Kitty's Greatest Hits

AUTHOR’S NOTES

The character Kitty started as a short story. At the time, around 1998, I wrote mostly short stories, and I didn’t think the idea of a werewolf talk radio host would get any bigger than that—it seemed like a gimmick. I should have known better. I’ve heard some writers talk about a character “taking over” a story, and I didn’t really understand that and it hadn’t happened to me until Kitty came along. When I wrote the first short story (“Doctor Kitty Solves All Your Love Problems”), it turned out three times longer than I was expecting, had too many characters, and had too much going on. So I cut it down to two characters—Kitty and Cormac—and saved everything else for the next story, “Kitty Loses Her Faith.” I still had more ideas and more characters. At that point, I realized I could fill a novel. But what would it be about?

I went clubbing with friends one night and was out on the dance floor when Peter Murphy’s “I’ll Fall with Your Knife” came on. I had a vision of Kitty, brimming with newfound confidence, on her own and celebrating. And there was my novel—Kitty learning to stand up for herself.

I still had more ideas. It turns out a werewolf talk radio host is a great platform from which to launch all manner of stories. Ten novels later … yeah. Wasn’t expecting that.

I still write short stories, because while some ideas need the space of a novel to tell them, others don’t. Novels have dozens of characters, at least a couple of plots, lots of settings, time passing, and so on. Sometimes, though, an idea has just a couple of characters, just one problem, one setting, and one moment in time. I had characters I wanted to know more about, but couldn’t explore their histories in the novels. Because the novels are in first-person point of view, I can only write about what Kitty knows or discovers, and the other characters aren’t always keen to tell her their secrets. Short pieces let me explore Kitty’s world, and I can often bring those discoveries back to the novels and make them richer.

Looking back at these stories, I see a record of me trying to work out my own mythology of the supernatural, vampires and werewolves and the like, as protagonists rather than monsters. I’m trying to answer questions like, How do vampires approach sex? How do supernatural beings find each other and interact? How do they make their ways in the world? What do they do for jobs? I write about vampires and werewolves in the “real world,” and I find that I’ve been most interested in the “real world” part of that theme. These stories are about vampires and werewolves (and were-lions and selkies and so on), but they’re also about people coping. I think when you cast supernatural beings as heroes, especially if you give them traditional monstrous strengths and weaknesses, part of their stories are necessarily going to be about coping with what they are and their places in the world.

On a day-to-day basis, putting a few hundred words on the work in progress, sorting through correspondence and promotion and all the business aspects of being a full-time writer, I feel like I never get enough done. But gathering these stories together and looking back—damn, I’ve been busy! I had no idea! I’ve made this whole world! The only thing better than building up a whole world is having people want to read about it. So, to Kitty’s fans and readers: Thank you. Most of these stories wouldn’t exist without you and your interest in Kitty’s world.

In the tradition of the playlists I’ve matched a song with each story that I think captures the feeling or tone of the story or character.

(This collection doesn’t include the first two Kitty short stories that appeared in Weird Tales in 2001 and 2003. Those stories, “Doctor Kitty Solves All Your Love Problems” and “Kitty Loses Her Faith,” became part of the first novel, Kitty and The Midnight Hour.)

“Il Est Né” (Taverner Consort, “Il Est Né”)

This story originally appeared in Wolfsbane and Mistletoe, an anthology of werewolf holiday stories edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner. Half the fun of some of these stories is seeing what the characters are up to between books. This fits neatly into Kitty’s arc, right before the events of Kitty Takes a Holiday: She’s taking what she’s learned so far and using that knowledge to help others.

