The Beatrice Interview: Laurell K. Hamilton (2000)

I’m sitting with Laurell K. Hamilton in the elegant dining room of the Jefferson Hotel in Washington, D.C., while we’re waiting for our pots of tea to finish brewing. She’s touring to promote A Kiss of Shadows, the first book in a new fantasy series about Merry Gentry, a.k.a. Meredith NicEssus. While Meredith is part of the fairy world’s royal family, she’s also partly human—and in order to escape the court intrigues to which her mortality makes her vulnerable, she’s been hiding among the humans for the last three years. But now she’s coming home…and it’ll take all her wits just to survive, let alone manipulate her way through the sexual and political intrigues. And as is so often the case in dynastical monarchies, the sexual really is inseperable from the political here…

What prompted you to start a new series?

I’d written five Anita Blake books in a row and I began to wonder if I could write anything else. It was just time to get a break and to see if I could do something else. When I sit down to write my own vampire novels, I want to write them exactly the way I want to read them, and it’s the same with the fey. I’ve read several other books and enjoyed some to an extent, but nobody was doing it the way I wanted to see it done.

It was a chance to write something different with different characters, and to explore themes that Anita’s really not comfortable with—and also to have a main character that doesn’t argue with me all the time. I love Anita dearly, but she is very stubborn and very certain of what she’s going to do, and I’m just the writer, apparently. I can’t really make her do anything I want, you know? She’s like my friends. I give them dating advice, but they don’t take it.

What were some of the new themes that you wanted to explore with Meredith?

From the very beginning, Anita was fairly confident, fairly powerful, could take care of herself. Merry grew up in a world where other people had amazing amounts of power; they could actually change reality around them. They could, with a spell, crush your heart. And she has very little power. She can change her physical appearance with glamour but that’s pretty much all she can do. She had to be a diplomat just to stay alive. She had to learn how to deal with people who were absolutely powerful when she was not. Fairly early in the book, she begins to acquire more power and that changes the dynamics. So this series is much more political than [the Anita Blake series]. It’s really a political thriller; without the politics, you would have no plot.

Also, I wanted someone who was a little bit older than Anita. Merry is 33. When you get to 30, you either mellow out or your head explodes. So she’s more mellow, more laid back. She’s more likely to keep her head down and not try to make herself a target. Anita is someone who’s been very out there, and I wanted someone who was a little bit older, someone who thinks a little bit more before she speaks. I wanted to deal with someone not from middle class America. It took me a great deal of rewriting to get Mary’s voice to where it didn’t sound like my voice, so she sounds very much uniquely her own.

So how do you figure out how a High Princess of the Fairies speaks?

Well, I did cheat just a tad. When Merry was six, her aunt tried to drown her because they found out she was half-mortal. So her father took her away from the court, and from the time she was six until she was sixteen, she actually lived out among the humans with her father and the servants. Her formative years were out among the humans. So I was able to make her more comfortable in our world, and it wasn’t so much a shell shock. I wanted her to know about our world. I’ve given her a voice very uniquely her own but she’s not like a fish out of water in either place.

The time that’s she spent with humans has made her sexual psychology slightly different from that of other fairies, who have attitudes about sexuality that are radically different than most humans.

As she says in the book, she’s fey enough to see the problem and human enough not to be able to know what to do about it. In our society today, we say that love is more important than sex, but whenever anybody starts talking about love in relationships, they’re often actually referring to sex. With the fey, the opposite is true—what is important is the relationship; the sex is very casual. What ends up happening in our society is we say that sex is not as important as relationships, yet we treat sex like it’s more important.

The feys’ attitude is very, very clear. They very much differentiate between love and lust. They aren’t confused about it the way we are. I like that. It’s a very honest way of doing it. I had my most conservative friend read all the [sex-related] scenes and she said that Merry never comes off as loosely moral. She comes off as very highly moraled—but if we’re going to have sex, we’re going to have a good time. I don’t believe in being punished for doing something that is very natural. I can’t see why we spend so much time apologizing. Our society says it’s very sexually free, and yet it’s actually it’s very not. It’s just sexually obsessed but still confused.

One of the things I love about the results of the feys’ attitude is that they’re much more sensual creatures. They seem to appreciate the sensual aspects of not just sex, but eroticism in general, more.

That’s from folklore. I didn’t make that part up about them being very sensual. They’re creatures of nature. Your dog or your cat knows the most comfortable spot in every room in the house. They will find it, and they will use it. They don’t have to pretend that they’re not being the most comfortable they can, to eat the most they can, to treat themselves, physically, as well as they can. And since the fey are nature spirits, I figured that they would do the same.

In the right setting, the fall of a silk blouse off a shoulder can be more sensual than total nudity. With the fey, I can use that to the absolute limit that I want, because I don’t have to worry that my attitudes may not be mainstream. Actually, I think most people are very, very sensual, but this culture does not encourage it, especially for men. Most of the men I know are every bit as sensual or sensitive to textures, maybe even more so than most women. But if they show it, or say it… people think that they can’t be straight. And I don’t understand that.

