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Carrie Vaughn Interview - author of The Kitty Norville Series
This is Jean Marie Ward for BuzzyMag.com.
With me today is award-winning, bestselling author, Carrie Vaughn, who's
world's encompass werewolves, superheroes, and girl fencers who lined up on
pirate ships.
Welcome, Carrie.
Carrie Vaughn: Thank you.
JMW: And congratulations on winning the WSFA Small Press Award for
"Amaryllis" your new nominated short story.
You're not excited about that at all, are you?
Carrie Vaughn: No. I'm super excited. I worried. It's like [inaudible 00:48]
speech going. I don't know if people realize I really, really enjoy this.
This is great. I mean, that story got so much attention. It got more
attention than any other short piece that I've written. And it's just been
so gratifying.
And, the number of people who come up to me and talk about that particular
story is just...
JMW: And did you know when you wrote it that it was going to
explode, if you will?
Carrie Vaughn: I knew it was a little different than anything else I've ever done.
I didn't really know, but it's like everything. I had hopes but I do with a
lot of things that I write that don't get that kind of attention. I had
help. I have to give kudos to John Joseph Adams who actually asked me if I
had a science fiction story to send him, which gave me the excuse that I
needed to write it. And also [inaudible 01:43] who courageously, very
graciously critiqued the first draft for me. And because I [inaudible
01:53] much encouragement and was able to really put some things in the
story at a level I never really done before.
So I knew it was special when I wrote it but I think that about a lot of
things. And you don't know, you're a writer. You know that you don't know
until it's out in the world how people are
JMW: The question that struck me when I started reading "Kitty and
the Midnight Hour" many, many years ago, where did you come up with the
idea of a werewolf named Kitty?
Carrie Vaughn: Well, interestingly enough, if I go back to the very, very first
draft of the first story, I don't think her name was Kitty. It was
something else but it was one of those things that the idea was in my brain
and I kept turning it around and once I thought about calling her Kitty, I
couldn't possibly call her anything else. And it was just one of those,
already the talk radio advice show idea was crazy to begin with and it was
like well, if you're going to go crazy go all the way. You don't do
something like this by half measure.
So of course I had to call her Kitty. But it's thee only name that makes
any sense.
JMW: I love the way that you took the standard view of the
werewolf as the ultimate victim and turned it completely on its head with
Was that part of your original conception of the book?
Carrie Vaughn: Maybe not necessarily in terms of the werewolf. It's metaphoric,
simple in its own but I wanted to tell the story of someone learning to
stand up for herself and learning to be powerful. I didn't want someone who
was super powerful right out the gate.
And I wrote about werewolves because I felt they kind of gotten short-
changed over the last 100 years in story telling. It's always the beast
within takes over, you can't control yourself, you do horrible things, and
then you die. And I thought let's just get past that. Let's assume that
werewolves are okay and they can handle it and what stories can we tell
then.
And then taking the pack structure, which is another different thing that I
wanted to bring to the werewolf story. And if you got someone who's at the
top of the pack and someone who's at the bottom and it progressed naturally
in the course of telling the story and developing the story and it wasn't
something I necessarily consciously set out to do.
I really was just trying to tell this one person's story and it got big
very quickly and it got a lot bigger than I ever originally thought it
would but it's worked out very well. I've gotten a lot of feedback on that.
It's turned out to be, struck a chord, I think.
JMW: Yes. As a military brat, I love the fact that I'm
interviewing another military brat. But I always wondered, having grown up
in the military, did growing up military influence the way you view pack
structure, in your werewolf world?
Carrie Vaughn: Not really because I see those same structures replicated
everywhere. I never thought of it as an exclusively military thing and when
I do explicitly deal with the military in a lot of my writings, I tend to
be really sympathetic to it and that's just because I've seen from up close
that the military is not a big model organization. It's a lot of
individuals doing lots of things with lots of different personalities and I
try to treat it as such.
But on the other hand, the werewolf pack structure you see on sports teams,
you see it in high school girl clicks, you see in the business world.
JMW: they are vicious.
Carrie Vaughn: Oh, yeah. It happens in the book story world. You get pecking
orders absolutely everywhere and so for me the werewolf pack was kind of a
amplification of that I think. It was just a way of kind of make it really
explosive and then, dealing with it in a very explosive way rather than
kind of having them following around.
I think, specially here in America, we like to think we're all egalitarians
so we tend to kind of smooth out some of those pecking orders as much as we
can. But they're there and we're all dealing with them all the time.
