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"Where do you get your ideas?" There's a question many writers dread. Not because they order them wholesale from a warehouse in Schenectady, as a famous SF writer once quipped, but because ideas aren't the hard part. Not really. Ideas are like breakfast cereal; there're more than I can possibly consume in a lifetime, but the real trick is finding the ones that don't go soggy and getting my procrastinating backside into a chair and my fingers on the keyboard often enough and long enough to turn them into a story-meal worth serving up.

I have eight linear feet of spiral-bound notebooks full of ideas from my high school days alone. Most of them seem to be the soggy-going kind, unfortunately--emo young wizards in alternate dimensions, Romances featuring fiery half-Irish Californios, dead detectives reincarnated as Afghan hounds... But there are sometimes bits of delicious, crunchy idea buried in the self-absorbed sog. So I keep the notebooks around, carefully stacked in a waterproof box. I don't use them very often, however.

Usually my ideas come from something I read, or heard--or misread or misheard--or some vagrant thought that broke free of its mental branch and came bouncing in on my conscious mind like a California avocado falling on an unsuspecting Mercedes. Which was the case with Bad Guy of the Month. This is what happened and it's typical of the way my avocado bounces--erm... that is, the way my mind stirs up ideas.

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Jim Butcher once said that he modeled Harry Dresden on the hardboiled detectives of Mystery's Golden Age--guys who had two common traits: they got the snot beaten out of them regularly; and they knew how to cut up with the quips--to "lip off" as Mr. Butcher put it. I know who those guys are--guys like Sam Spade and Nick Charles and Philip Marlowe. I like those guys too, but I have to admit that one of my favorite detectives is not a tough guy who gets knocked around and bounces back or is quick with a smart-mouthed comment. He's the invisible man, the transparent lens through whose eyes the story and its setting is shown to the reader, but who is not, in fact, a motivator of the events. He's Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer, a man for whom detection is neither an exercise of ego, nor an unpleasant delivery from Circumstances R Us. It's just a job.

Even though a collection of Lew Archer short stories has been released recently, Lew doesn't get much play these days. He's the pure Mystery fiend's detective, as far removed from the quirky, fast-talking, idiosyncratic anti-hero of Hammett and Chandler as glass is from grits. He's not flashy, he's not charming, he's deceptively plain and quiet--an observer whose life is not meant for display. He's the detective Harper Blaine would most like to emulate and whom she simply cannot. But why not?

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There is a saying that if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it must be a duck. Which is very embarassing if you're the parent of a small child with a plastic duck bill squeaker. If the child in question were a book, he'd be relegated to the "duck" shelves in short order and nothing his mother could say would get him moved back to homo sapiens.

Which is why half the bookstores I've walked into shelve Urban Fantasies in Horror. This really surprised--and I admit--offended me at first. I don't write horror! 'Deed I don't. (See Kat; see Kat get huffy and parochial.) It's not that I think horror is beneath me, but that I think of it as "that other stuff." Then I stopped to wonder "what is horror all about?" and could I be totally wrong about it?

So I started asking and thinking. Why was I considered a horror writer by some people? Was it the vampires, the ghosts, the death and dismemeberment? Well, in some cases, yes. To some folks, the presence of a vampire is all it takes to slot a book neatly into horror. That's kind of sad for some of the vampires, the St. Germaines and Henry Fitzroys who are basically nice guys. But it's not just vampires that will put a book into the horror department.

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A couple of my writer friends really hate used bookstores. Some of them even hate libraries. Because these channels allow their books to be distributed without authorization and without payment to them. The idea of those no-profit copies flapping around the marketplace like friendly birds is kind of scary when you live and die (professionally speaking) by net sales. But really, it's not as bad as that. After all, our publishers also give copies of our books away--sometimes hundreds at a single shot. They do it for publicity, to build word-of-mouth and positive feeling about the books, not because they think they are dogs, but quite the opposite: because they like the book and want it to do well. They are in business after all.

So, I'm not afraid of used bookstores, or libraries, or e-books, or P2P file sharing. I don't want people to be thoughtlessly profligate about spreading the books around on Limewire or something of that nature, but I do want people to read them--I want LOTS of people to read them. Realistically, the number of sales lost to these venues is miniscule. But the good will is huge. As a relatively new writer, the biggest challenge is building momentum with readers--getting to be known and liked enough that my publisher doesn't have to beg people to read my books.

And the very best channel for building that momentum is word-of-mouth, which you don't get if people don't have the books in their hot little fists to read. Second-hand bookstores and libraries and people who give their books away to friends are actually doing me a huge favor--they're passing my books along to others to read and (I hope) fall in love with. And talk about. To other people. Who may decide to go out and buy my books. And fall in love. And talk about them.

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I never would have expected it, but the most common question I get about Harper's world is "why doesn't she have a cell phone in Greywalker?" For some readers it's been a point of unreality that threw them out of the book so badly, they abandoned the story altogether. Kind of an odd point, isn't it? But it shows you never know what's going to work for some readers and what won't.

One of the difficulties for any Science Fiction or Fantasy writer is creating a world that's believable and compelling without getting so detailed that you spend all your time setting up or explaining things. You have to just take some things as read. As a writer, you have to strike a balance between showing the world in action and explaining it that doesn't make the whole experience fall apart like a stage flat falling over. And it's not the same for all writers or for all readers. No writer can satisfy all possible readers. Some will just not buy in, no matter how hard you try.

So... about this pager....

Back in May of 2000 I started on the first draft of Greywalker. At the time, my husband and I were the only people I knew who had cell phones as their primary telecommunications device. It's not that they were still very expensive, but rather that they were such a huge pain to keep in service. Coverage with any one company was terrible and patchy and the phones themselves were delicate and temperamental. But, living on a boat, we found that a traditional landline was not making the grade for us. We still had the line--we used it for our computer modem (124k baud, a veritable Niagra of information at the time)--but we were destined to drop it very soon. So I didn't consider giving my protagonist such an ill-tempered, unpredictable instrument. Instead, I tried to stick closer to the reality of the time--one I thought would prevail a little longer.

Kat Richardson lives on a sailboat in Seattle with her husband and two ferrets. She rides a motorcycle, shoots target pistol, and does not own a TV.

Poltergeist
Kat Richardson - Author
$14.00| add to cart
Book: Paperback | 8.26 x 5.23in | 352 pages | ISBN 9780451461506 | 07 Aug 2007 | Roc

 

 

Kat Richardson, Poltergeist, Harper Blaine, Greywalker, detective, supernatural, murder, Penguin Books, books