I was looking at men’s robes recently. Outside, they were very soft, but if you touch the inside, they were rough. When did this seem like a good idea? Anything that touches the skin should feel like you want it to touch you. The outside that you show to everybody else shouldn’t be nicer than the part that’s inside, touching you. Life is short. Treat yourself well. Everybody else will try to treat you badly.

You’ve commented before that your books are “allowed” to have more erotic content because they’re
already set in a fantasy world.

It does give a patina, something to put between the eroticism and the reader, that makes it more comfortable. But I work across genres, and I can take the best of all the genres. I can use whatever violence or horrific elements are necessary. I can take as much eroticism as I need for the romance, as much sensuality… But, yes, because they’re the fey, I can write about them in a more detailed manner and people are able to distance themselves. This is not real. So they don’t have to worry about it as much.

There must be a lot of assumptions about you from some readers, because of the sensual content of your books.

Early on in my career, I had to practice this phrase: “I’m sorry, I’m don’t have sex with strangers. Thanks for thinking of me, though.” It’s not, “I don’t find you attractive.” It’s just, “I’m sorry, I just don’t have sex with strangers, but thank you for thinking of me.” And you smile, and they go away. I’ve only had one gentleman come back and say, “How long does it take not to be a stranger?” And I said, “Five years.” And he went, “Five years!” He walked away and, of course, I never saw him again. As I’ve done more and more, and the books have become more and more popular, I don’t get as much of that. I don’t know if it’s that they’re intimidated, or pretty sure the answer will be “no,” so they don’t try as often. But they’re always polite. The more outrageous the suggestion, the more polite they are.

If you write about something with a high sensuality content, I think it’s kind of hypocritical to not think that people are going to think that [about you]. But as long as they’re always polite about it, then I’m fine.

And if you write something with a high violence content…?

The scariest comment I’ve ever got was a gentleman on Death Row said I write about killing people like I know how it really feels. On one hand, it’s a high compliment. On the other hand, ugh!

The assumption is that I’ve had a very misspent youth, and the fact is that I haven’t. But I’m proof that you can research anything. I’ve asked questions Barbara Walters wouldn’t touch. Anything that I didn’t know about, I found people to ask, from ex-Special Forces to people that are in the D/S community. People have been very generous with their time, very generous in answering questions and helping me fill in background. Many people don’t really do research, or they take other people’s fiction or movies as their research. I don’t do that, and I’ve had the high compliment paid of nobody telling me that I haven’t it got right.

Did you know when you came up with this idea that it would be a new series?

Oh, yes. I’ve never had a single-book idea in my entire life. I think in great, gaudy chunks. I love reading series. That’s my favorite thing to read, so that’s my favorite thing to write. I’m like all people who love series. I like to settle in and know the ride’s going to be a long one. I hate getting into a series, and really, really enjoying it, and then the series ends. A good series, if I find one, I just want to go on forever. And I treat my readers the way I want to be treated, which is buckle up, you’re in for a long ride.

So what are some of your favorite series?

Let’s see. I read a lot of mystery series. I love Robert B. Parker and Virginia Lanier. Given my own free time, I read a lot of cozy mysteries.. For science fiction and fantasy series, David Eddings’s characters are always fun; I’m very much a character-driven writer and reader. I’m also very fond of Sharon Shinn’s Angel books. Oh, and I just finished up the Harry Potter series.

I don’t want to read what I write. When I get up from the typewriter, I don’t want to read other people’s horrific books. I used to read a lot of that before I started writing it and now I want a break. I want to read something that’s like totally different.

And whose series are you working on now, Anita or Mary?

I’m finishing up Narcissus in Chains, which will be the tenth book in the Anita Blake series. If I wasn’t on tour, I would have the book completed by now, but I have some final edits. When I say “final edits,” I don’t mean that that means the book will be done. It means that then I send it off to New York. Several
people I’ve said this to are ask, “Oh, why isn’t the book coming out sooner?” I’m not finished with it. It’s 951 pages long; the longest book to date. So one of the reasons it’s taking so long is it’s just long. I’m now going back and redoing some of the beginning. I’m changing some of what the villains were at the beginning, some of their dialogue. They had changed over the course of the book, so I’m going back and smoothing.

When I’ve finished up with that, and take a couple of weeks off, I will be starting on the next Merry book, which will be A Caress of Twilight.

And both of these series are open-ended?

Anita is completely open-ended. It’s like a mystery series. With Merry, I’m not sure yet. It could very well be open-ended, but I also definitely have a goal in mind. She is going to have to take care of her relatives who are trying to kill her. That’s not something you can just leave hanging. And yet, I don’t see a permanent end any time soon. For some of the larger things, yes, I have an end in sight. We have to settle who’s going to get the throne. But as far as the rest of it, all bets are off. If you would have asked me when I started the Anita series, I would have told you exactly where it was going to go, and exactly what it was going to do. And I’d have been wrong. I was very wrong on that.

I don’t outline extensively. I’m a very organic writer. I have a goal in mind, but I know better than to argue with my characters. They know better than I do. And if they come up with better things to do than what I’ve got planned, it’s worked before, so I don’t argue with them. Sometimes, they’ll lead you down a rabbit hole and you have to dig your way back out. But very often, your subconscious is a better tool than anything else.