How did you start writing paranormal romance and urban fantasy...?

One of the questions I used to get asked a lot is, ‘How did you start writing?’ It was always an easy question to answer, simply because I started writing when I was twelve, and haven’t stopped since. These days though, the question has mutated into, ‘How did you start writing paranormal romance and urban fantasy’ and that one is a little harder to answer.

The fact is I’ve always sort of written it. Or rather, I’ve always written fantasy that had definite romance undertones. The very first book I completed featured an outcast member of a herd of talking horses (as a teenager, I was mad-keen on both horses and Elaine Mitchell’s brilliant Silver Brumby series) and my four-legged hero definitely had his female counterpart. Then I read Lord of the Rings, and switched to writing epic fantasy stories, but again, the undertone of romance was there. But there was one major difference between my writing and the books I was reading at the time (aside from the fact that they were not only published, but generally made a whole lot more sense plot-wise than my writing did.) My novels generally featured a tough heroine as the main character. Tough female leads weren’t a feature in the fantasy novels of that era, and the ones that were there generally annoyed me, simply because they always seemed to be the ones that needed rescuing. I mean, come on, some of us are resourceful, and can occasionally get ourselves out of tough situations. In my books, the women did just that. They were fierce and brave, and every bit as resourceful as the men – which is why they always completed the quest and got their man!

Then I read Children of the Night by Mercedes Lackey and Blood Price by Tanya Huff, and everything changed. Both stories were set in modern times and featured tough but caring heroines and men who loved and yet threatened them. I loved the fact that these stories were set in urban rather than fantasy settings, and I knew instantly that’s what I needed to write.

Which was how the Nikki and Michael series was born. Nikki’s a private investigator who grew up on tough streets and who became extremely proficient with both knives and the psychic abilities she’s been gifted with. Michael is a vampire who works with a clandestine organization known only as the Damask Circle, and it’s the Circle’s self appointed task to track down those supernaturals who not only kill humans, but whose actions threaten to expose the existence of their shadowy world. Their two worlds clash when Nikki takes on a case involving a run-away teenager and Michael comes to town to hunt down the vampire responsible for kidnapping and killing seven teenagers.

Nikki and Michael are both scarred characters, and the path of their relationship twists and turns throughout the novels. And it was great fun writing about all the different supernaturals – some creatures of myths, some little more than figments of my imagination – that they come up against, or work with. The Damask Circle comes into the later books more fully, and we get a glimpse of the inner workings of the organization, as well as some of the different ‘creatures’ that work for it. This actually led me to writing an offshoot series called, naturally enough, the Damask Circle series. One of those books, Circle of Desire, featured my first werewolf hero, and it was in that book that the first glimmerings of the world that became the Riley Jenson series appeared. I loved that hero so much that I decided to write a series centered entirely around werewolves, and that series became the Ripple Creek books – Beneath a Rising Moon and Beneath a Darkening Moon. While this series was set in an entirely different world – werewolves were out, but confined to reservations – the glimmerings of Riley’s world were much stronger here, and the werewolves of Ripple Creek share much the same beliefs and rules that appear in Riley’s world – even down to soul mates and swearing their love to the moon. In fact, we even see a moon ceremony – an event that may yet appear in Riley’s world. (And no, I can’t give any hints as to who or when – that would spoil the surprise!)

Posted 25/11/2008 12:28:51 by Keri Arthur with 1 comments.