Truly, Madly, Deadly_ The Unofficial True Blood Companion - Becca Wilcott [16]
So how has Harris — who prefers to go to bed early, get up early, go to the movies with her husband, and watch her daughter’s soccer games — adjusted to the life of an international bestselling author? After all, she toiled for almost 25 years before her career trajectory broke through the stratosphere in what must seem to most like an overnight occurrence. But Harris can still remember her first job, working in an offset darkroom for a small newspaper where she “stood on a concrete floor all day and made minimum wage, which then was $1.60 an hour.” She agrees that the writing life has rewarded her kindly.
However, the writing life has its dues. More than ever, readers want to connect with their favorite authors. In an industry as competitive as publishing, and loyal independent booksellers closing their doors at a remarkable rate, even authors as successful as Harris need to maintain contact with the loyal fan bases. It’s a new world; she could easily pipe in her image over the internet instead of making in-store appearances. But travel is all part of the job. With each new book, Harris is expected to put in her face time, appearing at events, conventions, and on panels, some of which she happily makes her own way to, such as the Romantic Times Booklovers Convention. For a writer who continues to create at an astonishing pace, though, all the coming and going can be discombobulating. “Airplane travel is just not fun anymore,” she says on her personal blog. “And when I’m on tour, it’s actually pretty easy to forget where I am. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve woken up in a hotel room and wondered how to find the bathroom . . . Sometimes I feel like a different person when I’m traveling, and it’s great to get to a big city and meet lots of wonderful readers. But I always enjoy going home.”
In 2005, Barnes & Noble asked Harris to name her favorite book and why. See if you can guess the book (and heroine) that she’s talking about: “This book has everything: mystery, unrequited love, class war, illicit sex, madness, and a woman with an unswerving sense of moral rectitude . . . [S]he’s devoted to thinking things over carefully before arriving at a rational decision. And yet she’s a passionate woman underneath that drab dress that she’s decided is suitable for her station . . . extremely conventional, and at the same time unconventional; a prime example of still waters running very deep. She rises above adversity every time, and she has a lot of adversity to rise above. [It’s] the basic blueprint for thousands of books that followed.” Harris’s favorite book is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, which features a protagonist who sounds an awful lot like Sookie.
Ginjer Buchanan is editor-in-chief at Ace Books and Harris’s longtime editor. In a promotional video for Penguin USA’s Project Paranormal series, she recounts how Harris’s original manuscript first came to her through an assistant editor who thought there was something special about Dead Until Dark. Buchanan gave it a read herself and found the voice and setting fresh and compelling, rendered in a realistic, loving fashion, not as a stereotype. She was also drawn in by Harris’s humor and ability to work within the constraints of a plot-driven genre when told only from the perspective of one person. Talking about Dead in the Family, the next book in the series, Buchanan shares that the story is, not surprisingly, very much about family and leaves Sookie in a better place than she was in at the end of Dead and Gone.
As for the coming installments, Harris has brought on some assistants to create what she calls a “bible” to help her keep track of what’s come before in the Sookieverse. She readily admits that the fun of writing comes from creating on-the-go, and that if she herself isn’t sure of the answers, she simply works around the questions,