 Kat Richardson is a cross-genre writer, creating a combination of Science Fiction/Fantasy and Mystery/Crime no matter how hard she tries to write something else—although she has tried her hand at a bit of almost everything else, as well. She dabbles in other text forms and media including: RPGs (Moon Elves); Film (The Glove); Computer Games (T2X); and Comi cs (Dangerous Days); as well as creating and maintaining this website; and taking a few abortive runs at Flash (The Pigeon of Death) and Photo Manipulation (Kat Nap). She used to read the "Sunday Funnies" for the Evergreen Radio Reading Service in Seattle—part of the Washington Talking Book and Braille Library and has put in her time as a Renaissance Faire dancer and costumer, as well as fencing and other anachronistic practices. Kat was born in California—the second of three precocious children—and survived growing up in a small college town under the LA smog shield long enough to earn a BA in Magazine Editing from Cal. State Long Beach. She worked in the magazine business in LA for a while, then moved on to curriculum writing and editing for the Gemological Institute of America. Later, she moved to Seattle and added Technical Editing to her skills. Her father was an English teacher with a degree in Classical Literature whose first bed-time story to his kids was reading aloud from a translation of The Odyssey. She claims to have started her fiction career by telling fantastic lies to friends and family, and wrote her first short story in First Grade—it was called The Pickle Bush, since Kat was then ignorant of the origin of pickles. She does better research now and confines lying to more acceptable forms of fiction. Always a reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy as well as Mystery books, Kat also watches a lot of film in both genres, with a particular affection for old films noir. History, Social Phenomena, Science, English Literature, and Noir-anything round out her reading. Kat currently lives on a sailboat in Seattle with her husband.
The Midnight Moon Café is thrilled to welcome urban fantasy author, Kat Richardson!
MMC: Welcome to the Midnight Moon Café, Kat. When did you first become interested in writing urban fantasy and paranormal stories?
Kat: Initially, I wasn’t. I didn’t know there was such a thing as Urban Fantasy. I just... wrote a mystery novel that had ghosts and vampires and witches and such in it. It wasn’t until it was well advanced in the editing phase that I heard the phrase “urban fantasy” at all much less that my book was one.
I’ve always thought ghost stories were kind of cool and though I never considered writing something in the genre, I guess the idea was sneaking around in my head long before I recognized it.
MMC: What was the inspiration for your books?
Kat: British TV from the 1970s, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, particle physics, and a bet with another writer. And fog.
See, I’d had a vague idea about a hardboiled P.I. who worked for ghosts back in college, partially inspired by the British TV show “Randall and Hopkirk: Deceased” which was about t wo investigators in London, one of whom is dead, but won’t stop pestering his living partner. It aired in the US as “My Partner the Ghost.” But my first version really stunk and I shelved it for... well a long time. So years later I was riding on a bus in Seattle’s Pioneer Square in the fog, talking to my husband about spies and ghosts and things like that, and the ideas started to click together. It still wasn’t ready, though since I couldn’t quite figure out how the magic worked. That came to me when I was reading some books on particle and quantum physics and I got an idea about how magic might work if it was just a mutant form of high-energy physics and quantum theory.
So that was where the idea started, but I didn’t get much work done on a manuscript until I got into an online argument with another would-be writer who said, essentially, that he thought he’d be done with his book before I was done with mine. Well... you can imagine how my back got up at that and before I knew it I was writing anywhere from 3-10,000 words a day and finished the first draft―which was huge by the way―in about six weeks. It kind of stunk and it took quite a few revisions and lots of work by my agents and editors―once I got some―to make it a decent book, but there it is.
MMC: Let's talk a little about world-building in the Greywalker series. How did you come up with your backstory for this series? And how does that setting affect your main characters?
Kat: As I said, there was a bit of stuff hanging around from the hardboiled mystery books I liked to read, and some physics, but a lot of the backstory comes from the question “how did you get this way?” I had set up the characters and a basic situation, but whenever I looked at it I kept having to answer that question. Every answer led to a bit of backstory or a bit of history or a piece of something and the mosaic kind of built itself.
