Urban Fantasy Author Faith Hunter: The Monster Complex Interview
“She goes from hating vampires to working with her worst enemy.”
In this exclusive interview, urban fantasy author Faith Hunter shares how her shapeshifting Cherokee vampire hunter Jane Yellowrock has grown over the course of the books, explains why she doesn’t write sex scenes, and reveals how she’ll know when it’s time to end the series…
New York Times bestselling author Faith Hunter has written more than 40 books in a variety of genres, including urban fantasy, thrillers and mysteries. Her Jane Yellowrock novels are part of a dark urban fantasy series starring a Cherokee who is a shape-shifter and vampire hunter for hire.
The latest novel in the Jane Yellowrock series is SHATTERED BONDS: Following a devastating battle with an ancient enemy, malevolent elements in the paranormal community still seek to destroy Jane. With nowhere to run, and her body failing, the rogue vampire hunter and her inner beast must discover a way to defeat this new threat and find a form that gives her a chance to fight another day.
In this interview, Faith shares how Jane Yellowrock has grown as a character over the past dozen plus books, explains why she doesn’t write sex scenes, and reveals how she’ll know when it’s time to end the series…
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Faith Hunter Interview Transcript
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Although you have a number of different books under separate names, I really want to focus on your Jane Yellowrock series. The most recent title is SHATTERED BONDS from last fall, right?
Yes, and we have a brand new title reveal as of today for book 14.
Wow! When does it come out?
Well, I’m not finished with it yet! I offered my editor several choices, and she came back with some other suggestions. And marketing just approved the title for book 14 - which is going to be TRUE DEAD.
OK, wow, that’s a lovely surprise that we had a reveal there.
Yeah, how about that?
And you said that’s book 14.
That is book 14, yes.
How different is Jane from when she started out in the first book?
Jane started out as sort of a paranormal biker chick-meets-Lee Childs’ Jack Reacher. She didn’t really have a place that she called home, she had a cheapo apartment she could drop into, she had very few friends, she pretty much lived on the road chasing down bad guys. Her business card said, “Have Stakes, Will Travel” - for those of you who remember the old TV show, of course, you’ve got to be really old to remember that old TV show. I think it was called “Paladin.”
But, anyway, she was this socially insecure, awkward woman who, when she was 5 years old, she accidentally did black magic and absorbed the soul of a mountain lion. So, the mountain lion soul and her soul share their shape-shifting headspace. Coming to terms with that character with her, that cat, is a part of what helps Jane to grow through the entire series.
She develops. She hates it, because she doesn’t have complete control. Beast hates her, because beast wants complete control. They’ve been fighting each other for a very, very long time. As the series progresses, part of the character development is that Jane learns to accept and appreciate and deal with her cat, her Beast, all on one level. In an acceptance level.
But she also knows that Beast keeps secrets, and that is another thing that causes conflict all through the book. You’ve got these two characters inside, so you’ve got internal conflict.
Then you’ve got the external conflict - that Jane, who kills insane vampires who are killing humans … by the time we’re in book 14, she has not only been working for the vampires to keep peace in the vampire community, because that keeps her friends safe, but she also has found a position of power among them. She goes from hating them to working with her worst enemy.
“There weren’t a lot of Cherokee language dictionaries, because the language was nearly dead.”
One of her character traits is that she is Native American. She’s of Cherokee descent. How much background or research do you bring to these stories to make that part of her character authentic?
Early on, I met an Eastern Band Cherokee elder whose father was a medicine man, and his grandfather was a medicine man. They all lived to their hundreds. And the Cherokee elder is still alive, and she’s still very active in the Eastern Band.
She wrote a number of books that were fiction, based on the old Cherokee stories. I read her books. I studied her books. I talked with her.
There weren’t a lot of Cherokee language dictionaries, because the language was nearly dead. When I started out in 2006 (I think) preparing myself to write these novels by doing research, it was very difficult to find pronunciation guides. Nothing was online that let you ask, ‘How do you say this word?’ So, a lot of it was collecting material in hard copy, and paper copy, back then. Now, I’ve got all kinds of things I can do. I can go online and search for Cherokee phrases. I’ve got a number of Cherokee dictionaries. It’s a lot easier now than it was then.
But the Cherokee mythos, the Cherokee stories, they started out as an oral tradition. When the bands were split at the Trail of Tears, the tribal people who went west to the Indian lands also met with Choctaw, Creek, a whole lot of different tribes that were gathered under the title of ‘Cherokee’ and shoved into the snow west. At that point, their oral traditions began to diverge a lot.
