Carrie Vaughn: Kitty's Greatest Hits

The challenge of this one was climbing into Cormac’s brain for an extended period. He’s very different from most of my other viewpoint characters, who tend to be cheerful do-gooders, or at least come from familiar, recognizable backgrounds. Cormac, not so much on either count. Kitty may be the werewolf, but Cormac is the real outsider among the characters. In this one, he finally moves to center stage.

When I was coming up with Cormac’s background, even for the early Kitty stories, I wanted to make him more grounded in reality than the typical badasses I encountered in genre fiction. He wouldn’t be a former SEAL, a bitter ex-cop with a heart of gold, or a member of an elite paramilitary squad. No, I went local, to rural Colorado. Where did Cormac learn his skills and his outsider attitude? The militia movement, enclaves of which you’ll find throughout the Midwest and Rocky Mountains. I found that to be much scarier because it exists in my own backyard, unlike most types of fictional badasses.

I sent Cormac to prison as part of my project of injecting the real world as much as I could into the novels. Lots of urban fantasy novels have kick-ass, badass, gun-nut, hard-core bounty hunter type characters, and they never seem to suffer consequences. In the real world, people who kill people go to jail more often than not. So, my hard-core bounty hunter was going to get caught, and was going to go to jail.

I have gotten more e-mails and feedback over that decision than just about anything else in the series.

A lot of people worried about Cormac being in prison and gave me lots of advice about how to get him out as soon as possible, but it was never my intention to lock him away forever. I planned on bringing him back. That was why I worked so hard to come up with a situation where he’d be convicted of manslaughter (rather than the first-degree murder he’s probably actually guilty of…). He’d be out on parole in a couple of years. Meanwhile …

Where did Amelia come from? I’m a fan of Victorian adventure literature, and Amelia embodies Victorian attitudes about the occult found in a lot of those stories. I’d been wanting to write about a character like her for a long time.

Something I’ve learned: You get the most interesting results by combining the most disparate ideas in the same story. I decided the Kitty universe needed more magic and wizards, and I could accomplish that by throwing Cormac and Amelia together. That also meant that Cormac in prison would have the most fascinating adventures. As you can see from the books, by the time I wrote Kitty Raises Hell , I knew exactly what happened to Cormac, and I started writing this novella so I could get it straight in my own mind.

Kitty and The Midnight Hour

Kitty Goes to Washington

Kitty Takes a Holiday

Kitty and the Silver Bullet

Kitty and the Dead Man’s Hand

Kitty Raises Hell

Kitty’s House of Horrors

Kitty Goes to War*

Kitty’s Big Trouble*

Discord’s Apple*

After the Golden Age*

Voices of Dragons

Steel

*A Tor Book