“A Princess of Spain” (Sally Potter, “Pavanne” from Orlando)

I wrote this for an anthology called The Secret History of Vampires, edited by Darrell Schweitzer and Martin H. Greenberg. The theme: What turning points in history featured vampires manipulating events behind the scenes? My favorite historical turning point happened early in the sixteenth century, in England, with the death of Henry VII’s eldest son, Arthur. Henry VIII wasn’t originally meant to be king of England. An England without Henry VIII—without the Protestant Reformation in England, without Queen Elizabeth and the naval triumph over the Spanish Armada—is a very different England indeed. It’s an incredible tipping point, and I think its most fascinating player is Catherine of Aragon, who married Arthur before she married Henry and who was an unsuspecting and mostly unwilling lynchpin. The question of whether or not her marriage to Arthur was ever consummated is still hotly debated, as it was when Henry VIII pursued his divorce from her.

“Conquistador de la Noche” (Procol Harum, “Conquistador”)

Rick is probably the most interesting character from the novels who gets the least amount of time in the spotlight. So many secrets, so much history, and I never really get a chance to talk about any of it because in the novels the characters so rarely just sit down and tell each other stories. I wrote this one because I wanted to know, finally, Rick’s origin. I had dropped hints—that he knew Coronado and was part of his famous expedition—but I needed to know the details.

Research-wise, this story was fascinating because it takes place in something of a shadow period in Mexico’s history. The conquistadors and Coronado’s expedition north are quite well documented. The colonial period and mission system that progressed as far north as modern-day California are also well documented. But there’s a forty- or fifty-year gap in between that I had a hard time finding information on. This is one of the frustrations and thrills of writing historical pieces—searching for as many scraps of information as you can, then fitting them together into a living world.

I want to write a lot more about Rick—he has five hundred years of history to cover, after all.

“The Book of Daniel” (Loreena McKennitt, “The Mystic’s Dream”)

When I started writing stories about the supernatural existing in the real world, I looked at a lot of old tales, mythology, and folklore with new eyes. Every kid with a Judeo-Christian background knows the story of Daniel and the Lions’ Den, the Biblical tale about a Hebrew prophet constantly getting in trouble with the Babylonian and Persian kings. I figured in a world with werewolves and shape-shifters, that story would look very different.

Writing this let me play in an amazing setting: The city of Babylon at the height of its power, home of the famous Hanging Gardens, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and the epic Ishtar Gate with its glazed blue bricks and row after row of marching lions and bulls.

This is also a good example of how little I have to make up whole cloth in the end. Endless stories and real-world settings are out there waiting to be told and retold. Writing about a world in which the supernatural is real opens so many possibilities—I get to turn that lens on all of history and tell new stories about what really happened.

“The Temptation of Robin Green” (Tempest, “The House Carpenter”)

I think this is the very first story I wrote involving anything having to do with the Kitty universe, although I didn’t know it at the time. Here’s how it happened: I wanted to write a story about a secret lab studying supernatural creatures. I included a vampire called Rick. Then I decided that anytime I had a vampire in a story, I would call him Rick, and he would theoretically be the same vampire. He would be a nice guy—Duncan MacLeod-ish, even—traveling through history, helping people while trying to keep to himself. When Kitty showed up, of course I had to include vampires, and I brought Rick along for the ride.

Years later I retrofitted the story for The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance, edited by Trisha Telep. At that point I could have changed the name and not brought Rick into it all, but I decided to keep the artifact of the earlier draft. I hesitate to speculate where this falls on the actual Kitty time line. I also have no idea how Rick ended up as a lab rat. I’ve almost decided this story is completely apocryphal, but it’s fun to see what I was thinking about at the time.

One more note about this story: I had seen one too many TV shows and movies featuring secret military laboratories that were very high tech, gleaming, and scary. However, my father was an actual, real-life military scientist for part of his career. After his stints as a B-52 pilot, he worked as a research chemist, specializing in electrochemical processes, batteries, and so on. He even worked a brief period at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (home of the Manhattan Project). I toured his lab at the Air Force Academy once, and it wasn’t anything like you see on TV. It had originally been built in the sixties, and it showed: aged tile, fluorescent lighting, kind of small and cramped, equipment shoved in corners or wherever else it would fit, old steel desks and chairs, and so on. I decided that a secret government laboratory, even one studying supernatural beings, would look more like a poorly funded college science department than a high-tech wonder.

