LUNA Interview

What do you love most-or like least-about being a writer?
You know, I usually go for a daily walk with the dog, and almost every single day as I'm out walking I'm astounded and delighted all over again at what an incredibly cool life I've got. I *love* writing; I l love the creation process; I love giving life to the people in my head. I love dicussing the books I'm writing or have written with friends and readers, getting feedback and ideas on how to improve the story. With URBAN SHAMAN, which is my first published novel, the excitement of being published for the first time has just been out of this world, and that's completely fantastic, too. :)

Down side of writing? It's isolated. I like people, but I don't get out a lot, and the more involved in the writing process I am, the more internal my world gets. That's *one* of the reasons it's so important for me to go on those daily walks--a writer needs to get out of her head and into the real world sometimes!

How did you come up with the idea for your latest book?
The book I've just finished as I'm answering these interview questions is THE CARDINAL RULE, which is under the byline Cate Dermody and which will be published by Harlequin's Bombshell line toward the end of this year. That book is a spy novel that sprang from the idea that my little sister, who was a world-travelling bohemian in her college days, was actually a spy. Her husband's father has done a great deal of work overseas, and so the idea came about that she'd met her husband through his father, who was her CIA handler.

The resulting story looks almost nothing like that initial idea, mind you, but that's where it came from!

Is this the way that book ideas normally come to you?
Yes. :)

THUNDERBIRD FALLS, the second Walker Papers book, came from a local waterfall called (you guessed it) Thunderbird Falls, and then from a Jeopardy! episode where a question regarding the Native American totem thunderbird's mortal enemy, a sea serpent, came up. The rest sort of fell in place from there.

Similarly, the story for "Banshee Cries" (which I'm calling Book 1.5 of the Walker Papers; it'll be out in November in LUNA's WINTER MOON anthology, along with stories by Mercedes Lackey and Tanith Lee) came from the LUNA-proposed idea of centering a story around a winter moon. It's a very slim thread, but it's what I hung the bones of the story on.

Do you have a favorite locale or setting that you've created in your novels? What is it and why is it your favorite?
Boy. I've got a few favorites. One is Babylon, in URBAN SHAMAN. I just insanely love the Joshua Spires. They seem so magnificent and alive to me, and I just adore the idea of them.

How does a new world begin for you? Does it come to you before the story or as you write?
Mostly the worlds come as I write them. Once in a while I'll get a kernel of a world idea from a dream, but by and large I explore my worlds as I write. That can end up with some dead ends and some wrong footing, but fortunately, that's what rewrites are for. :)

What type of story did you envision when you began writing your latest book, and how did the final story evolve or differ from your original idea?
In a way I answered this earlier, about THE CARDINAL RULE. In another--once I have an outline down, the book tends to pretty much follow that outline. The details are frequently different, sometimes *quite* different, but the general sketch of the thing is usually about what I started out with. By the time I'd begun defining the real *story* for that book, it already didn't look much like the germ of the idea that had started it, so by the end of the book, it looked much more like what I thought it would, rather than its initial spark.

What role does research play in your writing?
I love research. Especially when my friends do it for me. :) Really--I have one friend in particular, a woman named Sherilyn, who reads my rough drafts and looks up the things that I leave notes for myself in the text about. And that's how I usually work--I write first and research later, except for when I absolutely need a solid grasp of what I'm doing before I can move on. That happened with THUNDERBIRD FALLS--Jo, my main character, works in Seattle's North Precinct, and while I knew that, I absolutely could not get beyond a few chapters into the story until I'd sat down and really studied the North Precinct, the area it covered, where her beat would be, that kind of thing. I prefer to leave notes to myself--often things like, "GUY WITH THE ALIGNMENT PROBLEM, YOU REALLY SHOULD WRITE THIS STUFF DOWN, CATIE"--in the text, and then I go back and look up whatever it is I've made notes on, to give the book the flavor it really needs.

How is writing fantasy different from other kinds of writing that you may have done?
Well, I started out as a fantasy and science fiction reader (as soon as I finished reading all the Bobbsey Twins and horse books in the library, anyway), and therefore writing fantasy is my first and natural love. Moving into romance is the new thing for me.

