Kater Cheek is joining us today with her novel Mulberry Wands. Here’s the publisher’s description.
Susan never expected to find a corpse in her backyard, especially not one no larger than a doll. Her well-intentioned burial and investigation attracts the notice of the victim’s kin, who blame her for the murder and want vengeance.
Griff just wants a little more money. When his friend’s squirrelly cousin offers him a side job selling magic wands, and he meets a strange but beautiful girl, he feels his luck is finally starting to change. And then he meets the owls.
Paul is a human member of the Sunwards, a society of shapeshifting owls. When its parliament orders him to investigate a mage, he doesn’t realize his feelings for Susan will test his loyalty to the society he pledged his life to.
What’s Kater’s favorite bit?
KATER CHEEK
Owls Who Become Women
or
How to Substitute for Vampires in Urban Fantasy Recipes
When I started to write this series, my goal was to write something that didn’t rely on easy urban fantasy tropes. No Irish fairies, no fallen angels, no werewolves and especially no vampires.
But I couldn’t get past how useful vampires are. They’re scary and powerful, but they can be sexy too. They live forever, and you don’t know where they are during the day, and they have an uneasy kinship with darkness. So I had to figure out how to have a protagonist that had the elements of vampires I liked, without being anything like a vampire.
Sitting outside with my friends one night, we saw an owl in a nearby tree. My friend shone a spotlight on it (they hate that, btw) and we could see how huge it was, and how scary. Owls can see at night, they have huge claws, sharp beaks and they strike in total silence. The only reason they aren’t more frightening is that owls have no reason to hurt people.
But what if they did?
So I gave them a reason to have conflicts with humans: competition over limited prey resources. What else would an owl care about, except having enough food to kill? Of course, this happens a lot in real life, that pesticide use or human development will disrupt predator-prey balance. But unlike in real life, my owls aren’t normal owls, they’re shapeshifters known as the Sunwards. The Sunwards are a society that serve and worship a goddess of sunlight. They report to her what happens in the darkness. And when their parliament feels threatened, some of its members turn into women to better spy on human affairs.
We’ve had plenty of stories in which people turn into animals, but very few books in which animals, real animals, turn into people. How could an owl, even a very intelligent owl, pretend to be human? She’d have to learn to speak, how to walk, how to wear clothes, how to pass for human among humans who are hyper-aware of any strangeness. This, too, I stole from vampire stories. The vampires are like human, but they’re not human. They’re more than human, and less.
My Sunwards live in darkness. If a Sunward touches sunlight, she vanishes back into her goddess, melding with the light and basically ceasing to exist until darkness falls again. Since she is only aging and alive during her nighttime waking hours, she can live a lot longer than a normal owl. I say owl because 95% of the Sunwards are owls, and 98% of them are female. Paul, my protagonist’s love interst, is a rare, human, male Sunward, who has to deal with the problems of being a double minority.
Paul has most of the elements of vampirism that I wanted. He lives in darkness, he lives longer than a normal human, he’s beholden to a secret society with inscrutable motives, he has an uncanny fellowship with night animals. And most deliciously of all, he has associates that may try to kill the woman he’s falling for.
LINKS:
BIO:
Kater Cheek is a graduate of 2007 Clarion. Her work has appeared in Weird Tales and Fantasy Magazine, as well as several anthologies. She has art, book reviews, sample chapters, and links to her other work at www.catherinecheek.com. When not writing, she throws pots, gardens, binds books, practices aikido, and plays with molten glass.
I WANT TO READ THIS
I am bored of vampires, thank you LKH, but this sounds really cool