“Looking After Family” (Vangelis, “Movement V” from El Greco)

Of all these stories, this one may be the most revealing, and one of the most important in its effect on the novels. In the course of writing the first couple of novels, the relationship between Cormac and Ben developed slowly. Ben appeared on the scene in the first book because I needed a lawyer character. By the second book, I wanted the two of them to have the kind of close friendship that meant they would take a bullet for each other. So they became cousins who grew up together—brothers, for all intents and purposes. At that point, I needed to know what had happened to get them into that situation, and how they came to trust each other. I needed to know how Cormac learned to hunt supernatural beasts, what happened to his family, what traumas drive him. I wanted that background to be realistic, concrete, and visceral.

In some ways, I see this as Cormac and Ben’s origin story. We get to see them as teens and get to see a little of how they became the men they are. In my own mind, I’m constantly referring back to this story as something of a benchmark for them. This is where they came from.

“God’s Creatures” (Curtis Eller’s American Circus, “Sweatshop Fire”)

I wrote this for P. N. Elrod’s anthology Dark and Stormy Knights. Cormac was the obvious choice for a story on such a theme. I wanted to show what a typical day in the life of a werewolf hunter like Cormac might look like.

I was raised Catholic, and bringing these stories together I can see signs of that in many of them. That background definitely influenced my decision to set this story where I did. Saint Catherine’s is loosely based on St. Scholastica, a Catholic school in Cañon City, Colorado, where two of my great aunts, who were Benedictine nuns, taught. As far as I know, neither one of them was a werewolf.

“Wild Ride” (Cake, “The Distance”)

Another origin story—T.J.’s this time. T.J. only appeared in one of the novels (or maybe a couple of others, depending on what counts as an appearance), but he’s still one of the more significant characters in the series because of his impact on Kitty.

The metaphors regarding lycanthropy as disease and HIV and lycanthropy as identity and homosexuality are pretty clear-cut. I’m not the first person to make them. In fact, I’ve used a rough outline of the history of AIDS awareness to model what might happen if lycanthropy were ever identified as a disease: A long period of great confusion, ignorance, and fear at every level, with activism and advocacy coming from the communities most affected by the issues.

My terrible secret is that I first made T.J. gay so readers wouldn’t expect a romance between him and Kitty. Once I’d done that, though, I had a great opportunity to include a nonstereotypical tough gay character in the first novel. I also had the opportunity to make some of those metaphors explicit, which they are in this story.

I originally wrote this one for Running with the Pack, edited by Ekaterina Sedia.

“Winnowing the Herd” (Too Much Joy, “William Holden Caulfield”)

And this story gives us a glimpse of what Kitty’s life looked like before the books started.

I read two stories in a row, “Gestella” by Susan Palwick and “Laika Comes Back Safe” by Maureen F. McHugh. These are both gut-wrenchingly depressing stories in which werewolves stand in as metaphors for horrible tragedies. I wanted to write a literary-type story, like these, in which the werewolf did not die horribly and wasn’t depressing, so I recruited Kitty and sent her to the KNOB staff party, where we get her interior monologue about the proceedings.

This takes place before The Midnight Hour and before Kitty was outed.

“Kitty and the Mosh Pit of the Damned” (Dead Kennedys, “Holiday in Cambodia”)

This started with the title. My friends have learned over time that if we’re all sitting around, maybe or maybe not drinking, and we start throwing around crazy ideas that in most groups would be forgotten by morning, I’m as likely as not to grab them and run with them. It’s one of the great things about being a writer—I have a viable outlet for crazy ideas. Like a mosh pit of the damned.

Here, we get to see the kinds of things Kitty does between books. I’m a little sad that Jax has never made an appearance in the novels. But he inhabits this story so well it seems to be where he’s meant to live.

“Kitty’s Zombie New Year” (Big Brother and the Holding Company, “Piece of My Heart”)

My big goal with this one was to insert zombies in the Kitty universe, and to do it my way. I’m not a fan of the brain-eating shambling undead zombies. It’s like the same joke over and over and over again. Yeah, I’m familiar with all the commentary, the metaphors of decay and violence, that it’s not really about the zombies but about the survivors and their relationships, and so on.

