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First Draft Episode #324: Kendare Blake
September 23, 2021
Kendare Blake, New York Times bestselling author of the Three Dark Crowns series, Anna Dressed in Blood, and more, talks about her new historical thriller, All These Bodies, and her upcoming YA novel set in the universe of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, In Every Generation.
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Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Kendare Blake, New York Times bestselling author of the Three Dark Crown series, Anna Dressed in Blood and more. She's here to talk about her new historical thriller, All These Bodies and her upcoming YA series set in the universe of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, In Every Generation.
I love talking to Kendare. I love what she had to say about the risks that authors take when they move on from a popular series, and how to balance reader expectations with our own creative impulses. She talks about the stories that young women are allowed to tell if they want to be believed, and how she played with ambiguity and truth in a true crime narrative.
And also you'll have to listen to hear our kind of existential cone about whether we're writing in Scrivener or Scrivener is writing us. Mm, um...unclear.
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Okay, now please sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with Kendare Blake.
Sarah Enni: All right. So hi, Kendare. How are you doing today?
Kendare Blake: I am doing pretty well. Thank you for having me.
Sarah Enni: Oh, I'm so excited to chat again. This is not the first time we're talking we've actually had you on the show for a traditional First Draft interview. You were one of the very first people that I interviewed on my initial road trip so I'll link to that in the show notes. And we had a live event when my debut book came out in 2019 that you were kind enough to come out and talk to me and Somaiya Daud, which was awesome.
(Hear Kendare’s previous episode of First Draft here, and watch the Tell Me Everything University Bookstore (Seattle, WA) event featuring Sarah Enni, Kendare, and Somaiya Daud, author of YA sci-fi book Mirage and Court of Lions.)
But then today we get to talk about what you've been up to since then, which is a lot! I'm really excited about it. So we're not gonna cover the traditional bio stuff cause we did that already, but I do want to take us back a little bit to when you were wrapping up the Three Dark Crown series.
Which I didn't realize, I was listening to an interview with you this morning, and I hadn't realized that it had started as two books and then expanded to four. So you've been in that world for quite some time. So what was it like to wrap up that series?
Kendare Blake: I was in the world for quite a while. The idea came to me in 2013 in a book event, it was actually before another trilogy was just about to come out. Antigoddess was just about to come out and that's when I had the idea for Three Dark Crowns. So it had to wait for a while for the rest of that trilogy to come out so we could sell it. So, yeah, from 2013, till 2019, I was just all murdering queens, 24/7.
Sarah Enni: You were in the same world and talking about the same sort of intense murder et cetera, as you say, um matricide?
[Both laugh]
Kendare Blake: Matricide, sororicide, there was just a lot of 'cides going on in that series. And I feel really lucky that the first books did well enough that when the publisher asked me, "Well, what do you want to do next?" I was able to say, "How about a little more of this?" Because I thought I'd put the characters to rest, but I kept wondering what they were up to and maybe what happened. And I wondered if there was just a little bit more to tell.
And there was a lot! There were two books worth and actually a third kind of pseudo book where, there's a subplot in the second two books about a blue queen from the past and her sister. And I actually wrote like 50,000 words of that and then just cut it all. It was originally gonna be integrated into book three and then I just cut most of it and just kept the very pertinent parts.
So I actually ended up writing two more books, plus a bonus book, plus we got to do the novellas. Which consisted of the two short novellas, The Young Queens, about the queens when they were kids, and The Oracle Queen about the famous last oracle queen of Fennbirn. I got to just whirl around in that island for a few extra years, just bonus years, I like to think of them.
Sarah Enni: And that series was a really big deal. It was really kind of a breakout series that people got very attached to. I'm just curious what it feels like for you to step away and try something new. How do you feel about whether readers are gonna follow you here? Or do you miss that place you've been in for so long?
Kendare Blake: I feel lucky in that I've had that experience before. Anna Dressed in Blood was what brought me onto the scene, and Anna had a lot of really fervent followers. And then I switched and did like Greek mythology and that series did not do very well. And then I switched to Three Dark Crowns, again, which was dark fantasy.
And there was a lot of overlap between readership. People will find me from one thing or another, and then they'll find me through Anna and they'll follow the Three Dark Crowns, or vice versa, they'll backtrack to Anna. It is scary because every time it's like, "Well, okay, I've got to promote this new book. I've got to chase down those readers again and hope they're interested in what I have this time." And you're never sure. You're never sure what people are in the mood for.
Sarah Enni: I want to talk about the brand new thing that you have coming out, which is All These Bodies. It is a standalone. So it's a whole other kind of thing for you to pitch.
Kendare Blake: Yes, and it's a big departure also from anything that I've ever written. I try to say that there are similarities between it and Anna Dressed in Blood so if you liked that, maybe you'll like this. But really it's its own thing. It's historical, it's set in the 1950's, so that's something I've never done before. It's more literary.
