This year’s Literary Guest of Honor, T. Kingfisher, writes dark fantasy, horror, and fantasy romance. Her alter ego, Ursula Vernon, writes comics and children’s books. Under the two names, she has been nominated for or has won the Hugo, the Nebula, the Eisner, the Mythopoeic Award, the Washington Small Press Award, the Eugie Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Dragon Award, the World Fantasy Award, and others. While most of her work is prose, her Eisner nomination was for the Hugo Award-winning webcomic Digger. An accomplished artist and illustrator, she has supplied artwork for games and book covers.
Daily Dragon (DD): You published as Ursula Vernon for several years before branching out in the types of books you were writing and inventing T. Kingfisher. Did anything in particular spur you to broaden your reach?
T. Kingfisher (TK): I often say that inside every children’s book author is a frustrated horror author. Certainly it was true in my case! My editor kept having to have the talk about, “You are not allowed to straight up murder the villain,” and “We do not solve our problems with arson.” I would argue that kids would love this, and she would point out that yes, they would, but their parents were the ones who bought the books. (I still think that sometimes arson is the logical solution to a haunted house…)
Anyway, after a few years of all the things I couldn’t do, I said, “I’m gonna write a book for adults and it’s gonna have EVERYTHING and no one will be able to stop me!” So T. Kingfisher was born, and it’s just kinda gone from there.
DD: Your website describes fantasy as your first love, as “wonder writ large.” Will you say a bit more about what draws you back to it time after time?
TK: I think what I love about fantasy is, weirdly, what I love about science—that it can still show me something I haven’t seen before. Plenty of fantasy—even very good fantasy, even fantasy that I personally have written!—is familiar and draws from the same wells. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Hell, Terry Pratchett wrote some of the greatest fantasy of our time because he was so good at showing the familiar through a fun house mirror.
But every now and then I’ll read something and just go, “Whoa. I have never seen that before.” The first time I read Perdido Street Station, every other page was, “Damn, I wish I’d thought of that!” It’s not always big things, either—Naomi Novik’s wonderful book Uprooted has very clear folklore roots, but it also had giant evil stick insects, which I’d never seen before and was just totally enchanted by.
DD: What inspired the White Rat’s world?
TK: I am sad to say that it was spite. I had been playing a game called Neverwinter Nights 2—this dates me terribly—and it was one of the earlier games where they were just starting to put in romanceable characters. They’d worked very hard on the female character, but the male one was completely an afterthought, not well written, and also a paladin. I finished it, and said, “That is not how you write a paladin. I will show you how to write a paladin.”
We’re at seven books and counting because I was annoyed at a video game. Go figure.
DD: Who are the Clockwork Boys?
TK: They’re more a what—giant ivory monsters that look sort of like cubist centaurs covered in bone gears. I thought it seemed like a neat idea. I’d done a lot of paintings of gears that just didn’t work or shouldn’t work and the visual stuck with me. In the novel Clockwork Boys, our heroes set out to stop these huge ivory war machines from destroying the city and find a lot of other things happening along the way.
DD: How did you decide killing the Saint of Steel should be the foundation for the stories in the series of that name?
TK: I love writing paladins, but they’re a lot more interesting when their god isn’t around to tell them what to do. I’d already written one paladin who’d gotten severed from his god, but if I wanted to do a whole set of them, it seemed like killing the god off would accomplish that in one fell swoop. Of course, I didn’t quite expect that so many readers would want to know why the god died, so the series has evolved somewhat along the way…
DD: What led you to mix romance into the fantasy genre?
TK: I like romance, I like fantasy, they went together like chocolate and peanut butter.
DD: How did you decide to illustrate the novel Castle Hangnail, and did you do the illustrations yourself? I also have to ask what inspired that title!
TK: I didn’t so much decide as I was under contract at the publisher to do it! But I did the illustrations, yes, and the cover art. I’d been doing illustrated books for them before, and this was just an extension. As for why Castle Hangnail was called that… well, it’s about a young girl who’s officially a wicked witch, but really she’s just goth, and she acquires this castle full of not-very-evil minions. So I wanted a name for the castle that was a very mild badness. Hangnails came to mind, and also it was just a funny name.
DD: Please tell us about the Dragonbreath series.
TK: They’re a series of hybrid chapter book-graphic novels that I did with Dial Books. The hero is a young dragon named Danny who can’t breathe fire very well and goes to a school for reptiles and amphibians. But there are so many lizards called dragons that his classmates think he’s just a regular lizard. Danny has a rich fantasy life and gets into a lot of weird scrapes along with his best friend, Wendell the nerdy iguana.
It was a fun series to write, but it was intensely illustrated—the books were designed so that kids who see a wall of text as an insurmountable obstacle would always have an illustration or a comic panel to break up the page—so it got to a point where I was drawing hundreds of little dragons a year and was burning out and had to stop.
DD: Who is Harriet Hamsterbone?