But let me tell you about the movie The Serpent and the Rainbow, based on the book by Wade Davis, and the real source of zombie stories and even the word “zombie”: Zombie-ism as a form of mind control and slavery, and the possible existence of a neurotoxin concoction that induces a coma and brain damage in its victims, used to create zombie slaves. Tell me that isn’t a million times creepier than the shambling brain-eaters.

“Life Is the Teacher” (Oingo Boingo, “Flesh ’n Blood”)

When I was invited to submit a story to the anthology Hotter Than Hell, edited by Kim Harrison, I knew I couldn’t write a Kitty story. The editor was looking for serious, sexually charged fiction, and that tone was all wrong for Kitty. I tossed around a few ideas and settled on writing about Emma and exploring what happened to her after the events of Kitty Goes to Washington.

I had two goals with this story. First, I wanted to delve a bit into how vampires and sex work in my universe. I also wanted to see if I could tell an erotic story in which the main character never actually takes off her clothes. Horror and erotica writing have a lot in common in that sometimes it’s what you don’t show that counts.

“You’re on the Air” (3 Doors Down, “Kryptonite”)

In Kitty and the Silver Bullet, Kitty gets a call from a vampire who’s had really bad luck. He didn’t want to be a vampire, he doesn’t have a Family to support him, and he’s stuck working the night shift at Speedy Mart. I really loved Jake and wanted to find out more about him, and moreover I wanted him to succeed. So here’s what happened after he hung up on the phone call with Kitty.

“Long Time Waiting” (Pink Floyd, “Wish You Were Here”)

You didn’t think Cormac was just sitting around twiddling his thumbs all that time he was off stage, did you?

The challenge of this one was climbing into Cormac’s brain for an extended period. He’s very different from most of my other viewpoint characters, who tend to be cheerful do-gooders, or at least come from familiar, recognizable backgrounds. Cormac, not so much on either count. Kitty may be the werewolf, but Cormac is the real outsider among the characters. In this one, he finally moves to center stage.

When I was coming up with Cormac’s background, even for the early Kitty stories, I wanted to make him more grounded in reality than the typical badasses I encountered in genre fiction. He wouldn’t be a former SEAL, a bitter ex-cop with a heart of gold, or a member of an elite paramilitary squad. No, I went local, to rural Colorado. Where did Cormac learn his skills and his outsider attitude? The militia movement, enclaves of which you’ll find throughout the Midwest and Rocky Mountains. I found that to be much scarier because it exists in my own backyard, unlike most types of fictional badasses.

I sent Cormac to prison as part of my project of injecting the real world as much as I could into the novels. Lots of urban fantasy novels have kick-ass, badass, gun-nut, hard-core bounty hunter type characters, and they never seem to suffer consequences. In the real world, people who kill people go to jail more often than not. So, my hard-core bounty hunter was going to get caught, and was going to go to jail.

I have gotten more e-mails and feedback over that decision than just about anything else in the series.

A lot of people worried about Cormac being in prison and gave me lots of advice about how to get him out as soon as possible, but it was never my intention to lock him away forever. I planned on bringing him back. That was why I worked so hard to come up with a situation where he’d be convicted of manslaughter (rather than the first-degree murder he’s probably actually guilty of…). He’d be out on parole in a couple of years. Meanwhile …

Where did Amelia come from? I’m a fan of Victorian adventure literature, and Amelia embodies Victorian attitudes about the occult found in a lot of those stories. I’d been wanting to write about a character like her for a long time.

Something I’ve learned: You get the most interesting results by combining the most disparate ideas in the same story. I decided the Kitty universe needed more magic and wizards, and I could accomplish that by throwing Cormac and Amelia together. That also meant that Cormac in prison would have the most fascinating adventures. As you can see from the books, by the time I wrote Kitty Raises Hell, I knew exactly what happened to Cormac, and I started writing this novella so I could get it straight in my own mind.