 Also, I was a History minor in college and I just really like old, weird bits of information. Seattle is full of crazy tales and events and people that make you think WTF? So I grabbed the weird stuff I found in books and walking around and stuck that in, because if you have a detective who works for ghosts, she’s going to have a lot of those crazy things popping up around her. Seattle’s a rich mine of cool facts for a series like this, so I’m thrilled I found it.
MMC: What made you decide to make Harper a P.I. rather than, say―a cop?
Kat: It never occurred to me to make her anything else. I wanted to write a detective novel that had ghosts in it. She couldn’t be a cop because that would have caused a lot of problems with the story I wanted to tell. It could have been done―it has been done―but I just didn’t think of it. I liked the idea of an independent person who finds herself sucked into events she doesn’t understand whether she likes it or not. And with no organization to fall back on, she has no one to rely on but herself. Things are hard from the first minute and that was a very attractive idea for a story. Characters who are up against the wall, but refuse to lie down and give up are compelling. And we all like to think we wouldn’t give up, either, don’t we?
MMC: What sort of research did you do to bring this story to life so wonderfully?
Kat: Lots of walking around staring at stuff, lots of reading, lots of just plain staring and thinking while I worked out―I had messed up my knee jogging and I had a lot of time in the gym to think while I did my PT exercizes. The library is my favorite haunt for research―it’s amazing what you can get from a dusty old book no one has checked out in years. Of course I use the Internet a lot too, but mostly as a starting place. A lot of my material still comes from primary sources in libraries and sometimes talking to people directly. I spent a lot of time with the Head Historian at the Underground tour to gather information for Underground and I sent a lot of emails and asked a lot of questions of people connected to or doing research on the original Philip project for Poltergeist. I even went to England to do research for Vanished. Greywalker research was largely the collective information from years of just passing through the neighborhoods and looking at things.
MMC: Vanished is the fourth book in this series (released this August). How does this story continue your series?
Kat: Ah, this is the “why me” story. In Vanished, Harper has to start looking at her own past―and confronting some hard and ugly facts―to figure out why she became a Greywalker and why it doesn’t happen to just everyone who has a near-death experience. It’s not a pretty journey for her and she learns a lot of things she doesn’t like. She also has to mend a few fences with her mom, whom she doesn’t like much. I love to make her do things she won’t like.
MMC: What challenges have you faced in the process of writing your books?
Kat: Aside from “I can write faster than you”? The usual things: having to make time for the writing among all the other work; learning to be less sensitive to criticism and more open to editing; hurdling the usual fences of finding an agent and prepping the book for sale; waiting for things to happen over which you have no control.... Getting the job done at all can be a real pain.
It was also kind of difficult on a personal level, since throughout the writing of these books, family and friends kept dying. My husband was out of town on work assignments more often than he was home for a while, which is stressful. I’d also had to manage several pet illnesses and deaths during the books’ development cycles and that was horrible too. During all of that, I developed insomnia that caused me to abandon some projects and make some people really unhappy with me, as well as all the crazy stuff that goes along with not sleeping more than twelve hours in a week for several months. You really lose your perspective when your brain goes on strike.
MMC: What attracts you about the paranormal characters and situations you write about?
Kat: I like to have room to play with things. Paranormal characters and situations let me blend the real world with the make-believe and stretch the rules of normal life without having to make up a whole new set on my own. I’m kind of lazy: I like to have things already built for me to play with.
MMC: Let's say you've just landed a movie deal, and you get to pick the actress who'll play Harper Blaine. Who would you pick and why?
Kat: That’s always hard. I tend to see a very young Bridget Fonda in the part, but of course, she’s not available. ;) I also really like Katherine Heigl―and she’s almost tall enough too! And it’s funny that she once played Rita Hayworth’s stand-in, since I would love to pluck Rita out of time and have her play Harper―she also started her career as a dancer, you know―though Hayworth was really too glamorous to play the average-looking Harper.
MMC: Will there be a fifth book in the series?