TK: The heroine of the Hamster Princess books! This was another series like Dragonbreath, part comic and part chapter book. Harriet was basically Xena, Warrior Princess, only as a small rodent. She was a lot of fun to write. All the books were based on fairy tales, so we started with Sleeping Beauty—she was supposed to prick herself on a hamster wheel instead of a spinning wheel—and went through Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, and a couple others, only all with small animals and all getting increasingly weird. In Little Red Rodent Hood, for example, we had were-weasels instead of wolves. Naturally, Harriet immediately wanted the weasel to bite her so she could become a were-weasel too. (I absolutely wanted to be a werewolf as a child myself.)
DD: Your website’s Books for Kids section includes one called Summer in Orcus by T. Kingfisher. The cover art says it was a web serial. What is it about, and why did you decide to release it initially as a web serial?
TK: It’s about a girl named Summer who gets sent into a fantasy world by Baba Yaga. And in some ways, it was just a place to put all these fragmentary ideas and bits of imagery I’d had that hadn’t gone anywhere else. So it’s a surreal kind of world, and Summer, who read the Narnia books about ten thousand times (much like me), has an idea of how going to a fantasy world is supposed to work, but of course it doesn’t turn out like that. I called it a kid book for adults who loved kid books.
I released it as a web serial, I think, because I had done a webcomic called Digger for years and years and I missed some of the working-without-a-net quality of posting work as I wrote it.
DD: What draws you to writing horror, and what do you like about the genre?
TK: Honestly, it was very accidental. I was writing all this fantasy, and occasionally readers would say, “This is really getting into horror here…” often about things I hadn’t thought were scary at all. So I thought, hey, what if I set out to write a horror novel deliberately? I wrote The Twisted Ones sort of as an experiment and people really liked it, so I just kept going.
The funny thing is that I still don’t always know what people are going to find scary or horrible. I’ll write a horror novel, and a throwaway bit that I think is just there to build tension turns out to be what really bothers people. There’s a scene with a creepy school bus in The Hollow Places that I genuinely thought was interesting and, if anything, a little cheesy, but people still refer to it as “That goddamn school bus!”
DD: You’ve published a couple of short story collections, Jackalope Wives and Toad Words and Other Stories. What do you like about short fiction, and is there anything about it that particularly challenges you?
TK: The great thing about short fiction is that if I have an idea that’s fun or gripping or whatever but there’s not enough to sustain a whole book, I can just write a short story. I tend to write them all in one go or sometimes in two or three days, but it’s not like a novel where I’m gonna be digging around in the idea’s guts for months at a stretch.
The challenge is always that you don’t have space to screw around and figure out what’s going on and develop the characters and whatnot. You have a couple thousand words and that’s it.
DD: A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking has an interesting magic system. Are you a baker?
TK: Ha! No, and I don’t cook, either. When I was writing Wizard’s Guide, I baked like three things in order to be able to describe the feel of dough and whatnot and never touched it again. The premise of the book arose much more from thinking about, “What’s a really useless superpower? Okay, now how could you make it work if you had to?”
DD: Several of the books on your website, such as Swordheart, A Sorceress Comes to Call, and The Seventh Bride, look as though they are standalones. Do you have plans to write books connected to these or the other standalones?
TK: Just handed in the sequel to Swordheart! But most of the standalones are just standalones. I have two ongoing series, the Saint of Steel and the Sworn Soldier books, and that’s enough to juggle without adding more.
DD: How do you balance your artistic interests with your writing?
TK: These days, I mostly don’t. I wish I had some inspirational words about making art that would inspire people, but in truth, I get the urge to paint or make a weird little comic or something once in a blue moon. I burned out drawing dragons and hamsters, I’m afraid.
DD: Are there particular books you recommend as starting points for readers interested in exploring your work?
TK: It really depends on what you like. If you like fantasy romance, Swordheart is a lot of fun. If you want a romp, A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking. If you’re into horror, The Twisted Ones, but if you’re not sure if you’re into horror but are willing to dip your toes in, What Moves the Dead.
DD: What is your next project?
TK: My book Hemlock and Silver comes out right before Dragon Con, and it’s about…uh…poison. And mirrors. And I’m describing it badly. I also have the third Sworn Soldier book, What Stalks the Deep, coming out this fall, and a weird little book about evil roadrunner gods called Snake-Eater.
My next project is hopefully getting the next paladin book written, although all these other shiny objects keep distracting me…
DD: Do you have any advice for writers who’re working on their first or second books?
TK: You can find enough advice about the act of writing to wallpaper a battleship, and I don’t even really know how I do it so it’s hard to know what anyone else will find useful. The most useful advice I can give is that if you have a book contract, do not take it to your family lawyer to look over. Entertainment law is different than law-law, words are used differently, and what is standard and negotiable is probably not what you think it is. If you’re not willing to become an expert on entertainment law, getting an agent is really, really useful.
DD: Thank you for your time.
T. Kingfisher and Ursula Vernon share a website at https://www.redwombatstudio.com. You can find her on Bluesky as @tkingfisher and on Instagram as @redwombatstudio.
