The Unsorted BBS Collection/thegreatunsorted.tar/thegreatunsorted/texts/txtfiles_misc/vamp17.faq

Text File | 1995-03-26 | 16KB | 367 lines

Interview with Nancy Kilpatrick


Date:    Mon, 24 Oct 1994 21:32:58 EDT
From:    Cathy Krusberg <[e-mail]>
Subject: Nancy Kilpatrick Interview


This is a slightly updated version of an interview that
appears in _The Vampire's Crypt_ #10 (Fall 1994).  My
questions are in all caps as a substitute for boldface, not
because I was shouting.  ;-)

Note: Catherine B. Krusberg is the name that the Mad
Bibliographer's Mundane Half uses when writing for
paper publication.

            Interview with Nancy Kilpatrick
                          by
                 Catherine B. Krusberg


     Nancy Kilpatrick has published 60 short stories and
     (under a pseudonym) two erotic horror novels.  A
     long-standing aficionado of the undead, she possesses
     one of the world's largest collections of vampire-
     related materials.  Pocket Books has recently released
     her vampire novel _Near Death_.  _Near Death_
     focuses on a vampire named David and his very unusual
     relationship with a human woman, Zero.

     Ms. Kilpatrick is also the author of a chapbook,
     _Sex & the Single Vampire_, available from Tal
     Publications.  Information on how to order from Tal
     is at the end of part 2 of this interview.

WHEN AND HOW DID YOU START ON A CAREER AS A WRITER?

My "career" seriously began about 1972, when I was on staff
at what we then called an "underground" newspaper in
Montreal -- a kind of early _Rolling Stone_.  I was the
entertainment columnist.  I'd always written and had a few
pieces published with other underground papers, but that was
the first time I got involved in a major way.

When I was a kid I wrote essays and stream-of-consciousness
pieces.  I was the kind of annoying youth who almost never
studied but usually got A and B grades just by winging it.
I was always good at composition and could write off the top
of my head on any subject, even when I didn't know what the
hell I was talking about.

As to fiction, I had a couple of stories published in the
seventies.  They were literary in nature.  In 1975 I
spontaneously wrote a vampire novel.  Sounds like
spontaneous combustion, and it was, kind of.  I'd saved
enough money so that I could take a year off -- you could
still do things like that then.  Anyway, I lived in a little
cottage-like house in downtown Toronto with two other women.
I wrote that novel in nine months, on a typewriter,
including rewrites.  Basically I wrote, slept, ate, wrote,
slept, ate....  One woman moved out.  A guy moved in.  He
moved out.  The woman moved back in.  The other woman went
to Mexico for several  months and returned.  I wasn't aware
of any of it and learned much of all this later.  I was
thoroughly caught up in the experience of writing on a
24-hour-a-day basis.  At the time I smoked cigarettes and
drank coffee and lived on those things.  I'm not even sure I
did any laundry during that nine month pregnancy.  It was
wonderful, ecstatic, heady stuff.  I'd never do it again.
Now it would probably kill me.  But then, it was a
magnificent way to exist.

WHAT HAVE BEEN THE MAJOR INFLUENCES ON YOUR WORK?

I was a lonely kid, as many writers were.  An only child in
a very dysfunctional family.  I played a lot of imaginative
games, with very little input from the outside.
Consequently, I've never asked myself that tormented
question:  Do I exist?  I always knew *I* existed.  It's
everybody else I wondered about.  [grin]

Being of a fanciful nature, I loved movies and I loved
books.  The first book I took out of the library was called
 _The Little Witch_, so I guess I was destined to write
horror.  _The Catcher in the Rye_ (or "Wry" as I used to
think of it) was one of the first books that knocked my
socks off.  I ended up reading everything by and about
Salinger.  Whenever I found an author I liked, I'd immerse
myself.  For instance, I read all of Kafka, including
letters he wrote to his girlfriend and his father, essays,
etc.  I went through phases: I read Russian Lit. for a
couple of years solid; I was hot for the existentialists for
a while.  Naturally, when I began reading vampire books, I
was obsessive.  I have one of the largest collections in the
world -- close to 1,200 books -- plus posters, lobby cards,
and two trunks loaded with vampirabilia.

Spiritual transformation and working with archetypal
energies has always been the major focus of my life, even
before I knew those terms and could identify what I was
doing.  Vampires fit in nicely, don't you think?

HOW DO VAMPIRES FIT INTO THESE IDEAS FOR YOU?

Vampires are one of the major archetypal images -- they've
appeared in all cultures since the earliest recorded works.
Human beings needed to identify this energy.  All archetypes
have two sides, positive and negative, and both are crucial.
Some have said the positive side of the Devil is God and
vice versa.

For many people who have a great deal of trouble with
organized religion, the vampire takes on a special
significance.  Organized religion, in my opinion, has served
humanity well and poorly.  We humans seem to need images to
focus on.  But concretizing them, the way many religions
have done, misses the point.  These images are metaphors,
and to make them concrete is like trying to hammer the air
into a box -- you just can't do it  if you want to stay
sane.  We're talking paradox here; some things are
mysterious and should stay that way.