I have stuck with the Eastern Band traditions as much as I’m able. In terms of the skin-walker mythos, I have stuck with the pre-White Man version. Because when White Man came, everything that was magic among all the tribal peoples became ‘evil’ - they were taught that it was evil, and that their people were evil. Originally, the Cherokee skin-walkers were the leaders, they led the warriors into battle, they were the medicine men and the healers of the tribe.
It’s been a delicate balance, because so much is being taught now and made available now that I didn’t have before. It’s a lot easier now. If I had started now, it would be much easier. But I had a good time learning. I still do.
“I reveal a new paranormal character that Jane does not know about as being in existence.”
Jane Yellowrock is a shapeshifter who is a professional vampire hunter, as you were just talking about. Tell us about the world that she lives in. How closes it to the world we know, versus these are the rules that you have set up?
In an urban fantasy, you can have closed worlds - where the paranormals are hidden from humankind - and you can have open worlds. I decided to blend it. In my world - in Jane’s world - the vampires came out of the closet when Marilyn Monroe tried to turn John Kennedy the president in the Oval Office, and was staked by the Secret Service. A maid watched the whole thing, and the word went out everywhere.
At that point, people began to realize if vampires were real, then maybe the witches that they had always said had no power were real. And at that time, until the middle of the Jane series or the third or fourth book of the Jane series, that’s all the paranormal creatures that were. Except for Jane, and Jane was a solitary being. There were no other Cherokee skin-walkers. She was the only one she had ever met or heard of.
Then of course now we have the weres have come out of the closet, and there’s all different kinds of were creatures - all of them are predators. So, I am having fun releasing new characters onto the world both in the Jane Yellowrock series and in the Soulwood series, which is a spin-off. At this point, the next Soulwood book is coming out, and I reveal a new paranormal character in that book that Jane does not know about as being in existence. That will be fun as Jane discovers what Nell already knows.
“It’s been much easier on me than I think it would be had I come in in the 2020s to start writing about a world with vampires.”
In the years since you’ve started, vampire stories, vampire hunter stories just seem to proliferate more and more. How much difference does that make to how you approach writing new stories for the series?
Not at all. Not at this point. I guess if I were starting now, Jane might have been a little different because of the volume that’s out there. But Jane is established. And Jane is already so different because she has Beast’s soul in with her. They have this internal conflict and this internal dialogue that’s very cat-like and very human-like, so she’s already vastly different from all the other urban fantasy worlds that are out there.
The fact that the origination stories are so different from anything that’s out there. Each of the paranormal groups have their own origination story. And the fact that there are beings which came through a rift from another universe, that adds to it also.
My world is as unique as I could make it. I’m glad I got started when I did, because I didn’t have to worry about stepping on someone else’s toes and maybe accidentally stealing someone else’s concept – well, it wouldn’t have been ‘stealing,’ it would have been my own concept, but I might have been led the same direction as someone else accidentally. That does happen.
But fortunately I came in early enough. There weren’t as many 14 years ago as there are now. So it’s been much easier on me than I think it would be had I come in in the 2020s to start writing about a world with vampires.
“Dealing with her own guilt and coming through to the other side, that’s a big important part for me of Jane’s character development.”
As we said, this current book is thirteen. You are writing fourteen. As you get this far into a series, does that make it easier or harder to figure out the next thing? How do you keep things interesting for yourself?
First off, I have to keep it straight for the reader. Meaning, I have to keep all of this voluminous world building, character histories, straight for the reader. Keeping in absolute order.
I discovered this when Adriana came back to life twice. Jane had to kill her three times because I forgot she killed her the first time, and then I forgot she killed her the second time. And when I killed her the third time, I had to make sure this didn’t happen again. Now there was a way: There was a time shift that had already taken place, so I was able to make this work.
But I have hired a private editor, and her biggest job is to make sure that the timeline stays straight. She sees everything in hundred page segments. When I write a new book, I will leave a space and ask ‘Is this true?’ and highlight it in green. And she’ll see it. The first hundred pages might have 12 of those. And then she goes through and she’ll do an edit and she’ll make comments. ‘You need this’ and ‘you forgot this’ and ‘you have to add this,’ ‘this happened in this book,’ ‘you’ve already killed this character,’ ‘you already have four characters named Mary,’ she does that kind of world corrections for me.
And she’s been an editor in the past, so she can also do things like line editing and copy editing. The database that she has built I think is 600 pages long at this point - single spaced. It’s fun, but it’s also very time consuming. I’m really grateful to have her. I truly appreciate her organizational abilities. So, that’s the history part.