To me, the best way to answer this is the way Tilda Swinton, who played the angel Gabriel in the recent film "Constantine" answered a question about whether it was hard to prepare for a role as an angel. She said it wasn't any harder to prepare to play Gabriel than a suburban housewife, because neither of them were any more or less real than the other. They're both simply characters she's portraying.

And that, to me, is very much how writing is. It doesn't make a particular lot of difference whether I'm writing about a Seattle in which a woman discovers her ability to perform shamanic magic, or a world in which a continent-hopping spy chases down artificial intelligences and learns of secret organizations manipulating the world's economy. Neither is any more real than the other; both require rules and thought and research about places I've never been and things I've never done.

How did you become interested in writing? Why do you enjoy writing fantasy?
As I said to my husband recently, it wasn't really any more that I knew I wanted to be a writer than I knew I wanted to breathe. I've always written. I still have a play I wrote when I was 10, and before that I began writing what I intended to be a series of mystery novels with several youthful protagonists (a la Trixie Belden) on our old Franklin computer. I was maybe eight at the time. At age six I turned in three poems to a school magazine; the teacher who was producing the magazine stopped in the hall one day to tell me to keep writing. So there's no time in my life when I *didn't* write, or wasn't interested in it.

I love writing fantasy because I believe in the possibility of being. I want worlds with magic, where the things we dream of do happen. It's more than escapism. To me, fantasy is about hope, and that's a thing we all need.

Which of your books is your favorite and why?
I wish you could read my favorite book! My favorite book so far is a young adult novel called RIGHT ANGLES TO FAERYLAND, and it hasn't yet been purchased for publication. It's a book that I've wanted to write since I was about twelve years old, and a couple of years ago the first sentence and then paragraph popped into my mind, and I was finally, after almost twenty years of trying, able to write it. It's a story about magic and choices and growing up and sacrifice and life not being fair, with as many classic fairy tales woven into the structure as I could manage. I'm terribly, terribly proud of it and *someday* it'll be available for people to read!

What type of writing routine have you developed?
*laugh* I have a writing nook that's completely offline, no internet access, that I write at. On a good, organized day, I get up and go out into our garage gym, do some walking or weight lifting, and then come back in and plunk myself down in my writing chair to do at least a few hundred words before I eat or shower. My daily quota is 1100 words, which usually takes me about an hour. My goal is often to write a complete chapter a day, though whether that happens or not is anybody's guess. Only *after* I've gotten at *least* my quota done am I allowed to check email and websites and all of that, because once I get on the internet-connected computer, I can be doomed to non-productivity for the rest of the day. :)

What are the five books and/or authors on your shelf that you could not live without?
C.S. Friedman, particularly her Black Sun trilogy. Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising Sequence. Guy Gavriel Kay. Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January books. Robert Heinlein. Augh. I have to stop at five?

What writers have most influenced your writing?
Robert Heinlein. Chris Claremont, author of much of the Marvel Comics X-Men continuity (and creator of such characters as Storm and Wolverine!), and to a lesser degree, Stan Lee, originator of the X-Men. A.C. Crispin, a SF author who wrote me a big fat four page handwritten letter when I wrote her, half a lifetime ago, to ask for advice on growing up to be a writer. More recently, Judith Tarr, whose gorgeous prose and beautiful storytelling teach me something every time I read one of her books. Wendy and Richard Pini, creators of ElfQuest. I could go on for a very long time. :)

As an author, what are your greatest goals? Challenges?
Well, my goal as an author is really pretty straight-forward. Generally speaking, I want to conquer the publishing world. :) I'd like to publish somewhere between 3-6 books a year, probably under different bylines; I'd like to write one or two really good comic books, and I'd like to pen a screenplay or ten. I'd like to sell some of my television series ideas, and I'd like to do a coffee table book of photography and essays from the bike ride I plan to take across the country someday.

I suspect you can all see the challenges inherent in these goals. :)

What is the best or most useful piece of advice about writing you've ever received?
Ah, this harkens back to the story of me being a six year old and turning in those poems for my school magazine.

The teacher who was putting the magazine together stopped in the hall one day and said, "You're Catie Murphy, right?" to me. I was sitting on the floor at the time, so he looked particularly tall, and he had an alarming black beard. There was nothing I could do about being Catie Murphy, so I had to confess to it, even if it seemed likely that he was going to do something scary like haul me off to the principle's office for some infraction of the rules that I hadn't known I'd done.

Instead, he said, "Keep writing," and went on down the hall.

