Summer of Discovery: Unending passion
Carole Nelson Douglas ditched a newspaper career to become a full-time fiction writer about fifty novels ago.
Talk about double trifectas so far this year: a Career Achievement Award in Mystery from RT Book Reviews in L.A., and Guest of Honor slots at Malice Domestic mystery convention in D.C. and at CONduit science fiction/fantasy convention in Salt Lake City. Cat in a Vegas Gold Vendetta, the 23rd Midnight Louie feline PI mystery, comes out August 2. Late November welcomes the fifth Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator urban fantasy, Virtual Virgin. And Delilah has a novella, "Monster Mash," in this summer's Chicks Kick Butts anthology.
Carole's titles have appeared on national fantasy, romance and mystery bestseller lists and have won many writing awards. The secret to her long, genre-blending career, she says, is passion and compassion.
Take it away, Carole!
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People often ask how I've kept a writing career going for so long through so many genres. I didn't have a clue myself until I heard the great American fantasist, Ray Bradbury, speak. I'd written twenty novels by then, but had never analyzed what had driven me to write and keep writing. Bradbury said his secret was he'd never outgrown the subjects that fascinated him as a child: Mars, books, dinosaurs, carnivals.
So what was I passionate about as a young child? Books, yes, and cats, writing and putting on plays, begging hand-me-down clothes for dress up, cats, drawing and making up poems, old movies on TV, the young wife next door's awesome high heels, Hopalong Cassidy's voice on TV, and cats.
My kid lit was Little Women (women's issues), Sherlock Holmes stories (historical mystery), and the T. S. Eliot poems that became the musical CATS (feline PI). I loved Edgar Allen Poe at an alarmingly early age (horror, mystery and suspense), and adored Tolkien's Lord of the Rings later in college (high fantasy, urban fantasy and world-building on a grand scale).
No wonder Cat in a Vegas Gold Vendetta is the 23rd book of my
Midnight Louie feline PI series. It's Remington Steele with a romantic quadrangle and a Sam Spade cat. Temple Barr, Louie's partner, is a gutsy and clever vintage clothing fan. Vegas Gold Vendetta's murder mystery involves a dying cat collector and greedy relatives, but also addresses the series' underlying serious issues: domestic and institutional abuse and ethic hatred. Passion and compassion.
The compassion had kicked into gear when I was in college and writing my first novel, a Gothic romantic suspense with a female protagonist who did not need to be rescued. I overheard an English couple denigrating the Irish, right in front of the libeled hotel employees. At that moment, my heroine became half-Irish, half-English and my novel gained a social/political issue and a depth of plot and character growth that allowed it to sell to New York even after the Gothic novel craze had died forever.
Twenty-five years later, the year I heard Ray Bradbury speak, because of my annoyance with wimpy women in books, I became the first author to take a woman from the Sherlock Holmes stories as a series protagonist–Irene Adler, the American opera singer and only woman to outwit him. Good Night, Mr. Holmes became a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. (the arts, women's issues, historical dress, mystery and suspense). In fact, I signed a copy and gave it to Bradbury in return for his signed copy of Fahrenheit 451. Talk about a fangirl moment!
Before then, my post-college reporting career focused on . . . you got it, women's issues and the arts of writing, theater, acting, costuming. And I wrote a feature story on a remarkable survivor, a stray black alley cat they called "Midnight Louie." All that reporting drove my fiction writing even more. After the Gothic, I wrote a female swashbuckler historical romance. I wrote bestselling high fantasy. Now, years later, I write bestselling urban fantasy with the Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator series, which earned two Publisher's Weekly starred reviews.
Delilah Street's name comes from where she was found as an abandoned infant, so collecting and wearing vintage clothing from other people's family history fills an orphan's void. She rescues a . . . dog, an Irish wolfhound-wolf cross who becomes the K-9 in their investigative partnership. She's pals with Cinema Simulacrums (CinSims) like Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles, black-and-white film noir characters overlaid on zombies to become living, 3-D attractions at Las Vegas 2013 hotels like the Inferno. And in Virtual Virgin, Delilah and her ex-FBI dead-dowsing love, Ric Montoya, go to Mexico to take down the demon drug lords responsible for the deaths of the hundreds of women in Juarez. (horror, women's issues, animal companion, film noir) Passion and compassion.
In the Chicks Kick Butt story, "Monster Mash," the head 
werewolf mobster hires Delilah to evict an unwanted opera-singing CinSim from his hotel. The cheapo has hired Lon Chaney, "man of a thousand faces," as a house CinSim because he'll morph into his many roles, the Phantom of the Opera, a vampire, and Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame. To solve the haunting, Delilah must duel serial CinSim monsters, but she ends the haunting by uncovering and resolving a horrific Chaney family feud involving Chaney, his wife and their son, who created the Wolf Man role, and who wasn't really Lon Chaney, Jr. Again, passion and compassion.
Even as I morphed with the publishing industry to try new genres, my lifelong passions took new shapes and showed up to drive new characters and plotlines, never abandoning me or my imagination, because they were the things I did and still do care about, passionately.
Jiminy Cricket advised Pinocchio to "Let your conscience be your guide," but I've always offered newer writers a variation on that: Let your subconscious be your guide. That will ensure you draw on your deeply buried childhood passions and they will never lead you wrong.
I've also realized that, for me, like Pinocchio, conscience must also be my guide. I want my writing and characters and plots to be intriguing, adventuresome, and romantic and fun, but with an underpinning of psychological realism and character growth. That means I must look the evils of my world in the face as well as portray the hopes we all have.
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Thanks, Carole!!
