Author Interview: Kelly Meding
Six months later, at Farpoint, I co-hosted a panel on the paranormal with Kelly and another veteran author, Ann C. Crispin. It was a lot of fun and I enjoyed the company of my fellow panelists and the energetic audience.
With just a few days before the debut of the third novel in Kelly's Dreg City Series, I'm honored to have her on my blog!
1. First, let us know where we can find you online such as blogs, websites, Facebook, etc.
My website is www.kellymeding.com, which links back to my blog Organized Chaos. I am also on Facebook and Twitter.
And I post on a group blog called The League of Reluctant Adults, along with a fun and eclectic group of fellow paranormal and fantasy authors.
2.
What inspired you to write fiction, specifically urban fantasy?
I don't know if I can still pinpoint why I started writing fiction. For a long while, as a child, I didn't realize that real people wrote the books I was reading. I don't remember where I thought books came from (no, I do, they came from the bookstore, duh!). Then it clicked for that there were these people called Authors who wrote Books and it was their Job. I thought it was awesome. I also thought that, because being an Author was a Job, that only grownups could do it.
Fortunately, by junior high, I figured out that anyone could write a story. I'd been making up stories in my head since I was a small child playing with my dolls (I used to organize very specific He-Man/She-Ra playground stories for me and my friends). I finally understood that even though I wasn't an Author, I could still write down some of my stories. So I did. I wasn't very good when I started out, and it took a lot of work and practice to find my own style and voice, but I'm very grateful to be able to do this.
Urban fantasy felt like the perfect fit. I grew up watching horror, science fiction and fantasy on television and in the movies, and I loved reading RL Stine and Christopher Pike. I've always loved monsters and mystery and fantastic settings. And just like Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, urban fantasy gave me strong heroines that I could look up to and cheer for. It's an ever-expanding genre, and there are still so many mythologies and monsters ripe for the taking.
3. If you don’t mind, please tell us about the first story you completed, published or not.
Oh boy. Well, the first story I completed was at the end of the seventh grade. I wrote it long-hand in one of those black-and-white marbleized notebooks. It was pretty awful, even though I barely remember it. It was heavily inspired by the original "Beverly Hills, 90210" as well as years of reading Sweet Valley High. I gave it to my then-best friend to read. Unfortunately (or fortunately), we had a very serious fight (as serious as junior high fights can actually be) while she was still in possession of it, and in a fit of anger she ripped it up and flushed it. At the time, I was devastated. Now I just think about it and laugh.
4. Your debut UF novel, Three Days to Dead (Dell, November 2009), is the opening tale in your Dreg City series which continued in As Lie the Dead (July 2010). What inspired the story and characters?
Dreg City came from a lot of different places. It mostly spawned from my desire to write something that was purely Urban Fantasy (I'd written other speculative work at the time, but no UF) in every sense—the ass-kicking female protagonist, first-person POV, original world-building full of fantastical creatures. I knew I wanted to have a melting pot of paranormal creatures by putting the familiar (vampires, shape-shifters) alongside the less common (gremlins, gargoyles, goblins). I then decided to have it be a closed-world, which meant the general population wasn't aware of the supernatural creatures living in the city with them, but those creatures still needed to be kept in check. Hence, the Triads were born.
My heroine, Evangeline Stone, developed as I developed the Triads. I needed to understand what kind of person would, at eighteen, be recruited into an organization that trained them to police, hunt, and kill paranormal creatures. What kind of person would be okay with going into that kind of lifestyle? Several of the other Triad Hunter characters developed in a similar way.
Another thing I wanted to do with the series was to write it on the cusp of going from closed-world to open-world. So many UF series are already established as one or the other, but I was curious as to how things might progress as it became impossible to hide the truth. And over the course of the four books I've written so far, we're getting closer and closer to an eventual "coming out." I don't know for certain how or if things will shift, but I like having that possible avenue open to explore.
Can you give us a blurb on the third installment, Another Kind of Dead,
premiering August 2, 2011?
Evy Stone is a former Dreg Bounty Hunter who died and came back to life with some extraordinary powers. Now, all but five people in the world think she is dead again, this time for good: immolated in a factory fire set specifically for her. Evy and her partner Wyatt can no longer trust their former allies, or even the highest echelons of the Triads—the army of fighters holding back a tide of quarreling, other-worldly creatures from an unsuspecting public.
Teammates, friends and lovers, Evy and Wyatt can only trust each other. Because when the Triads raided a macabre, monster-filled lab of science experiments and hauled away the remnants, they failed to capture their creator. He is a brilliant, vampire-obsessed scientist with a wealth of powerful, anti-Dreg weaponry to trade for what he desires most of all-- Evy Stone: alive and well, and the key to his ultimate experiment in mad science.
Will the series continue beyond book three?
Yes. Book four, Wrong Side of Dead, is scheduled to release March 2012. As of writing this, I'm not contracted for more, but that could change at any time, and I already have a partial outline of book five. Ideally, I'd like to write a few more to bring Evy's story to a proper close, as well as tie up the major world-related arcs.
5. Along with NYT Bestselling author Lara Adrian, you contributed to the novella, A Glimpse of Darkness (Del Rey, December 2010). Other contributors included Harry Connolly, Stacia Kane, and Lucy A. Snyder. The book is available in Kindle format on Amazon.
Can you give us a story synopsis?
Munira bint Azhar, the half-human daughter of a djinn, is a skilled Retriever in the city of Port Nightfall. Now the powerful sorcerer Temesis has given Munira a dire ultimatum: steal a magical lantern—the Light of Ta’lab—from the horrific undead kingdom below the city, or watch her father die at Temesis’s hand. Will she be able to retrieve the lantern and save her father’s life, or will they both perish in the process?
How did the collaboration come about?
The collaboration was the brainchild of Del Rey/Spectra editors David Pomerico and Mike Braff. David presented the idea of a joint, choose-your-own-adventure story in email, and once we authors agreed to the project, he set up a private Google Group for us. We brainstormed ideas on setting, world-building, and the characters. Djinn mythology is relatively unexplored in much of UF, so it was something we all agreed to utilize. Once we had the characters, we set up a very basic story progression and assigned chapters. Each chapter ended with a cliffhanger and readers could vote on what the characters did next. It was great fun reading each person's chapter, then seeing which choice the reading audience vote on the polls. I really enjoyed myself, and it's definitely something I'd like to do again.
6. During the Writers Workshop at Shore Leave 32, you mentioned a few superhero projects on the horizon. Are you able to provide any details?
Yes! The first book in my new series with Pocket, TRANCE, releases 10/25/11. It's an original superhero concept, in which battling heroes and villains had brought the world to the brink of total disaster. Villains were in line to win, the heroes were all but wiped out, and then everyone lost their powers. The powerless villains were locked away, while the powerless heroes (all children between ages fifteen and ten) were shuffled off to various foster homes. Fifteen years later, everyone's powers mysteriously return, and the adult heroes must find each other and join forces before a vengeful villain murders them all.
The sequel, tentatively titled CHANGELING, will follow sometime in 2012.
7. What does Kelly Meding do when she isn’t writing?
When I'm not writing, I can be found with my nose in a book. I've been a big reader my entire life, and it's one of my favorite ways to unwind and relax. I also like to make jewelry when the mood hits. I love to book and bake, so I might spend an evening experimenting in the kitchen (so far, I have never poisoned someone). My family is also pretty close by, so I get to spend a lot of time with them, especially my adorable niece.
Farpoint convention: www.farpointcon.com
Shore Leave convention: www.shore-leave.com
