is a very, very old collected complete Byron. And lava lamps, we have five of them. MMC: Do you have a newsletter, blog, or website where fans can read about you and your books? Lilith: My website is http://www.lilithsaintcrow.com. The "Journal" tab will take you to my weblog, updated almost daily (www.lilithsaintcrow.com/journal) and if you click on "newsletter" on my homepage you can join my newsletter the Dark Side—called that because when we take over the world a la Dilbert, you'll want to know who's on your side. MMC: Thank you so much for being with us today. Lilith:: Thank you so much for interviewing me!