T. Kingfisher

T. Kingfisher is the New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award–winning author of fantasy, horror, and occasional oddities, including What Feasts at Night, Nettle & Bone, What Moves the Dead, Thornhedge, A House with Good Bones, and A Sorceress Comes to Call. Under a pen name, she also writes bestselling children’s books. She lives in New Mexico with her husband, dog, and chickens, and does not trust roadrunners.

Kingfisher's new novel is Snake-Eater.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Snake-Eater describes a predator, and furthermore, a predator that feeds on animals many people find alarming. Hopefully the reader will go “Wow, badass!” and want to see what got that name and why. This is the story of a woman who comes to a small desert town, fleeing an abusive relationship, and finds that the desert is full of beings, and that the one called Snake-Eater has an eye on her in particular.

What's in a name?

As much as I’d like to claim that I have a very deep and meaningful process, the truth is that coming up with names in novels, particularly after you’ve written a dozen or so, gets harder and harder. I eventually devolve into looking at baby name lists and going “No, no, no…could work…no, no…hey, I like that one!” For minor characters, I have been known to use the Latin names of plants. Sometimes it’ll end up being a placeholder until I think of a better one, but there’s a narrow window in which I can change character names. After a point, that’s just their name in my head and that’s the way it is. The only hard and fast rule I try to follow is not to have two major characters whose names that start with the same letter, since that’s just visually confusing for the reader.

In the case of Snake-Eater, the only standout is that Father Aguirre, the Catholic priest, is named after my fourth-grade teacher, who was a very kind and patient man and didn’t ever yell at me for reading ahead when we had to read aloud in class.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

My teenage self made a point to be blasé about everything, so I suspect she’d at least try to play it cool. The setting of the Arizona desert wouldn’t surprise her at all, nor would many of the individual spirits. And I had a black Lab growing up, so that wouldn’t be surprising either.

Hmm, actually at fourteen, I had the boundless confidence of the untried that I could write books, so she’d probably just go, “Yeah, yeah, obviously we wrote a book. Now explain this smartphone thing to me. And do they still make Amiga computers?”

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

The beginning almost never changes—I can think of maybe one or two books where I changed the opening scene. Things do get edited, mind you. I wrote the first part of Snake-Eater over a decade ago, and when I came back to it, I found myself editing as I went along. At times, it started to feel like a collaboration with my younger self.

I always start at the beginning, but unlike Alice, I don’t go straight on until the end. I am not an outliner at all, and I tend to write very much out of sequence. If I know a scene happens over here, I write it, and if I don’t know what happens in a scene, I’ll just skip it until later, when I do know. So the book, for quite a long time, is just a word .doc full of disconnected bits, and sometimes the word “gap” to denote that something ought to be there, but I’m not sure what yet. Then I’ll go back and write the connective tissue required to get from this scene to that one.

I don’t write the ending until the end, though. Once it’s done in my head, so is the book.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Any character whose head I want to get into has to have some connection to me, even if it’s a very small one. In the case of Selena, I did in fact work in a deli. But mostly I was trying to tap into experiences I’ve had at very low points in my life and the sense of being completely unable to go on but having to anyway. I certainly got better, and I wanted Selena to get better and find herself too.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Practically everything influences my writing in some fashion—I’m like a weird sponge who grew up Catholic. In the case of Snake-Eater, I was influenced a lot by the landscape of Arizona. I spent four years there as a kid, during that critical window when you imprint on what the world is supposed to look like, and I’ve loved the desert ever since. (I live in New Mexico now.) The enormous skies, the way the shrubs all grow almost-but-not-touching, all the plants and animals that live in this incredibly harsh environment…all of it helped shape the book.

Also, there was a moment a few years back when my husband and I were in Albuquerque, in a little jewelry shop with glass doors, and a roadrunner came up to the door and began tapping on the glass with its beak. (They have quite large and pointed beaks.) My husband staggered back and said, “Is that a roadrunner?” He’d never seen one and was astonished by how they looked in person. They’re basically velociraptors. If you ask anyone in the Southwest about them, they will almost all have a story about some horrible thing they saw a roadrunner do. So that definitely went into the book as well!

Visit T. Kingfisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue