Intro by Dame Rinda
The Dames are very proud to welcome Dame for a Day, Anna Katherine! Her debut novel, Salt and Silver, sounds so cool! Here’s a taste of the blurb:
One night six years ago, Allie and her friends got drunk and chanted a fake spell they made up… and accidentally opened a portal to Hell. Now it resides in the basement of the diner Allie runs, and it’s a pain in the ass — mystical crap is always coming out, and then it has to be killed. Demon guts get everywhere, stuff gets smashed up, there are salt circles and sigils all over the place… It gets tedious.
The up side is that Allie gets her own personal demon hunter guarding the Door and killing the demons: a sexy and mysterious, Stetson-wearing, snide-remark-making, dark-eyed demon hunter named Ryan.
Salt and silver is out now . You can read an excerpt here.
AND… A random commenter here will be chosen to win a signed copy! You can comment over the next week until Saturday, the 30th, at midnight. We’ll announce the winner on Sunday. Contest is open to international readers, too.
Who is Anna Katherine? Anna Katherine is the pseudonym for two women who have both worked in the publishing industry for most of their lives. They wrote Salt and Silver to be a jolly romp, starring a type of heroine they love but rarely see in romance novels. They really do love the mass market art director at Tor Books, and duct tape.
Anna and Kat are both big magic nerds, and hardly had to do any research to write Salt and Silver. Anna likes to say that this is the first time she’s ever used her college degree in religious studies, and that might very well be true. Kat gives a shoutout to her folklore and Greco- Roman magic studies, which gave her a huge library and a lot of ideas.
Turning things over to Anna. How about giving her a huge welcome! 
Writing Characters Without a Spreadsheet
When I was a full time professional fiction editor, and even for a couple of years after that, I spent a good deal of time talking about characters. I even did a couple of panels/lectures on the subject. How to create them. How to make them three dimensional. How to critique someone else’s characters. How to use the characters to either make the plot build up around them or further the plot you’ve already got. How to tailor characters to your plot (and vice versa). How to use someone else’s character to create your own character and the story around that character.
We are talking here about an intense amount of time and a huge amount of brain power. Charts! Outlines! Lists! Lots of organizations, because, of course, the easy way, the right way to create a character is to sit down and decide basic facts, and then draw lines between the dots. At one point I even teamed up with another editor and we put together a “Chinese menu” of how to make primary, secondary, and tertiary characters by taking one characteristic from column A, two from column B, three from column C, and combining them.
Which is not to say that the hyper-organized way of creating a character doesn’t work. It can work incredibly well for some people. I myself have written more than one novel utilizing charts and lists and spreadsheets to organize my way into characters, plot, and story. I’ve known lots of writers who do it this way and are very successful at it.
I always thought I was one of them.
Imagine my surprise when I sat down to write the 100-page story that would eventually become SALT AND SILVER, and instead of beginning by organizing my thoughts and figuring out what I wanted from the story, I just put my fingers to the keyboard and typed.
Here was where I started: I knew I wanted a science fiction/fantasy story, and I knew that I wanted it to be somehow set in a diner in Brooklyn that closely resembled the ersatz diner in which I’d worked for two years. And I knew I wanted the narrator to be someone rarely seen in sf/f novels.
It wasn’t very long before I had a pretty decent novella about a sarcastic, very normal, very New York girl who owned a diner and went demon hunting.
When Kat and I started to work together, she ripped the story down to its bare bones, and we started over again—keeping many of the same elements (diner, Brooklyn, demon hunting, Doors to Hell, beef stew, bagels, demon hunters divided into factions by their hats), but changing some other things. (Kat is an absolute master at twisty plotting, whereas I can be a bit of a straightforward disaster.)
The character stuff was something we weren’t certain about, though. A plot can be told over a cup of coffee — characters are people, and people are complicated. Kat and I never had a conversation about who Allie and Ryan, our main characters, were, or what we wanted from them. I think I might have said, “They’ve never hooked up.” That’s about it.
But as it turns out, characters (providing they still act within the realm of real people) will create the story they’re living in — and vice versa. A certain story will necessitate a certain character. So I built the universe, Kat made it go zoom, and while the both of us were very much in tune about getting from Point A to Point XXX, Allie and Ryan grew within the frame of the story we created. Likewise, when Allie and Ryan, as reasonable, realistic people, came across something in the plot that no reasonable, real person would put up with, the story had to change to accommodate that.
What it looked like from the outside is that when one of us accidentally wrote a note that rang false, the other would just delete and rewrite, or edit it, until it sounded right and fit into the story. From the inside, it was one of the most organic experiences I’ve ever had — and a big difference from the organization-heavy lists I’d used before.
This crazy organic coauthoring method is not something I’d recommend to a first time author. It’s not something I’d recommend to anyone who isn’t instinctively comfortable with it. But there is definitely something interesting and exciting about writing a story without knowing exactly where the characters are going from the moment you start.
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Don’t forget to comment to win a signed copy of Salt and Silver!
