Greywalker Author, Kat Richardson - Exclusive Interview

Kat Richardson Interview

Greywalker Author sits down with BuzzyMag at DragonCon 2014 in Atlanta, GA

JMW: Hello, this is Jean Marie Ward for BuzzyMag. With me today is Kat Richardson, the best-selling author of the Greywalker series. Welcome, Kat.

Kat Richardson: Thank you.

JMW: After nine books, Harper Blaine’s adventures of the Greywalker have their big finale in “The Revenant”. Is this how you expected the saga to end when you first sat down to write the series?

Kat Richardson: Not precisely. I did know there was going to be an end, that it wasn’t an open-ended series that would go on and on forever. For the most part, I’ve come to the end of the arc that I really wanted to write, but it did change over time. I had slightly different ideas about what I wanted to do when I first started, and you just kind of go with the flow up to a certain degree.

JMW: Is she the character you thought she would be?

Kat Richardson: She is, at core, at specific, perhaps not. She started out being someone who was very hard to like, and who wasn’t, in a lot of ways, very mature. I think that I’ve put her through enough baptisms by fire that she is finally a more secure, more reasonable, and much more decent person.

JMW: One always hopes to get to the decent person phase. If you could give your circa 2007 self one piece of advice about the series, what would it have been?

Kat Richardson: Do something else.

JMW: No. Why?

Kat Richardson: Well, at the time, I didn’t realize that there actually was an urban fantasy genre. I really wanted to write a detective novel. You know how those hard-boiled books have the detective whose client comes along and then is dead by chapter three or chapter five and the hard-boiled PI goes on anyhow? That’s where I started, except that I decided that the client was dead in chapter one, and then, the detective was dead on page two.

Things got kind of weird, and I ended up in a genre I didn’t know existed, which over time has developed some very weird audience expectations, especially from women writing women. Had I known then how things were going to fall out, I might have written a slightly different character, or I might have written in a different genre, because I’ve had some frustrations with the way this genre has been perceived and struggling against that perception. And, I’m awfully, awfully lazy.

JMW: Well, hey, you’re entitled after nine books. How important was Seattle to the series? I’ve heard you talk about how creepy the city is, but you love it, don’t you?

Kat Richardson: Oh, I love Seattle. I’m originally from Southern California, mostly Los Angeles, and moving to Seattle was really a revelation. Suddenly there was weather.

JMW: Yes, there is weather in Seattle.

Kat Richardson: Yes. But it was really the thing that caused the series to gel because I had started on the book quite a long time ago, when I was in college. The character was originally male. The relationship with what I eventually called Grey was very different, but it didn’t work. It just wouldn’t come together, and one day, stuck on a bus in fog in Pioneer Square in Seattle, suddenly things came together. Seattle really animated the series in a way it had not been before, and it’s been a very strong part of the character of the series.

JMW: What are you proudest of? You talked about some of the challenges of working with a female character in urban fantasy. What are you proudest of having done with Harper and the Greywalker?

 

Kat Richardson: Wow. I’m really proud of the fact that I feel like she comes across like a real human being. Some people complain that she doesn’t seem to feel a lot, that she is still kind of cold and chilly, that she doesn’t seem to have any friends, but I think those are hangovers from early in the series. She really does have a lot more going for her now. She used to be a very chilly and isolated person, but she’s grown over time, and I feel like those are good things from a character development standpoint. If the character was a real person, it would be great to see someone change that profoundly in, really, the series only takes place over the course of about five years in the series time, even though it’s been eight years in the real world.

JMW: Production schedules being what they are.

Kat Richardson: Being what they are. But also, I have challenged myself as a writer to write a different book each time, to do something new with the characters, or the format, or the story so that I’m always challenging myself. I know that they haven’t been perfect, but I think each one has been better than the last. In a way, that’s the thing I’m the proudest of, is starting with a fairly raw concept and bringing it all the way around to something that I think is pretty good.

JMW: Cool. Are you done with Harper’s world, or might you pick up with some other characters in the future?

Kat Richardson: There’s been discussion several times about possibly doing something with the vampires, or possibly doing something with a character who showed up in the novella, “The Third Death of the Little Clay Dog“. There was a Mexican boy who may or may not be a warlock.

There have been a few other discussions, and there is certainly an opportunity for Harper and her friends to come back in the future, but at this point in time, I’m not banking on any of that, and I don’t have any immediate plans for it. A lot depends on what happens in the industry and in the genre in the next couple of years.

JMW: Yeah. We are tied to that. What are you working on now?

Kat Richardson: Well, I currently have a project out on spec, 140,000 word novel about two cops in the future on a planet that has a lot of ethnic and social problems. They get involved in a mass murder in an underground club, and things go to hell in a horrible, horrible way. I really love this book. I’ve been working on it off and on for eight years, and my agent really loves it. It’s gruesome, it’s horrible, it’s social commentary in science fiction clothes, and I can’t wait for it to sell.

JMW: You should see the grin you have when you say gruesome. It’s just wonderful.

Kat Richardson: I’ve become much more gruesome as I’ve gotten older. I used to kind of pull back from it. I’ve got a couple of other things boiling at the moment, including a story that’s set in the 1920s during prohibition in Kansas City that features a main character who lost his eyesight during World War I in a particularly horrible way, because it was an awful, horrible war. I find myself writing things that are just very, very disturbing lately, mostly because, I guess, I really enjoy just torturing people.

JMW: We’re writers, that’s what we do. Is there anything you’d like to add?

Kat Richardson: Well, I’m hoping that people will enjoy not only the new book, but the series as a whole, to look at it as a great big book that’s nine volumes long. And I’m hoping that some of them will continue to read whatever I do next.

This is really the best job in the world, even when it’s hard, even when you don’t know where your next meal is coming from. So, I hope that I’ve engaged fans enough that they want to come back and see what I do next.

JMW: Great. Thank you, Kat. And thank you, for BuzzyMag.com.

Interviewed by Jean Marie Ward

Find Out More about Kat Richardson & her Work:
Kat Richardson Official Website
Kat Richardson Google+
Kat Richardson Facebook
Kat Richardson Twitter