So, how I keep Jane fresh is by not screwing up and making her two inches taller, or change the color of her eyes, or do something that the reader will be pulled out of the world. To keep her fresh, I have to go back to the past all the time.
Now, to keep her fresh I have to remake her. So, Jane has come to terms - or you think she has - with her Beast. She has accepted that not all vampires are evil. She has accepted that some of the vampires she has killed may not have been what she thought they were. She has killed humans who were under the control of vampires because she had no choice.
She deals with that pain and that guilt and that fear, and yet has to accept that these things happened and she played a part in them. Dealing with her own guilt and coming through to the other side, that’s a big important part for me of Jane’s character development.
And then she had cancer. She could time walk, but the time walking is what caused the cancer. And she went away at the end of - what book was that? 12, I think - she went away to die. I mean, she truly believed that this was the end. So, that book 13 was a book of healing.
The only way to keep her fresh is to remake the character. Most writers, especially young writers, and I’ve been there - I’ve written a number of series under different names - so what we do is we keep trying to up the ante in the plot. We keep trying to make the danger to the world bigger, the danger to the character bigger, the danger builds and builds and suddenly you realize you’ve written yourself and your character into a corner and there’s no place else to go. There’s nothing bigger you can do to the universe. Or worse, that you can do to the character. You’re stuck.
But if you remake the character, instead of trying to make the conflict worse each time, then the character deals with each new conflict in a different way. That’s what’s fascinating. The character moves through.
The character might be inclined to shoot first, ask questions later. And maybe by book three, the character has learned to stop, ask a couple of questions, and decide if they need to shoot later. And then, having learned this wonderful lesson, tries it again in, say, book four and pays a price for it. Because somebody isn’t willing to answer questions, they want to kill her.
So you have all of this. As your character develops, that’s what draws your readers in and makes them stay. So, it’s gotten easier and harder to move Jane forward.
I don’t know about a book 15. I will not know about a book 15 until I reach the end of this wonderful book 14 that I’m working on that we just have a new title. And I just saw a mock-up of the artwork, and it is splendid! I love it. So, hopefully, they all agree to go with that and we’ll do a cover reveal sometime this fall. But I kind of like True Dead. I think it’s very cool.
When you say you don’t know if there’s going to be a 15, do you mean you don’t know if the ideas are gone, or whether by the time you get done with this manuscript, you’ve found a place of closure and it would kind of ruin it to keep going?
Yeah, I’m not going to keep writing books where the character can’t grow anymore, or where it’s a magic baby book, or some kind of jumping the shark. I don’t want to do that. I want to make sure that the character can make it into another book and still be interesting.
So, at the end of this book, I do have one small plot line that I have left open. And if, when I reach the end of the book, the character is still interesting and can still grow, then I have a plot line I could stick that in. As I write this book 14, I am working very hard to see in each scene what I can do with her and what character threads are still hanging open that I can build on.
“All writers should write to their strengths.”
Faith, why don’t you write sex scenes?
Well, I’m not very good at writing sex scenes. They usually come out as unwieldy. A little, um… every word I’m thinking of saying sounds like a double entendre, and I don’t mean them that way. The writing is stiff. It doesn’t flow for me. I can write sexual tension and romantic tension with the best of them. But I have learned that, for me, the sex part of the relationship is a private thing. Even for me, I don’t need to know that about my characters.
I’ve tried it a number of times. I’ve written during the course of the last… through the Soulwood and the Yellowrock books, I have tried to write sex scenes at least ten times. And I thought they were okay. And my editor said no, they were not okay. She said no, I really think you should just do the fade to black, you can do the fade to black really well, you know the foot on the floor, let it go, and let your readers use their imagination. So, I have done that and it has been successful enough.
Now, had I been able to write really good sex scenes, I would have been moved from urban fantasy into paranormal romance. And I might have been a much, much better known, financially successful writer. But all writers should write to their strengths. And sex is not one of my strengths, apparently.
“You’re doing twice as much as a writer who just writes literary fiction...”
You’ve written a lot of books under different names. What are the common denominators for your work?
When I teach writing classes—which I don’t do very often anymore, but when I do—one of the most important things I tell writers is that every character has to have at least one great strength and at least one great weakness. And the conflict, the plot, the problem has to challenge that weakness. And the character has to grow through that weakness and save the day. If the character saves the day with the strengths, it doesn’t mean anything. You just have another Superman.