JMW: Absolutely. But what fascinates me is you aren't just staying
in that urban fantasy universe. You expanded out to both YA in terms of
"Steel" and several other, "Voices of Dragons", I believe. And more
importantly, you've gotten to superheroes.
How did "After the Golden Age" come about?
Carrie Vaughn: I've always loved superheroes. I grew up with Lynda Carter as
Wonder Woman, Bionic Woman, and Superfriends cartoons, the Incredible Hulk,
on and on and on. It was the golden age for superheroes in television and
it was a great way to grow up.
I also grew up reading the George RR Martin's Wild Cards series and I was
kind of my introduction to prose and I've been reading all of them since
High School and a few years ago I got the opportunity to write for them and
that was just cool. That was a kind of a dream come true for me. So I wrote
"The Wildcards" for a while and then I had a story I wanted to tell.
I kind of started with the cliché, which is the daughter of the superheroes
who doesn't have superpowers of her own. But I wanted to kind of follow
that to its logical implications so I think you probably see a lot more of
my military brat background in that one that in the werewolf ones because
it's a daughter grappling with her parents expectations, dealing with the
reputation of her parents and trying to carve out her own space in this
world that has been imposed on her. And it's a family drama that just
JMW: Because that's a big thing that I think is universal for
Carrie Vaughn: Yes. And something I realized from about '82 to '85, my father
was stationed at [inaudible 08:02] Air Force Base and his job was piloting
B-52's and he was part of the nuclear mission. He was [inaudible 08:08].
And this is the same time that movies like "Red Dawn" and "War Games" and
"Day After" all the post-apocalyptic craziness was going on.
I was about 10, 11 years old and at the time it was normal and this is what
is kind of bizarre to me now. It was completely normal. That was just the
way things were. It was life, it was kind of cool. In family day I got to
go play on the B-52, which how many kids get to say that. And that was
really awesome.
And it's only in my 20's and 30's when I've talked to other people about
their childhood stuff, kind of like looking back, wow. That was really
Carrie Vaughn: The Cold War meant that when Reagan pushed the button, my dad had
to go fly to Russia and drop bombs. And that stayed with me in ways I
JMW: [inaudible 08:57] plan for that?
Carrie Vaughn: I actually do. I have a sequel I'd like to write for that one.
Not a series. It's really interesting. I have written almost 11 Kitty books
now plus the short story collection plus other short stories but I don't
really think in terms of series. I really, as a reader, I really like
standalone fantasies. I like complex stories that have an ending so I try
to write in those terms.
I do have a sequel I would like to try for Golden Age.
JMW: Cool. And you wouldn't mention Kitty again and I didn't want
to ask. I noticed you just sold four more books from the series. Do you
have an endpoint in mind for these series? And about how many books can we
look forward to?
Carrie Vaughn: I get asked that a lot. I do know what the last book looks like.
I know what happens since the last story. I don't know quite when it's
that. What I tell people is never say never. If the idea lands on me one
day, I'm not going to ignore it.
But "Voices of Dragons" is one that I'd like to actually continue.
JMW: Oh, cool. Okay.
What's next in any of your worlds?
Carrie Vaughn: Right now I'm focused on the Kitty series. I'm working on book 11
and I've got this three other books to write. I've got a whole list of
The thing I'm actually working on is a new YA. But it's science fiction YA.
It's not tied in anything I've done yet. I'm kind of at a stage where I
have a little bit of freedom right now. I'm trying lots of different
things.
I'm always working on short stories. I have half a dozen short stories I'm
working on right now. And that's one of the great things about "Amaryllis".
It's giving me a lot of encouragement that yes, short stories are still
viable. I should still work on them. I do have something to say in the
short form and since I love it I need to keep doing that as well.
And it's always an nice break. That's one of the things, reasons I do love
short stories, both as a reader and a writer. It's a nice break to kind of
sit down and have something that you can finish in a short amount of time
rather than the months and months that it takes novels.
I'm such a slow reader, it takes me weeks to finish novels so I'm always
happy to pick up a short story collection.
JMW: Cool. The last and final question. Anything you'd like to
add?
Carrie Vaughn: I'm just, this is my second Guest of Honor.
JMW: [Capclave] yes.
Carrie Vaughn: Capclave and I've had a wonderful time and I really appreciate to
meet a whole new set of people since I don't get out East very often. So
this has been great.
JMW: All right. Thank you very much, Carrie. And thank you for
BuzzyMag.com