Kat Richardson: Poltergeist

Carlos's shop also exists under a different name, but I figured the owners wouldn't be too pleased to know I'd turned their manager into a vampire necromancer and made their staff totally weird, so small changes had to be made. There is, however, no Radio Freeform, although there are radio towers on top of Queen Anne Hill.

In this book I was able to use existing places most of the time. The parks, monuments, restaurants, and businesses do exist where I said they do, except for the restaurant owned by Phoebe Mason's family—that's based on an actual place called Ida's Jamaican Kitchen that went under in 2002—and Phoebe's bookstore, which is an amalgam of three great used-book stores in the Seattle area. Yes, there really is a troll under the bridge, and Lenin does, indeed, stride into the future of fast food. Pacific Northwest University is entirely fictional.

And because of a question about cell phones, I ended up with the scenes in the downtown Barnes & Noble bookstore—which truly is the cell phone death zone.

So, having warped and twisted and willfully ignored bits of intervening time, I've brought Harper's world back in sync with our own timeline, but the past will continue to play a big part in these books—not just because it's part of the structure, but because I always seem to find something interesting there.

— KR

Kat Richardson is a former magazine editor who escaped Los Angeles in the nineties. She currently lives on a sailboat in Seattle with her husband, and a crotchety old cat and two ferrets. She rides a motorcycle, shoots target pistol, and does not own a TV. Visit her on the Web at www.katrichardson.com.