But if the character has this weakness, this kryptonite, then you have a character who has to grow through something and overcome something. And it’s always better if that kryptonite is inside the character’s head as much as out there in the conflict. So, you have this internal weakness, you have this this physical or spiritual weakness, and then you have this problem or this bad guy, and this problem or bad guy challenges that horrible weakness that the character has. And then as the character grows through the book, that weakness becomes a strength.
So, whether you’re writing mystery or thrillers or medical thrillers or any kind of book, what you want is a character who grows. Who changes. Who becomes something more than when they started out. Even if they lose a lot along the way. To me, it doesn’t matter what kind of book it is - it can be a literary novel, it can be religious fiction, anything - as long as your character grows.
The interesting thing about writing the fantasy field is that not only do you have to use all of the devices and concepts that are used in ‘higher literature’ - and I will put that in quotes - you also have to keep a world-building straight and use the world-building. You’re doing twice as much as a writer who just writes literary fiction, because you’re adding in a completely different paranormal world, and that paranormal world comes with its own problems and negatives and positives. And instead of this paranormal element being a magic wand or a light switch or – flip! - everything solved, everything has a price. So the use of magic is its own un-reward. There’s always a price.
That’s why I like writing, period. It doesn’t matter what I write. But when I get to write fantasy, I get to throw in all of these amazing paranormal complications. And I end up with these multi-multi-stranded plot lines that end up all twisted and woven and stretched and pulled. I don’t know if I answered your question again but that’s what they all have in common.
On your author website, you openly say ‘these are the names that I write under, these are the kinds of books that these names are under.’ Do you find that you have readers that follow you through all of those, or are you actually writing for different people?
Yes and no. I have probably brought over to all of the different books maybe fifteen thousand readers who will read or at least attempt to read anything I write.
They may say ‘The DeLande series isn’t for me. It triggers painful things. But I’ll read everything else that Gwen Hunter writes.’
They may say, ‘I really, really miss the Rhea Lynch, MD novels, I want you to write more of those,’ those were the medical thrillers I wrote as Gwen. And then they’ll say, ‘However, I really like this Jane Yellowrock character, she’s kind of kick-ass, let’s look at Jane.’ And then they fall in love with that.
Those readers are my bread and butter. They know that when they pick up a novel written by me, no matter what kind it is, it is going to have certain specific elements in it that are character development, world building, description, and a writer’s voice that changes appropriately with each genre. They know that I am going to deliver them a story that is satisfying.
That said, some of those people don’t want to read anything but Jane Yellowrock, and will not look at the Soulwood series. And some of those people only want the new Junkyard Cats series, which is science fiction, post-apocalyptic. Post-World War 3, actually. So, I have people who only want to read that and don’t want to read the magic stuff, and that’s okay, too.
I’m going to keep writing as much as I can write for as long as I can write. Hopefully, people will give me a chance when I diverge from their favorite character.
“Find ways to tell your friends about the books that you like.”
Thinking now of all those subsets of your readers, what are the best things you think that readers can do to support their favorite authors?
Two things. Read their books from legitimate sources. If you’re going to borrow from a library, make sure it’s a library that buys its books. Your local library, even if you go there and get a free eBook, they’re paying a certain amount to the publisher for the use of those eBooks.
If you go to one of these so-called libraries that are really piracy sites, and you download a book and you read it for free, it would be like if you’re a nurse and someone tells you ‘Yeah, you have to work but we’re not paying you.’ Or if you’re a dog trainer, ‘Yeah, you have to train the dogs, but we’re not paying you. You’re supposed to do it. That’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to satisfy my desires and my desire is to have my dog sit.’
So, what they’re doing is, when readers steal, that affects my bottom line. And that determines how many books I can afford to write a year. And how many books I’m willing to write and not be paid the full amount that I’m due. So, that’s the first thing. Buy or lend from a legitimate library, or buy your books online from a legitimate place, a legitimate online site.
Second thing you can do is tell your friends about the work. Find people you can talk to. Say, ‘I have this new series! I love it! It’s fabulous! It’s kind of like, I don’t know, Jack Reacher-meets-whatever.’ Find ways to tell your friends about the books that you like. And that personal touch that a reader who loves something that a writer has written can bring to the market what nothing else will.
If you have a Facebook page, announce ‘Faith Hunter has a new book coming out! They just did a title reveal! It’s called True Dead, and I love it!’ You can do that.
You can Tweet something. Or if you go to Twitter and you see I’ve put something on Twitter - which I do very seldom - but send it out. Share it. Share it with your friends on Twitter. Share it with your friends on Facebook.
That personal touch, I can’t buy it. There’s no amount of PR that will replace my fans. They make me happen. They keep me alive. They keep me paying bills. My fans do. And I love every one of them.
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