And that, frankly, is the best piece of writing advice I've ever been given: keep writing.

Besides writing, what other talents do you have?
I'm a decent artist, good enough that people tend to think I'm better than I think I am. I've got fifteen or so years of dance training, and am particularly good at (and fond of) tap dancing. I do web design, and I'm one hell of a baker!

Who is someone you admire and why?
Margaret Sanger, one of the first proponents of family planning in the United States, whose lifelong ambition to provide women control over their reproductive choices landed her in jail any number of times in the early part of the twentieth century. She was a bold, passionate woman willing to give her all for a cause she believed in, and I think that's one of the highest ideals that a person can strive for.

Do you have a good luck charm or superstition?
I'm Irish. I'm genetically inclined to be superstitious. :)

In fact, I do carry an Native Alaskan good luck charm called a billiken, which is (in this case) a jade-carved cheerful little fellow about the size of my thumb. I'm very fond of him. :)

What is the one thing you've always wanted to do but never had the courage to try?
... see the next question for this answer.

What is something you've always been grateful that you did have the courage to do?
This is a long story. :)

When I was 13, my drama class went on a high school trip to New York City. We had a layover in St. Louis, and I was wandering around the airport, bored and tired. During my wanderings, I saw a really cute guy playing a racecar video game, and I thought for some reason that he looked familiar. I went and got a cookie and came back. He was still playing. I hid out behind the AT&T booth and watched him for a while, trying to figure out why he might possibly look familiar, and trying to get up the nerve to go say to him, "Uh, hi, you look familiar, how come?"

Eventually I decided it was just my imagination, because he was really cute and I was sure I'd LIKE to know him, but I was too embarrassed to go say, "Uh, hi." So I went back to the drama group and kept reading my book (David Eddings's MAGICIAN'S GAMBIT).

About twenty minutes later, a girlfriend of mine came rushing over and flopped in the chair beside me and said, "Kirk Cameron is here!"

And I realized that the kid I'd seen *had* been familiar, because I'd seen his picture on my friends' walls (I hadn't ever watched Growing Pains, at that point). I said, "Oh, yeah, I saw him a while ago," and then we all went and mobbed the poor bastard. I kept thinking, "If I had been brave enough, I could have actually had a conversation with this guy, instead of being one of a faceless mob of people clamoring at him." So I promised myself I'd never chicken out like that again.

Fast forward more than a decade. I'm in the Houston airport, standing in line to see if I'm going to make my flight to Florida for the Highlander Clan Cruise. A guy behind me says something, and I go, "! I know that voice!"

I look over my shoulder, and Highlander actor/blues singer Jim Byrnes is two people behind me. A few minutes later we're both out of line and I'm thinking: if you do not go talk to him, Catie, you are going to regret it for the rest of your life. You know this, because you've already *been* there once.

So I gathered myself and went and said hello, and we talked a couple of minutes. Later that weekend he saw me on the ship and said, "Hi, Cate!", and an entire year later bellowed, "My friend, Catie Murphy!" at me in a room full of crowded people, so talking to him made not just that weekend, but several others through the course of several years.

I will always be a little sad that I didn't nerve myself up to go talk to Kirk Cameron and find out who he was, but I will also always, *always* be glad that I not only learned from making that mistake, but that I had the belly to follow through when the exact same opportunity came up so many years later. It was one of those rare moments in life where you can see a turning point very clearly, and act accordingly. I think that's pretty cool, and it really has affected my life in significant ways. So I have a really difficult time pinpointing things that I've wanted to do but don't have the courage to, because this episode in my life taught me to go for it.

If you weren't a writer, what would you be?
Unemployed. :)

How do you like to spend your spare time?
Walking, biking, swimming, reading, chatting, baking, movieing...

What projects are you working on now, writing or otherwise, that interest you the most?
As I write this, I'm about to plunge into revisions on THUNDERBIRD FALLS and get started on the second Cate Dermody Bombshell title, THE FIREBIRD DECEPTION. Those will both be a great deal of fun, and then after that it's writing COYOTE DREAMS, the third Walker Papers book. I'm hoping to take a go at writing an Elizabethan-era epic fantasy with some science fiction elements at the end of the year; that's a project I'm really looking forward to. But the Bombshells and the Walker Papers books are going to be a blast to write. :)