Kitty's Greatest Hits

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.

THE KITTY NORVILLE BOOKS

Kitty and The Midnight Hour

Kitty Goes to Washington

Kitty Takes a Holiday

Kitty and the Silver Bullet

Kitty and the Dead Man’s Hand

Kitty Raises Hell

Kitty’s House of Horrors

Kitty Goes to War*

Kitty’s Big Trouble*

OTHER NOVELS

Discord’s Apple*

After the Golden Age*

Voices of Dragons

Steel

*A Tor Book