ne of the top vampire writers in America, Laurell K. Hamilton burst onto the scene in 1993 with a paperback titled Guilty Pleasure, which introduced the world to Anita Blake, vampire hunter and animator of the recent dead.
Momentum quickly followed with Laughing Corpse in 1994. For the rest of the decade and into the new millennium, her popularity rose with each new Anita Blake book—Circus of the Damned, The Lunatic Cafe, Bloody Bones, The Killing Dance, Burnt Offerings, Blue Moon, Obsidian Butterfly and Narcissus in Chains. Cerulean Sin, recently published, is the 11th Anita Blake novel.
Laurell K. Hamilton started a complete different fantasy series with her Meredith Gentry books in 2000, starting with Kiss of Shadows, which was about the faerie princess of the Unseelie Court, and continuing with Caress of Twilight. She is currently working on her third installment, Seduced by Moonlight.
Between all of that, she appeared as a toastmaster at the World Horror Convention in Kansas City April 17-20.
Hamilton lives in St. Louis with her family and is active in animal charities. Her Web site can be found at laurellkhamilton.com
You are going to be a guest of honor at the World Horror Convention in Kansas City. How do you feel about this—are you excited?
Hamilton: Yeah, I'm excited, and wishing I wasn't so good at being toastmistress. Guest of honor only has one speech to give, toastmistress gives little speeches for everybody as she introduces them. Much more work. It was a honor to be asked.
In the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series, you created a world where vampires, zombies and werewolves inhabit the United States and have legal status. How did you invent this imaginative universe?
Hamilton: Anita's world is based on ours. As if we went to bed tonight, and when we woke up tomorrow, vampires, zombies, ghouls, werewolves, everything that goes bump in the night, were real. And the modern world had to deal with them, bang. I wanted to play in modern America with the addition of monsters from folklore and mythology. Where the desire came from, I no longer remember. Probably I couldn't have told you at the time. Not exactly. Ideas are like that sometimes.
If they were real, what night club you rather go to—The Laughing Corpse or Narcissus in Chains?
Hamilton: Narcissus in Chains, I guess; though, naughty you, only giving me two choices.
What can you tell us about your 11th Anita Blake book, Cerulean Sin?
Hamilton: Nothing. I am the world's worst hinter. I always give too much away.
After writing 11 vampire books, how do you keep the subject matter fresh for yourself? Is there a fear you'd run out of ideas for future novels?
Hamilton: After, or maybe before, I finished Guilty Pleasures, the first Anita book, I had tentative plots for some 15 or 17 more books. I've still not gotten even halfway through the list, because the books I've written have birthed new ideas, new characters and taken the series in directions I never dreamt. New book ideas keep coming, because Anita's world is so fresh, alive, real, in the way that the best fictional worlds can be.
How long do you see the Anita Blake series being? How long do you plan continuing the Meredith Gentry series?
Hamilton: Indefinite. It's like a mystery series with no set limit or ending. Merry was set up to have a happy-ever-after ending. Somewhere between book seven and book 12, the story will be over. Merry will have her storybook ending. It is a fairy tale, after all.
Of the 16 novels you have written, what are your top favorite three and why?
Hamilton: It's like asking someone to pick their favorite child. I just can't do it.
Meredith Gentry shares your grandmother's surname. Was there a reason for this?
Hamilton: I learned that Gentry could mean blue-blood [noble], or be a polite euphemism for the fey, the little people, when I was in elementary school.
I loved the idea that my family name could mean we were descended from fairies. It amused me then, and apparently, it still does. Other than that it has no bearing on my family, or my grandmother.
Was Circus of the Damned inspired by the Hammer movie Vampire Circus?
Hamilton: Yes and no. I think that my vampires in general were influenced by my being allowed to watch the Hammer vampire films. Vampire Circus, also shown as Circus of Fear, was one of those movies. The vamp at the beginning with the frilly white shirt and long dark hair reminds even me of Jean-Claude.
I was probably 7 when I saw the movie. A movie that includes a vampire that changes form into a black leopard. I certainly think it left its mark on my subconscious, but Circus of the Damned was not based on the movie.
