WLP: I am happy to welcome Stacia Kane here today, Stacia popped my E-Readers cherry & now Stacia’s WLP interview cherry is about to be popped in return. Thanks for stopping by Stacia. Can you tell my readers a little bit about Unholy Ghosts?

SK: Of course! It’s a very dark urban fantasy. It’s sort of a cross between Ghostbusters and Escape From  New York, and it’s got drug use, black magic, human sacrifice, an atheistic Church government, punk rock, a ghetto, and a black ’69 Chevelle.

WLP: Why the back to back releases? (Not that I am complaining!)

SK: Honestly? Because that’s what Del Rey wanted, and I was thrilled to go along with it! I’ve always been a fan of releasing those first books in a series close to each other, because I think it sucks as a reader to get excited about something and have to wait. This way, readers can buy UNHOLY GHOSTS secure in the knowledge that by the end of the summer they’ll have gotten to read the next two books—they won’t have to wait for months and months to really get into the story and the characters.

WLP: I loved that Chess isn’t just some perfect heroine, but she’s got a pretty big drug addiction. What made you want to write a character like that?

SK: I’ve always had a real penchant for writing damaged people, people with problems and issues. I don’t really understand how to write happy people, to be honest! But there were a few things that especially appealed to me about Chess. I wanted to write a drug addict because I hadn’t really seen it done before, so it was exciting to me because of that. I wanted to write a drug addict because I found the dichotomy between what she does for a living—seeking the truth—and what she does in her private life—hiding the truth—to be so fascinating and full of complexities. I absolutely loved the contrast between her desire to be independent and take care of herself and be powerful—and she is powerfuI—and the fact that her addiction automatically is a weakness and something she’s dependent on. I also loved the sense of time passing and the structure that her addiction gives her days.

Really, I wanted to write a character with real problems. I wanted to write a character I could really identify with and put myself into. And Chess just sort of appeared in my head, fully formed, and I fell in love with her, and wanted to tell her story.

WLP: What are Chess’ drugs of choice, Cepts, based on?

SK: Oh, I’m not sure I should really say! I don’t want to glamorize drug use or abuse. They’re a strong opiate-based painkiller, let’s leave it at that.

WLP: Do you mind talking a bit about the World you created?

SK: Of course not! The funny thing, for me at least, is how the world just sort of grew without much real thought on my part. I mean, I came up with the idea of Haunted Week—the ghost apocalypse—and the Church as an atheistic magic-and-fact-based group, and the look of it all, but so much of it just seemed to flow from there. It just made sense, you know? The way people had more unusual names instead of names based in Christianity like we’re used to. The genealogy thing, because so many people lost so much family in Haunted Week. All of Downside, really. It just flows, and I love every second I spend there.

Basically, it’s a world where the vast majority of the population—about 2/3 of it—was killed when the dead rose from the grave as ghosts. The Church of Real Truth, an underground magic group, was the only organization capable of actually doing something about the ghosts; it banished them all to an enormous cavern under the earth, known as the City of Eternity. And in exchange for this rescue and protection, the people put the Church in charge. Now they’re religion and government all in one, although they’re strictly atheistic and focused solely on facts and truth.

So if you have a ghost in your home the Church will pay you a settlement for not protecting you. And some people try to fake hauntings to get money. That’s what Chess’s job is; she’s a Debunker, and she investigates and—usually—disproves hauntings.

It’s a world where the poor are pretty much left to fend for themselves, and aren’t really given educations or anything else. It’s a world where people are just starting to spread out again after seeking the safety of numbers. It’s a world without racism, without war, without real discrimination—but at what price?

WLP: Why did you choose to go into the past (the 1997 ghost uprising) as opposed to making it something that happened in the future?

SK: Honestly? Just for fun! It seemed to me like a lot of urban fantasies used the year 2000 as a cut-off point; that was when the vampires or weres or Fae or whatever made themselves known. I wanted to be as different as I could, so I thought 1997 would be fun. That was pretty much it, really!

WLP: When reading, I noticed you used some pretty out there slang. In my head I heard it as patois mixed with Cajun; it flowed that way to me. Can you tell us how you came up with Downspeak?

SK: Oh, wow. Actually, I’d originally envisioned the project as a historical. But when that sort of fell by the wayside, I didn’t want to let all the research I’d done into historical slang fall by the wayside—so much of it was so cool, and so evocative, and it just excited me even more than language in general does. So I wanted to use it, and considering the sort of Puritan speech of the Church, I thought it would make sense that the slang used would have a sort of old-fashioned touch to it; a lot of it is actually slang used in Georgian and Victorian times.

But I also wanted to highlight the differences between the middle and upper classes and the poor, by showing the way their speech changed with their socioeconomic status. I wanted to show very clearly that for all the good things the Church did, and all the advances it had made, it still had faults. I wanted to show the hopelessness of a forgotten people, and Downspeech enabled me to do that clearly, especially since you have different degrees of it; from people like Bump, whose speech is pure Downspeech, to those like Terrible who reads books and thus has some idea how language is supposed to sound. And then you have Lex, who picked up Downspeech to fit in, but uses a lot more archaic slang, Everyone has their own thing, and it hopefully shows how even in Downside there are differences and how much variety there really is in the world. It’s very rhythmic, at least it sounded that way in my head.

