Kater Cheek's Blog - Posts Tagged "fantasy"

I've had all kinds of strategies in mind for how to make it as a writer, based on stuff I've been told to do by other writers, marketers, agents. You have to have a web presence, they say. You have to build a blog following. You have to make a name for yourself as a writer or you won't sell. This has been my goal since I first started writing: get my novels published and read.

I've done a lot of things that feel very "writerly" to me, things that are meant to help my writing career. Here are some examples.

Blogging: like this one. Also livejournal (which I just deleted), and to some extent my chicken comic was meant to increase my web presence. Increased web presence leads to increased name recognition leads to increased readership, the common wisdom goes. I'm not sure how true that is. I still write on this blog, because this blog is mostly about books, and I like books, and people who like books should come here and read my stuff. So that makes kind of sense. But I'd rather talk about other people's books than my own. I want you guys to talk about my books, after you read them.

Tweeting and facebooking: Similar to blogging. You have to know how to use social media, they say, they mostly being people who just found out about twitter last week. I still tweet, but I'm not frenetic about it. And I still post on facebook, but not to increase my social network platform, just to say something witty or tell people about my blog.

Writing and submitting short stories: As silly as it is, I once had the follwing train of thought--I need an agent. To find out who I should have as an agent, I should find out who the agents are of people who write like me. This is not public knowledge, but if you're a member of SFWA, you can get this information. You can't be a member of SFWA without sufficient publications. It's easier to get short stories published than novels. I'll learn to write short stories so I can get enough publications so I can become a SFWA member so I can find out which agents I need to submit to so I can get an agent so I can sell my novels.

Silly, I know, but it's better to have a silly plan than no plan at all. And it wasn't completely useless. By learning to write short stories, I got into Clarion, which was an amazing and wonderful experience that I never regret. I also got into some nice anthologies, which is a good experience, and I met some really cool editors. But there isn't as much of a connection between people who read short stories and people who publish novels as I would like. I no longer believe that even writing a brilliant, award-winning short story will help me sell novels.

Going to conventions: Okay, I'm still going to do this. I don't really think it's all that helpful to my goal in bold up there, but they're fun and I meet cool people and I get to travel.

Marketing myself: By this I mean handing out merch and promoting myself, shilling the Kater Cheek name like a hungry and crass real estate agent. Okay, so I have a signature on my email that tells people about my blog. And I have some business cards with my book cover on it that I hand out. But I'm not going to invest thousands of dollars in fliers and what not to give to people, like strip club ads at Vegas. I just don't believe it will be fruitful. Also, yuck.

I have given up this stuff for two main reasons. One, I don't have time anymore now that I'm working full-time instead of being a homemaker. Two, I'm not sure it works.

So here's what I'm doing instead. Are you listening?

Writing the next book.
Yeah. That's pretty much it. Writing, and of course reading (and listening to) books, because I can't not read books. I'm working just about every day on the next book in the Seabingen series. When I'm done with that, I'm going to get the fifth book polished up, which may or may not require a complete rewrite (I hope not) and then I'll do the same for the other books in the series. I plan to have at minimum, a book a year published, and I'm going to shoot for one every six months until they're all out there. I want people to read my books. I want people to enjoy my books. I want people to love them as much as I do. I want to be so popular that hipsters make fun of people who like my stuff, until the backlash comes and they get to enjoy my books ironically.

I'm making good progress on the novel. (Working title: Faerie Killer). I'm about 70,000 words into it, and I think it will be 80,000-90,000 when it's done, so I estimate that it will be ready to go by May. I work on it just about every day, even if I only have a few minutes, and I work on it for several hours on the weekends. I had to pare down, you see, when I realized I no longer had time to fritter away. I had to do what was the most important. Writing the next book.

And to be honest, all that other stuff is boring.

ALTERNATE SUSAN the first book in a new urban fantasy series was born yesterday on Createspace and Kindle. Smashwords version coming soon.

This book takes place in an alternate version of Tempe, Arizona. I wrote it in part because I wanted an urban fantasy that had no vampires, no werewolves, no fallen angels, no Irish fairies, and did I mention no vampires? It's fast paced and has a lot of family drama, with my own special sense of humor intermixed throughout.

Please go and check it out.

https://www.createspace.com/4177391

Feminist Mage: Kater Cheek discusses Hawthorn Hex

Kater Cheek is the author of seven novels, dozens of short stories, hundreds of book reviews, and a comic book about chickens. She’s just come out with Hawthorn Hex, the sixth book in the Kit Melbourne series. We talk to her about childcare, feminism, refugees, and how they relate to urban fantasy.

This is the sixth book in what is proving to be an enduring series. How has Kit changed as a character since Seeing Things?

Kit has come a long way since the first book. When she started out the series, she had a typical young person’s problems: how to make the rent, how to find love. Now that she’s started a family, she has to balance taking care of her daughter with her work for the Vampire Guild. It’s a struggle that a lot of people go through that’s not well represented in fiction, especially not in contemporary fantasy.

Why do you think it’s underrepresented?

Partly I think it’s because it’s inconvenient. For example, in high fantasy you have this problem with horses that are basically cars that Diana Wynne Jones mocked so beautifully in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland back in 2006. Fantasy horses don’t need to eat, they don’t need to rest. They just take the heroes from place to place, a prop that gives the book that high-fantasy feel, like cloaks and castles.
I’ve seen that in other novels, where the heroine has a baby but it’s merely used as a prop. It’s disingenuous, because raising a baby is hard work, and to pretend that it isn’t is disrespectful to the people who have done it, who are doing it. It requires a lot of time and a lot of skill that has to be learned.