The vampire is an image that has stayed mysterious despite
all the Grade Z Hollywood movies.  It is an extremely
powerful archetype and has an amazing capacity for
transformation, so you get both sides.  That's clearly in
the vampire's nature.  He/she has transformed, and can help
others transform.  To transform, you have to go from there
to here, or here to there.  I think the vampire is a kind of
Grail, what's missing in Western religion.  If we were in
India, we'd have Kali, but here we only have the Devil, and
he/she is one side of a coin.  In India, Kali holds the
opposites.  It's the paradox we in the West don't know about
and have a hard time living with.

WHAT GOT YOU STARTED WRITING ABOUT VAMPIRES?

I'd watched vampire movies as a kid -- Bela Lugosi, Gloria
Holden, etc., on the late show.  But it wasn't until I saw
Christopher Lee in _Horror of Dracula_ when I'd just hit
puberty that I really got hooked.  I'd already loved horror
movies more than any other type of movie, so it was just a
question of zeroing in on a particular sub-genre that
resonated.

I went with my cousin Barbara to see _Horror of Dracula_,
which in itself was a big deal.  She was older, a sexy,
outrageous teenager, always getting into trouble for her
wild life.  I think that contributed to the event.  Lee was
fabulous.  Tall, dark and gruesome, as his autobiography
says.  I went back to see that movie seven times.  After
that, I couldn't get enough vampire movies, comics, etc.

WHAT LED YOU TO WRITE _NEAR DEATH_?

 _Near Death_ is the third vampire book I wrote (completed
in 1988).  There are three vampire friends: David, Andre,
and Karl.  I wanted to write about each of them, and each is
extremely different from the others.  The thing about these
three vampire males is that they are fairly recent vampires
 -- in the one hundred year range.  None of them go back
centuries, although the first book I wrote is about a
vampire from the 1500s in France.  But David, Andre, and
Karl are departures from the conventional vampire who is
centuries old, and the more modern versions, who were
created yesterday.

David appealed to me because of his poetic nature.  I've
always loved the romantic poets, Byron in particular -- his
life was so outrageous and intriguing.  He was such a bad
boy, a fly boy (as we'd say now -- couldn't keep his feet on
the ground).  I wanted to write about a kind of tortured
poet vampire.  I'm interested in psychology; in the last ten
years, Jungian psychology.  The notion that people have a
dark side (what the Jungians call "the shadow") that they
don't know about is  fascinating.  The vampire usually is
seen as a metaphor for the dark side of humans: our greed,
lust, obsession, predatory natures, desire for eternal life,
the tragic quality of being boxed in by fate, etc.  In our
let's-put-everything-out-in-the-light society, the dark
becomes fascinating and affirms that life is a mystery, not
just cut-and-dried commerce.  There are things we don't know
and may never know.  What fascinated me was the idea of
creating a vampire character who is all of those things, but
too soft, mushy even, who has to get in touch with *his*
dark side.

The dark side, by the way, isn't always bad stuff; it's just
what we don't know about.  A nasty person could have a very
sweet dark side.  In David's case, he needed to toughen up,
and I liked working with that concept.

I think the notion of vampires having a "shadow" hasn't
really been explored.  The vampire, being "evil", has a
"good" shadow.  But shadow and light are never black and
white, so to speak.  It's all much more complex.  If David
were just this whining, tortured poet, he'd be pretty
boring.  What gives him complexity is that he's struggling
 -- not so much to be good, as to uncover all that he is.
It's a struggle I respect in people, and in vampires!

Zero appeals to me for a lot of reasons.  I was never a
prostitute or a drug addict, and I did not come from an
incestuous home, nor was I beaten.  I did, however, come
from a poor family, and I understand the way poor people
think.  I know the hopelessness and the toughness.  Zero has
a heart of gold, but make no mistake; she is far tougher
than David in many ways, and he had to learn some of the
basics from a flesh and blood woman -- a woman who, if most
of us saw her on the street, would call her an airhead, or
worse.

I'M INTRIGUED BY THE HALF-VAMPIRE MICHEL/MIKEY.  HOW DID YOU
THINK OF HIM?

Michel/Mikey seemed like a natural character to me, and is a
major subject of the second novel, which I'm trying to sell
now.  He's kind of like an ordinary kid with supernatural
abilities.  A vampire and human mated and I wondered what
they would produce. But Michel/Mikey is still a child.  We
don't know yet what he will become, since he's the only one
of his kind.

WHAT PROJECTS DO YOU HAVE IN THE WORKS RIGHT NOW?

