Carrie Vaughn: Kitty's Greatest Hits

I still had more ideas. It turns out a werewolf talk radio host is a great platform from which to launch all manner of stories. Ten novels later … yeah. Wasn’t expecting that.

I still write short stories, because while some ideas need the space of a novel to tell them, others don’t. Novels have dozens of characters, at least a couple of plots, lots of settings, time passing, and so on. Sometimes, though, an idea has just a couple of characters, just one problem, one setting, and one moment in time. I had characters I wanted to know more about, but couldn’t explore their histories in the novels. Because the novels are in first-person point of view, I can only write about what Kitty knows or discovers, and the other characters aren’t always keen to tell her their secrets. Short pieces let me explore Kitty’s world, and I can often bring those discoveries back to the novels and make them richer.

Looking back at these stories, I see a record of me trying to work out my own mythology of the supernatural, vampires and werewolves and the like, as protagonists rather than monsters. I’m trying to answer questions like, How do vampires approach sex? How do supernatural beings find each other and interact? How do they make their ways in the world? What do they do for jobs? I write about vampires and werewolves in the “real world,” and I find that I’ve been most interested in the “real world” part of that theme. These stories are about vampires and werewolves (and were-lions and selkies and so on), but they’re also about people coping. I think when you cast supernatural beings as heroes, especially if you give them traditional monstrous strengths and weaknesses, part of their stories are necessarily going to be about coping with what they are and their places in the world.

On a day-to-day basis, putting a few hundred words on the work in progress, sorting through correspondence and promotion and all the business aspects of being a full-time writer, I feel like I never get enough done. But gathering these stories together and looking back—damn, I’ve been busy! I had no idea! I’ve made this whole world! The only thing better than building up a whole world is having people want to read about it. So, to Kitty’s fans and readers: Thank you. Most of these stories wouldn’t exist without you and your interest in Kitty’s world.

In the tradition of the playlists I’ve matched a song with each story that I think captures the feeling or tone of the story or character.

(This collection doesn’t include the first two Kitty short stories that appeared in Weird Tales in 2001 and 2003. Those stories, “Doctor Kitty Solves All Your Love Problems” and “Kitty Loses Her Faith,” became part of the first novel, Kitty and The Midnight Hour .)

“Il Est Né” (Taverner Consort, “Il Est Né”)

This story originally appeared in Wolfsbane and Mistletoe , an anthology of werewolf holiday stories edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner. Half the fun of some of these stories is seeing what the characters are up to between books. This fits neatly into Kitty’s arc, right before the events of Kitty Takes a Holiday : She’s taking what she’s learned so far and using that knowledge to help others.

“A Princess of Spain” (Sally Potter, “Pavanne” from Orlando )

I wrote this for an anthology called The Secret History of Vampires, edited by Darrell Schweitzer and Martin H. Greenberg. The theme: What turning points in history featured vampires manipulating events behind the scenes? My favorite historical turning point happened early in the sixteenth century, in England, with the death of Henry VII’s eldest son, Arthur. Henry VIII wasn’t originally meant to be king of England. An England without Henry VIII—without the Protestant Reformation in England, without Queen Elizabeth and the naval triumph over the Spanish Armada—is a very different England indeed. It’s an incredible tipping point, and I think its most fascinating player is Catherine of Aragon, who married Arthur before she married Henry and who was an unsuspecting and mostly unwilling lynchpin. The question of whether or not her marriage to Arthur was ever consummated is still hotly debated, as it was when Henry VIII pursued his divorce from her.

“Conquistador de la Noche” (Procol Harum, “Conquistador”)

Rick is probably the most interesting character from the novels who gets the least amount of time in the spotlight. So many secrets, so much history, and I never really get a chance to talk about any of it because in the novels the characters so rarely just sit down and tell each other stories. I wrote this one because I wanted to know, finally, Rick’s origin. I had dropped hints—that he knew Coronado and was part of his famous expedition—but I needed to know the details.

Research-wise, this story was fascinating because it takes place in something of a shadow period in Mexico’s history. The conquistadors and Coronado’s expedition north are quite well documented. The colonial period and mission system that progressed as far north as modern-day California are also well documented. But there’s a forty- or fifty-year gap in between that I had a hard time finding information on. This is one of the frustrations and thrills of writing historical pieces—searching for as many scraps of information as you can, then fitting them together into a living world.

I want to write a lot more about Rick—he has five hundred years of history to cover, after all.

“The Book of Daniel” (Loreena McKennitt, “The Mystic’s Dream”)

When I started writing stories about the supernatural existing in the real world, I looked at a lot of old tales, mythology, and folklore with new eyes. Every kid with a Judeo-Christian background knows the story of Daniel and the Lions’ Den, the Biblical tale about a Hebrew prophet constantly getting in trouble with the Babylonian and Persian kings. I figured in a world with werewolves and shape-shifters, that story would look very different.

Writing this let me play in an amazing setting: The city of Babylon at the height of its power, home of the famous Hanging Gardens, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and the epic Ishtar Gate with its glazed blue bricks and row after row of marching lions and bulls.

This is also a good example of how little I have to make up whole cloth in the end. Endless stories and real-world settings are out there waiting to be told and retold. Writing about a world in which the supernatural is real opens so many possibilities—I get to turn that lens on all of history and tell new stories about what really happened.

“The Temptation of Robin Green” (Tempest, “The House Carpenter”)

I think this is the very first story I wrote involving anything having to do with the Kitty universe, although I didn’t know it at the time. Here’s how it happened: I wanted to write a story about a secret lab studying supernatural creatures. I included a vampire called Rick. Then I decided that anytime I had a vampire in a story, I would call him Rick, and he would theoretically be the same vampire. He would be a nice guy—Duncan MacLeod-ish, even—traveling through history, helping people while trying to keep to himself. When Kitty showed up, of course I had to include vampires, and I brought Rick along for the ride.

Years later I retrofitted the story for The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance, edited by Trisha Telep. At that point I could have changed the name and not brought Rick into it all, but I decided to keep the artifact of the earlier draft. I hesitate to speculate where this falls on the actual Kitty time line. I also have no idea how Rick ended up as a lab rat. I’ve almost decided this story is completely apocryphal, but it’s fun to see what I was thinking about at the time.