Tessali and Kit have a complicated relationship in this book. Kit seems to seems to feel guilty about how much she needs Tessali, and yet she resents her as well. Do you think readers will respond to this? Most readers don’t have a full-time faerie nanny.

The struggle of how to raise children or not raise children is one I think that all women deal with. Even women who don’t have children (maybe especially women who don’t have children) have thought about how much weight is placed on every decision. No matter what you decide, society will judge you harshly.

My female friends and I joke a lot about how much we’d like to have a wife. Anyone who’s read the series will know there’s a lot of parallel between the karla/spira bond and a traditional marriage. In the Vargel society, the Indel have been conditioned since birth that bonding, becoming a submissive helpmeet to a Vargel, is the highest role they can attain. As in real life, it doesn’t always work perfectly even if both people think that’s what they want.

Kit feels conflicted about having Tessali do this for her, because our society still tells women that their natural place is as a caregiver. And Fenwick has a problem with it too, because he wants to be at home with the kids, but as a man, he’s been taught that it’s his job to earn the money. So they’re all struggling with the conflict between what they want and what they think they’re supposed to want.

Would you say that this is a feminist book?

Oh, yes. I would say anything I write is feminist. I feel very sad when I hear women say a woman’s proper place is to be under the authority of a man. Women who claim that a woman should not have her own authority and autonomy remind me of victims with the Stockholm syndrome.

Being a homemaker was the right decision for me and my family, but I’m extremely aware of the risk, the sacrifice, and of the pressure it puts on a relationship to have one person financially dependent on the other. In a way, writing this book was like an exploration of what the other side of the coin is like.

For me, feminism is not just about deciding whether a woman should have kids and whether she should stay home to raise them. That’s a loaded question, designed to set women against other women. Feminism should be about women helping each other. That’s a strong theme of this book, women trying to help other women, and about how far you can go to help another person without endangering yourself.

In the novel, the Vampire Guild has to make decisions about how many vampire refugees to take in. Did you mean to draw parallels with the situation in Syria when you wrote this?

Not at all. When I first wrote the sixth book in the Kit Melbourne series, it was a very different story. it was called Familiar Battles, and it was about a rather sympathetic witch named Barbara who had an incurable degenerative disease. She had an opportunity to live disease-free forever if she was willing to kill an innocent woman. Kit was a background character in that version. In trying to incorporate her as a main character, I had to abandon the plot and start over from scratch.

When I rewrote the novel, I knew I wanted to focus on Kit and Tessali’s relationship, and on Kit’s career as Dayrunner. I also wanted to flesh out her development as a mage. The plot needed a pressing reason why she had to finish the ward in a short amount of time. I’ve already written later books in this series, so I kind of know where I want the story to go. I had written in Adamiak’s background story that he had been living in Toronto when an internecine vampire conflict caused a lot of vampires to flee to other Guilds. I decided to use that backstory here.

This book took me over a year to write, and when I started it, I knew nothing about the Syrian refugees. In Hawthorn Hex, the vampire refugee situation is made more complicated in that if a city gets too top-heavy, that is, too many vampires per humans, it can endanger everyone in the city. It’s a heavy question. Who do you allow to come into your safe space? How do you balance the desire to help others with the need to keep your own group safe?

What’s next after this?

I’m currently working on an omnibus of the first three Kit Melbourne novels. Its title will be Bindi Magic, and I’m working with a cover artist to give it a fresh look. My next standalone novel will be Parasitic Souls. It’s an emerging adult contemporary fantasy novel about what happens when people develop the technology of transferring a soul into another person’s body.

As for Susan Stillwater, the third book in the Desert Mages series, The Heat Stealer, won’t come out until 2017 at the earliest. I’m pretty busy with work and kids, and I only do one project at a time, so it can take a lot longer than I’d like.

Kit would understand!

Hawthorn Hex is available as an ebook through most formats or paperback through libraries or retailers. For more information on her other books, visit: http://www.catherinecheek.com/fiction-2/

I have two new books coming out this summer that I'm very excited about. The first new book is the second Kit Melbourne omnibus, titled DAYRUNNER MAGIC. It contains books 4-6 of the Kit Melbourne series. I'm going to release an ebook version too, so if you wanted a cheap way to get the whole series, getting BINDI MAGIC and DAYRUNNER MAGIC together wouldn't be a bad bet.

The second book is a standalone young adult fantasy called PARASITIC SOULS. It's currently in the final editing stages, and should be released by August. This is a great novel about young people living in a small town in California wine country. It has some dark twists, magic, and romance. Because it doesn't have sex or violence (a few swear words) it's a PG book that's suitable for even the children of protective parents.

Kater

I have a new book out this week called THE HEAT STEALER. It's so new that as I write this, it's not yet showing up in the goodreads listing. This is the third and perhaps final in the Desert Mages (Susan Stillwater) series.

2017 was a tumultuous year for me (cross-country move) and I have to say I hardly wrote any new fiction at all, preferring instead to channel my creative energies into honing my watercolor and ink skill to do the illustrations and cover art for ANIMAL MAGIC. 2018 wasn't much better, as I moved yet again and had a bit of an existential crisis about whether it was even worth it to keep publishing these books.

One thing that made a difference is a comment someone made, a message someone sent me here on goodreads. It was a simple offhand comment like "when are you going to publish that book I want to read?" I can't find it. I wanted to thank her for sending it. Because sometimes I write and I don't know who is reading. So to have a stranger ask about it made me feel that maybe there were readers out there I didn't know about who cared. And that one reader, that person I didn't know, became my reason for picking it up again. So, if I don't find you, mystery reader, I want to say thanks.

Kater