I very much want to see _Child of the Night_ published.  It
is the story of Carol and Andre and Michel.  This book is
independent of _Near Death_.  If people like _Near Death_
and want to see more, I would be extremely grateful if they
could take the time to write even a short note to:

          Pocket Books
          Publicity Department
          1230 Avenue of the Americas
          New York, NY  10020</PRE>

I mean this in all seriousness, because although my editor
loves _Child of the Night_ and wants to buy it, the
higher-ups are closing off to horror at the moment, and she
can't.  If, however, she had some readers asking for another
book by me (coupled with good sales), that's something
concrete she can take to the decision-makers and maybe sway
the tide.

 [Nancy's editor, Rebecca Todd, is no longer with Pocket,
 but mail addressed to Rebecca Todd is also okay; mail with
 RE: NEAR DEATH in the address will probably move faster.]

Of course, there's the possibility of going to another
publisher as well.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE OUTLOOK FOR PUBLISHING VAMPIRE
FICTION?

I think that vampire fans need to take a stand.  From the
inside, I can tell you that there are at present only five
publishing houses that will even look at vampire fiction.
After [the movie] _Interview with the Vampire_ comes out,
there will be a slacking off, then a resurge in 1997 (the
100th anniversary of _Dracula_), then likely a dying off.
This isn't my opinion, but what I've read in the trade
journals.  They are saying vampires are dead [!] as a
subgenre.

If people want to see more vampire books, and if they want
to see more from me, they'd better write the publishers and
tell them this.  Publishers will listen to readers.

HOW CAN YOU SAY THAT WHEN I'VE REVIEWED OVER TWENTY RECENT
VAMPIRE NOVELS IN EACH OF MY LAST TWO COLUMNS?

The books that you hold in your hands now are books that
were accepted for publication two years ago.  In other
words, that's what publishers were buying two years ago, not
now.  Word has it that Zebra will stop publishing horror
altogether, filtering into their list as mainstream anybody,
like Rick Hautula, who can cut it mainstream (he's not a
vampire writer, BTW).

Some of the info I get on publishing is from being online;
what I'm conveying to you is the inside dope, as well as
what's in the trade journals.  The trend at the moment seems
to be "worlds."  White Wolf is becoming a very big publisher
of anthologies and novels, but their worlds are extremely
rigid.  Vampire series books are big (not that it helps me
with Pocket having so little interest in publishing
horror!).

GOT ANY ADVICE FOR ASPIRING WRITERS?

As John Preston said, publishing rewards longevity.  My
advice sounds trite, because it's been said so often, but it
really is the basis of what I understand to be the key to
getting published: keep writing, and hang in there through
the tough times (of which there are plenty).

Publishing is a hellish business.  Being an introvert by
nature, it's taken me a long time to get a grip on how it
really works.  If I had known before I wrote that first
novel in 1975 that nobody would even want to read it in
whole or in part for fifteen years, I might not have written
it.  But the beauty of life is that you don't know until you
do it, and then you're hooked and you want to see what's
over the next hurdle.  It's only depression that makes us
think we *know* what's ahead.  Because even if we guess
right, it's never right in exactly the way we imagine.  And
then there are all these weird little things that happen so
that you get books published because of flukes.  And then
you realize that publishing is like the rest of life.  It's
an illusion to think there are rules.  Life is made up of
the exceptions.  Or, as John Lennon said so succinctly,
"Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans."
The same can be said about publishing.

     I asked Nancy if she could give any tips on
     *how* to write a publisher to support vampire
     titles or a particular author's work.  Her
     response:

If someone wants to just write to a publisher, they can
send a letter saying something like, I really liked this
book [specific name], can we see more by this author,
more like this one, etc.

Editors' names may appear in market guides, but editors
frequently change at publishing houses.  If you're willing
to spend the dough on a phone call, you can call and ask
which editor(s) handle horror (or fantasy, or romance, or
whatever the book is listed as).  This is hit or miss but
better than nothing.  One problem with this is that
receptionists don't always give the names anymore.  Very
frustrating.

The best approach might be to write to the author through
the publisher.  *If* the mail gets forwarded (not always the
case), then the author can send a copy to their editor --
whoever that happens to be at the time.  If I have letters,
I can take them to another editor or even another publishing
house.

END INTERVIEW

HOW TO ORDER _THE VAMPIRE TRILOGIES_

These are available at $14.95 postage-paid per set of three,
or separately at $5.95 + $1.00 each, from Tal Publications,
P. O. Box 1837, Leesburg, VA  22075.  (These are U.S.
prices: each book has a "foreign" cover price of $7.00.)

The Vampire Trilogies is a set of three chapbooks (saddle-
stapled, about 50 pages each).  Each contains three
related short stories.  These are signed, numbered limited
editions, with interior artwork by Roger Gerberding.  The
titles are:

 _Shrines & Desecrations_ by Brian Hodge
      Introduction by Poppy Z. Brite

 _Sex & the Single Vampire_ by Nancy Kilpatrick
      Introduction by Nancy Holder

 _Sex & Blood_ by Ron Dee

 _Sex & Blood_ has not yet been released, as far as I know
 (delays at the printer), but the other two are available.