And I didn’t want to use something like Ebonics, because in this world race has nothing to do with wealth, and I didn’t want to seem like I was co-opting an established culture. And it was an absolute blast to write, and hopefully helped bring the characters to life.

WLP: I saw a video of you at DragonCon talking about Unholy & you stated Edsel is an albino. I totally didn’t catch that, did I miss something?!

SK: Lol, no, it’s very subtle. I hate when people have characters who are racial minorities or whatever, and the description of those characters seems to consist solely of “He was black” or “He was Asian” or whatever. I tried to bring that stuff out slowly and more carefully in these books; it actually never says outright that Edsel is albino, but hopefully after all three books you kind of get that image in your head. I try to focus on what’s really important, and that’s the person they are.

To bring up another example, Elder Griffin is gay. It’s mentioned in the second book, because it comes up in conversation, but it’s obviously something Chess already knows and isn’t a big deal. I mean, when you see a gay friend or gay co-worker, you don’t think, “Oh, there’s my gay friend.” It’s just your friend. And that was my attempt to show another thing about this world, which is that so many distinction don’t exist anymore.  Gay marriage is legal and encouraged. And it shows something about Chess too, hopefully. She doesn’t think of Edsel as the albino guy. He’s just her friend.

WLP: I loved the idea of if your house is haunted; the Church will pay you if it is indeed haunted. Where did that idea come from?

SK: Actually, that was the basis for the entire world! I was reading one of my husband’s old magazines and they mentioned a very old B movie about a debunker who discovered the ghosts were real. And a shiver ran up my spine; I was so excited by that idea and the possibilities it presented. But of course I needed higher stakes than that; I needed a world where a haunting would actually matter, where people would actually have a legitimate motivation for faking a haunting. That’s when I thought of a world where ghosts were a real threat, and psychopomps and the Church and Haunted Week followed pretty much immediately.

WLP: Have you thought about writing the actual book of truth as a companion to the series?

SK: I have, actually! I save all of the epigrams in a separate file, in order to compile them and to double-check the books and numbers. But boy. My agent and I came up with the idea of using epigrams when we were getting ready to submit the books, as a way to deepen the world-building, and I love them, but I admit it does get difficult to write them! By the third book trying to come up with a way to phrase things, and new things to say, was rather difficult!

But I would love to do that one day, and of course I hope the series is successful enough to warrant it!

WLP: I found this book really dark & gritty, the world was very tangible. That said I am leaning to this being more of a horror novel than an urban fantasy. What do you say?

SK: Oh, totally. I mean, I consider it to be urban fantasy, but I think of it as more of an old-school urban fantasy, almost, with strong horror elements. I definitely wanted to write something that skirted the line between UF and horror; I wanted to push the envelope and see just how far I could take the genre.

Which isn’t to say I think I’ve broken some wall or created something so different and amazing; I’m not so egotistical. But that is what I tried to do, and I tried to explore the darkness that’s so inherent in urban fantasy but which I feel is so rarely really exploited. It’s really such a limitless genre, with so many possibilities, and I wanted to experiment with it, and I wanted to take it as far as I could, and I wanted to make it dark and scary and horrifying and just…creepy. I was thinking of stuff like SANDMAN and HELLBLAZER, and I wanted to do that, as much as I could.

WLP: When you are writing, do you listen to music? If so what?

SK: Actually? I don’t listen to music when I write. I do listen to music when I’m thinking about writing, and get a lot of inspiration from it. Mostly when I’m in the car. Most of my best ideas come when I’m driving (or in the shower, for whatever reason) so the music really helps. But when I’m actually writing I don’t hear it anyway, so it’s kind of a waste to put it on.

I do have playlists for the Downside books, music that’s actually mentioned in the books, and those will be loaded onto iTunes as playlists so they can be downloaded if anyone is interested.

WLP: I love that idea!! Can you tell us about the following books, without giving too much away?

SK: Sure! Or I can try, at least. Things are going to get more complicated for Chess; letting people into her life on even a semi-regular basis opens up a can of worms she really doesn’t know how to deal with, and it’s really scary for her. She faces a job with some new challenges, and her work with the Black Squad—the police, essentially—grows more important and more complex, though she doesn’t stop handling Debunking cases.

And of course her relationships with Lex and Terrible grow and become much more complicated. We learn a secret Terrible’s been keeping, a secret Lex has been keeping, and more about Chess’s past. Things build up to a major confrontation, definitely!

Don’t forget to get your copy of Unholy Ghosts on May 25, you will NOT be disappointed! But cause Stacia rocks, she’s giving away a copy of Unholy Ghosts to ONE lucky commenter. Just tell us in the comments section what you would do if you had a ghost in your house (I’d scream blue murder). Contest runs until Monday May 24th at 12PM EST.