Cat Tales by Faith Hunter
A NOTE TO READERS
Hi Everyone,
It isn’t often a writer gets to talk directly to her readers—except at cons and book signings—and then the personal contact is short-lived. So I wanted to take an opportunity to share with y’all my thoughts about the Skinwalker series, and about Jane Yellowrock, Beast, Rick, Bruiser, and Leo.
When I started out to write the series, I wanted a character who had no past, with seemingly only the future open to her. I wanted a character who was a bit repressed socially, sexually, and emotionally. I wanted a character who was a singularity—the only one of her kind in the world. I wanted a loner in the truest sense of the word.
When Jane was born, I was sitting in a Starbucks with my friend and fellow writer Kim Harrison. We’d both had tiring weeks, with a lot of detail-oriented stuff and not a lot of downtime. And certainly no creative time. To clear our heads, we started talking about the new, innovative characters and worlds that lived in the backs of our creative brains, things and people who hadn’t yet made it to pen and paper or computer file. We call them new shinies, and they call to us like shiny things on the ground, spotted by a crow in flight—something we simply have to check out.
Kim was talking about a character and magic system that were . . . well, that’s her story, and maybe she’ll share it as a short story or a book someday. But let me say—it was exciting!
When she was done, she said, “What are you working on in the back of your brain?”
I was staring at ck the far wall, fairly engrossed in the paint job, I suppose. I took a sip of my tea and said, “I keep thinking about this line: ‘Katie’s Ladies, the oldest continually operating whorehouse in New Orleans.’”
Kim said, “Go with it.” And I did, for something like twenty minutes. In that visit, Jane Yellowrock—at that time, called Jane Doe—was born.
Shortly after, I had tea at that same Starbucks with Misty Massey (author of Mad Kestrel), and again we were talking about new shinies. I told her about my character. Misty encouraged me to expand on my theme, and I did. Jane “Yellowrock” Doe took on form and substance, and developed a history. She came alive. And so did the Beast within her, which had to be weird for anyone who might have been listening in! During that afternoon tea, Jane Yellowrock became an opportunity for me to discover my Cherokee roots—something that had been hidden from me, that I never knew I had.
Back in the day, people kept their racial heritage to themselves—not necessarily because of shame, but because our society made living with mixed racial genetics difficult. To my great delight, I had recently discovered that I was not lily-white, but rather a wondrous mix of nearly one-fourth Cherokee and Choctaw, English (tracing my roots back to an ancestor who came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066), African-American, with a complex mixture of Irish, Germanic, and other European bloodlines. I was a mongrel! What fun! And so Jane became of mixed ethnicity: a Cherokee skinwalker.
This fabulous character had to be way taller than I am, so instantly she was six feet, with long black hair and coppery skin and—the one thing that sets her apart—amber-yellow eyes, like a mountain lion’s eyes. Her Cherokee name had to be unusual even for her culture, had to be about her eyes. Dalonige’i Digadoli. Yellow-Eyes Yellowrock.
And her Beast—well, Beast was a difficult character to write. She still is. Beast is a predator, a carnivore—she kills and eats animals. She’s a very bloody, earthy creature! From Jane, Beast gained an understanding of language, a usage that slips and slides and changes, just like the language skills of a human learning a new tongue late in life. She has memories that she keeps from Jane, skills and abilities that she keeps from Jane, and perhaps Beast has a magic of her own, which Jane is beginning to recognize even if she doesn’t understand it.
I promised a mention of the men in Jane’s life. Rick—oh my gosh. Rick. Black haired, black eyed, six feet even, and gorgeous. A man brought up Catholic, educated in Catholic schools, with a high-society family and a proper Creole background, all the way back to the mid–seventeen hundreds. But Rick was a player at the time he entered Jane’s life, and full of secrets, almost as many as Jane had herself. And perhaps after all it was the secrets that brought them together. We’ll see. . . .
Bruiser. George Dumas. Now that is a man! He stands six feet four inches tall and has a butt that makes women salivate. Brown haired and brown eyed, he can dance better tha>