Kat Richardson On The Supernatural

What is your writing environment like?

Kat Richardson: Tight. I live and work on a 35' sailboat and that means my workspace is a 20-inch wide table in a fixed position in front of an upholstered bench. It's the same place I eat my dinner and sit to read books or watch a DVD on my computer.

Sometimes I have to get away and have a change of scene, so I take my laptop and go to the library or Tully's Coffee and work for a while, but I usually just work at home. The very small space forces me to focus, since all sorts of distractions are literally in arm's reach, but I'm still in a comfortable environment where I can run around in my bare feet and cuddle my pets whenever I want. We are considering a move to a larger boat though—so I could have an office space of my own eventually.

Do you re-write extensively?

Kat Richardson: I have, but not at the moment. I try to do the real heavy lifting in the outline and first draft so I rewrite less. I'm not a seat-of-the-pants sort of writer. Since the stories are structured like Mysteries, that makes timing and placement of clues very important, so I work out a lot of the details in the outline before I get a lot of the writing done and that eliminates a lot of heavy revision or re-writing later. At least so far it has.

Where there any specific changes your publisher asked for once they accepted Greywalker?

Kat Richardson: Mostly Anne wanted it shorter and tighter so most of the changes were just small cuts in a lot of places, but we did do a massive restructure of Chapter One, including removing the original opening line—which ironically was part of what sold the series in the first place: ”In early April of that year, I died”--in favor of keeping the reader in the dark just as long as Harper was and starting with the fight, rather than the orginal info-dump.

The biggest changes were actually done while I was working with my agent, Steve, and his boss, Joshua, to make the ms more focussed and saleable: we cut the original word count from 137k to 117k; removed two major characters; cut one subplot while restructuring two others into one; we also remodelled Mara from a minor character into a major one; and made Harper less of a stereotypical wise-ass girl and more of a cynic. A lot of silly stuff was removed—like a goofy appearance of the ferret during the climax—to create a darker feel overall.

Death and the supernatural are two of the obvious themes in the series. Have any of these two had a significant impact on your own life in any way?

Kat Richardson: I've always had kind of odd ideas about those topics—which had a big influence on the form of the Grey—but I have other more coincidental oddities about death and Greywalker, too. My dad, who was an English teacher, died while I was in college—just after I'd written the first fragment of the story. That was pretty hard, but I knew he'd be pleased if I kept on pursuing the publication dream, even if my approach was kind of weird. He'd always been a big supporter of my writing and I wish he'd gotten to see me published.

My stepmother, to whom Greywalker is dedicated, was the person who got me started reading adult mysteries. I was with our family at her bedside when she died of non-Hodgkins Lymphoma one week before the release of Greywalker—that was a very strange experience. Afterward I felt a great deal of irony about the fact that I was writing about death and spooky stuff and I was actually at a Mystery convention (at her urging) while the rest of the family attended the funeral. It was quite surreal. Sometimes I imagine they both somehow know I made it and I often think of them when I'm writing the Greywalker books. The were both incredibly generous and supportive people who really loved books, so if they're haunting me, it's in good ways. (Thanks you guys.)

Read a sneek peek of the third Greywalker novel, Underground in another interview.

Kat Richardson

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