Kat: Oh yes! I’m working on it now. It’s the wrap-up to the vampire arc and to a few things that start in Vanished. But that’s all I’m going to say except that it’s the only book in the series that you have to have read the others to understand. I don’t like to force readers to read all the books, in order, and my editor and I have tried to avoid that. But we couldn’t do that for Book 5. There will also be a Book 6―or at least I have a contract for one―so even though a lot is going to be resolved, the story is not over.
MMC: Now to the fun questions. What's something that your readers may not know about you?
Kat: Gad, I have no idea what people know about me or don’t. I chatter so much I’d be surprised if they didn’t know my weight at birth by now. Most of what they don’t know is boring, like: I’m allergic to egg yolks (sulfa really, but egg yolks are the biggest problem most of the time); I used to be a manicurist (I sucked at it); I didn’t drive for the first thirteen years that I lived in Washington (and no I wasn’t underage); I love bats and rollercoasters (but not together); and I have broken both my arms, a toe, several fingers, and my nose at various times (none recently.) Really boring stuff.
MMC: Do you have a favorite food/beverage/music you always have on hand while you're writing?
Kat: Coffee. Well... no not really. I like coffee, but I don’t have to have it. Really. I can quit anytime. Yes, I can, too!
MMC: Do you still have ferrets?
Kat: I’m sad to have to say I don’t have a ferret right now. My little guys were pretty old and the last two, Dexter and Taz, finally left us. I am holding off on getting any new pets―right now we have none at all―until the book tour is over and I can spend all the time I want cuddling them. But I do get to go hang out with my friends’ ferrets and dogs and cats. I just love critters: it’s the downside to living on a boat that there isn’t much room for most pets. But ferrets were perfect. I miss them. I even joined a California Ferret Legalization group, although I no longer live in California, so lots of other people can enjoy ferrets. Yeah, I’m a big goof ball where the fuzzy guys are a concerned.
MMC: Our condolences, Kat. We're big pet lovers here at the Midnight Moon Café. ((hugs))
Another question, how do you relax when you're not writing?
Kat: I like to read, watch movies (we don’t have a TV, so it has to be on disc or from Hulu.com), take walks, and play World of Warcraft with my husband. I used to dance and go to the gym, but that’s been sidelined for the year while I get the books in shape. Eventually I’d like to go back to Swing dancing or learn Salsa or Tango.
MMC: Are there any other genres you’d like to try writing but haven’t yet?
Kat: Lots. I’d like to do a straight mystery, some science fiction, steampunk, YA, and noir crime. I’d like to try some comic book work, but that’s not a specific genre.
MMC: Do you have any obsessions? Collections?
Kat: I don’t have a lot of room to collect anything, though I do tend to keep things longer than I should. I like watches, but I only recently started wearing one again, so that might not be a successful collecting idea. As to obsessions, probably, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Aside from ferrets. And chocolate. I like to find local chocolate companies and try them out when I’m on tour; it’s my form of tourism, I guess.
MMC: Do you have a newsletter, blog, or website where fans can read about you and your books?
Kat: Goodness, yes! I have a website (http://www.katrichardson.com/ ); two blogs (http://katrich.wordpress.com/ and http://katatomic.livejournal.com/ ); a facebook page and a profile both under Kat Richardson; a twitter account (katrchrdsn); a newsletter (http://groups.google.com/group/kat-richardson-news?pli=1 ); and a forum (http://www.criticalfumble.net/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=18 ) . I also hang out with a bunch of local writers who refer to ourselves as Team Seattle (not to be confused with the racing team that benefits Seattle Children's Hospital) and they have all that stuff too. We are collectively nuts.
Thanks for letting me chat with you―it was loads of fun!
Want To Win One Of Kat Richardson's Books?
Leave a comment here to enter to win reader's choice of a book
from Ms. Richardson's backlist of novels!
Contest ends midnight, Friday, August 14, 2009 and the winner
will be announced here at the MMC blog Saturday, August 15th.
So remember to check back to see if you've won.
Good Luck!
Labels: Kat Richardson, midnight brew, urban fantasy |
