The Crossroads Blog Tour (Day 11)

Welcome to day 11 of The Crossroads Blog Tour and today I'm featuring Karen Kincy, author of Other (July, 2010) and the upcoming sequels Bloodborn (2011) and Foxfire (2012). Check out the Goodreads description for Other here.


How did you come up with the idea for Other and how many books will there be in the series?

In a nutshell, I decided to write Other after reading one too many novels where werewolves/vampires/whatever are living right in human backyards/sewers/cities, but humans are too dumb to notice. Yeah. You would think that a few centuries of action-packed battles and ancient feuds would have clued in the nightly news. So I thought to myself, what would happen if we did know? How would our culture, laws, advertising, etc. be changed? The worldbuilding for Other proved to be addictively fun, ranging from laws about driver’s licenses (you must list paranormal heritage) to shopping (centaurs browse produce in grocery stores).

To answer your second question, Other is the first book of the series, followed in Fall 2011 by Bloodborn (a guy who hates werewolves becomes one) and 2012 by Foxfire (fox-spirits, faceless ghosts, and family secrets in Japan). Who knows, more might follow if people love the first few enough!


What can we expect from the sequel?

In Bloodborn, we meet Brock, a character from Other who hunts werewolves, gets bitten, and becomes the very thing he hated. He fights the change, afraid it will kill him, while seeking revenge and a second chance at love with a girl he dated before he became a werewolf. He doesn’t get to sit around and angst, though, because pretty soon he meets up with the pack and the police are on their tails. Brock’s hometown of Klikamuks, Washington gets left far behind as they flee across America, running into all sorts of backwater and big city Others along the way…


Are you writing anything else at the moment or have any ideas in the pipeline? Will they be paranormal in nature?

Yes, I’m currently writing an outline for a Super Secret Project set in 1955, which involves food and magic gone wrong. That’s all I’ll say!


About your writing style, are you a pantser or an outliner? What would your one bit of writing advice be?

I used to be a seat-of-the-pants writer, but that got me into a load of trouble. I meandered far from the path and got lost in the plotless wilds of several novels. I once mapped out a new path in Other by writing every single scene on an index card, ended up with over one hundred, and spread the different subplots on my bed to make sense of them. With Bloodborn and Foxfire, the synopsis came first.

My advice: even if you don’t like synopses, write the blurb first. Just a few tantalizing paragraphs that capture the essence of your premise—and what makes it marketable. Not something that would make you pick up a book in a bookstore? Redo it, and get it right before you write hundreds of pages.


What’s your favourite thing about Halloween?

Spookiness! On a perfect Halloween, a pumpkin-orange full moon rises from the fog lurking over dark fields where wary walkers keep their eyes on the shadows…


Favourite scary movie?

I don’t really watch scary movies, but I do have to say The Exorcist sufficiently creeps me out. Oh, and The Ring! Where the dead girl crawls out the TV… shudder. Broke the fourth wall between the movie and the viewers enough to make me crawl over my couch in an attempt to get away.


If you could be any supernatural creature, what would you be and why?

I’ve been asked this question so many times now… but currently I’m leaning toward dragons, just because you get to be huge and scaly, breathe fire, and swoop around. This may be because I’m now reading Firelight by Sophie Jordan, and I also adore Dragon’s Bait by Vivian Vande Velde, with its amethyst-eyed dragon shapeshifter Selendrile, who’s also very sexy.


Thank you to Karen for answering all of my questions! To find out more about Karen and her books, you can visit her website here. She is also active on Facebook and Twitter. Don't forget to comment and you will be entered to win a swag pack from The Crossroads Tour!

Each day of The Crossroads Tour, a new question will be revealed on The Crossroad Blog Tour main page and each day the answer to that question will be found within one of the 16 different blog posts by Crossroads Tour authors. Your job is to get the question, read the blog posts, and collect all 16 answers by the end of the tour, on Halloween. Click here to get today's question and links.