Early in your career, you wrote a Star Trek media tie-in book, Star Trek: The Next Generation: Night Shade #24. How much freedom did you have to work in an universe that was already created and very popular? Did you get any feedback on the book from any Star Trek people?
Hamilton: I knew going in that I was playing in someone else's sandbox, with someone else's toys. I actually had more freedom to play than I thought I would.
My biggest surprise came when the editor sent the first draft back and told me I could torture Capt. Picard. He had not been tortured on the television show at that time. I replied, "I can torture Picard, really?" They said, yes, as long as it was clean futuristic torture. No blood and guts. OK. I enjoyed the experience.
Were you worried about your writing future when your first book, Nightseer, was only moderately successful?
Hamilton: Yes. If I'd been easily discouraged, I could have been a one-hit wonder.
How do you feel about the Anita Blake/Buffy the Vampire Slayer comparisons?
Hamilton: I'm fine with it.
Has the Anita Blake or Meredith Gentry novels sparked any interest from Hollywood?
Hamilton: Some, nothing definite.
What was the first horror or science-fiction story you remember reading that had an impact on you?
Hamilton: Robert E. Howard's short story collection Pigeons from Hell.
Dark sexuality is an element that runs in your books. Why is this? And does it shock you sometimes?
Hamilton: One of the things that puzzled me in most horror novels was the level of punishment for sex. Sex of almost any kind either caused horrible things to happen, or was punished by death, or possession, or other terrible things.
I never understood why this Puritan attitude towards sex seemed so prevalent in a genre that prided itself on pushing almost every other kind of boundary. I mean, I'd read books that were so graphic in their violence that it made me queasy, yet put a little sex in and everything goes to hell. This seemed a backwards kind of thinking. Shouldn't violence be a worse crime than sex? I did not purposefully set out to be the spokesperson for fictional sexual freedom, but it seems to have turned out that way. There was a time when the sex embarrassed me, but not shocked, no.
What draws you to vampires as characters?
Hamilton: I don't really know. Maybe I'm just orally fixated. Remember, I write about shapeshifters, too, and they get to do more than just drink blood.
Having written on the themes of vampires for almost a decade now, have you noticed any significant changes in your writing style?
Hamilton: My writing has changed a great deal, as any writer's will after a decade.
My writing has become more lush, richer. I can be sparse and minimalistic when I want to be, or I can wrap the sensuality of the words across the paper. It's a choice now, rather than a happy accident.
Any advice for beginning writers?
Hamilton: First, a writer writes. I've lost track of the number of people who want to be writers but never actually write anything. Talking about writing, dreaming about writing, can be very fun, but it won't get a book written. You've got to write. Either set aside a certain time of the day, or night, for writing, so that when the o'clock rolls around you feel almost compelled to sit down and write something; or have a page quotient. Because if you finish your pages early you get to get up and do something else. Of course, the reverse is true, if you don't get your pages accomplished you can be
sitting at your desk a very long time.
When I first started writing, I did two pages a day, five or six days a week. Why two pages? Because on my worst day I could do two pages before I had to get to work in corporate America. I was working a full-time job when I started my first book, so I know it's hard to fit it in, but not impossible. Some people prefer to work at night, but for me, after a full day's work, I could barely think, let alone be creative. I had to work first thing in the morning or I wouldn't have written anything. By the way, I am not a morning person. I got up, stumbled out of bed and sat at the computer until I had those two pages, then I got up, got dressed and went to play executive.
Here's the secret to finishing that first book. Don't rewrite as you go.
Let me repeat that one. Don't rewrite as you go along. I know one writer who has three wonderful first chapters of a book. They are wonderful, and they should be. He's been rewriting them for about nine years now. He wanted the beginning to be perfect before he moves on. He's never going to finish the book, because perfectionism is an unattainable goal. It isn't going to be perfect. Just get words down on paper, and when you stumble to what you think is the end of the book, you will have hundreds of pages of words that came out of your head. It may not be perfect, but it looks like a book, or rather a book manuscript.
Any last words?
Hamilton: I never do last words. They always seem so final.
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