It is very scary because just because you liked Three Dark Crowns does not in any way guarantee that you will like All These Bodies because they are very different. And there's a lot of expectations that build up, and you want to have that sense. You want to develop that kind of relationship with readers, that when they pick up a book of yours, they kind of trust what they're getting, or they have a sense of what they're in for.
And, I don't know, I think I've been very bad about that because I'm the kind of writer who is just like, "Ah...no. I want to do this now. And isn't it weird?" And they're like, "No, please don't do that. Please do more of this other thing." And I'm like, "Well, I can't. I can't right now."
Sarah Enni: That's a good point you're making that, as writers, we have to find the way to walk that tight rope. A publisher and the audience would always want more of the same because, of course they do, that just makes sense. But as authors, we have to find projects that really speak to us and that we can spend that much time in and develop. And sometimes those things overlap and sometimes they don't. So it's hard.
A lot of this conversation is echoing a conversation I just had with Stephanie Perkins (New York Times bestselling author of Anna and the French Kiss and the horror novel There’s Someone Inside Your House (watch the Netflix film adaptation Oct. 6!) talks about her newest scary book, The Woods Are Always Watching) whose new book, The Woods Are Always Watching, is a horror novel.
We had the similar conversation about it being the grizzly, murdery, book of her heart and she just had to go with it. So I think this is probably gonna be a similar conversation.
Kendare Blake: And she went from like the sweetest, most lovely rom-coms to the slashiest, bloodiest, you know? That's like a hard pivot. But she does them both so well, so screw it. Let's do it!
Sarah Enni: So let's talk about All These Bodies. I have so many questions about this book. I would love for you to give us the formal pitch for All These Bodies first, please.
Kendare Blake: Yes. I'm impressed with myself because for the first time I have one!
[Both laugh].
Kendare Blake: So, All These Bodies is the story of two teenagers who get caught up in this mysterious murder spree that rips through the 1950's Midwest. Marie Catherine Hale is a 15 year-old girl who is discovered covered in blood in the middle of a farmhouse where the entire family, except for the little baby, has just been slaughtered. And Michael Jensen is the 17 year-old son of the local sheriff. He's an aspiring journalist. And he is the only one that she will tell her story to.
So this murder spree has been terrorizing everybody. It's captivated people through newspaper headlines, in the time before cell phones, in the time really before TV journalism, she's been splashed across the headlines. And now she chooses him to find the truth. And the story that she tells is totally unbelievable.
The hook of the murders is that despite the bodies being completely drained of blood, all of the crime scenes are suspiciously clean, like hardly a drop. So where did all this blood go? So I like to think of it as true crime with a vampire.
Sarah Enni: Which feels appropriate. So, as you say, All These Bodies is really different from your other works. And in your author's note you said, "There are no spells, there's no opinionated animals. And since the bloodless murders in this book were inspired by the murders of real people, I try to treat them with seriousness and weight, even as I imparted some possibly supernatural twists."
So I want to hear about both what the inspiration was, what this true crime is that you're kind of pulling from, and how you developed in thinking about treating this material? And how you were gonna spin a narrative while respecting the actual events.
Kendare Blake: It was actually inspired by two true crimes that both occurred in 1958 and 1959, which is when the book is also set. I didn't realize that those were just bad years to be alive in the Midwest. The first of the true crimes, was the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, which most of us are familiar with because of Truman Capote and In Cold Blood. He profiled the heck out of those murderers.
And I was fascinated, not so much by the murders themselves in that case, but by Capone himself. And the way that he basically invented the true crime novel and went to that town, which was a really small Kansas town that had been blown apart by this thing that they never imagined could happen to them, and how he just cracked those towns people open and got them to trust him.
Maybe they had poor judgment in trusting him. But I thought that the way that he profiled them was very respectful and very intriguing. And the other crime, the one that fascinated me the most, was in 1959, in January. Two teenagers went on a massive killing spree, an 11 victim killing spree. Charlie Starkweather, 19 years-old, and his girlfriend, 14 year-old Caril Ann Fugate, raced across the country and just shot people, essentially.
He was convicted and sentenced to the electric chair. She was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. I think she was released after she served like 16 years of a life sentence. But I was very fascinated by Caril, in particular. She was just so young when this happened, she was like a child. And she always said that she was Charlie's hostage, but nobody seemed to believe her. Nobody seemed to be interested in the story she was telling.
It was more like the story that was being written around her, by the headlines, by the media, by even Charlie himself. He would say things like, "Oh, we had sex all the time. And sex, sex, sex. And we had twice sex on Sundays." I think that was one of his favorite quotes, that they had sex every day and twice on Sundays.
If you had asked Caril, she would have said that she was a virgin and they never did anything else than like French kiss. And she had no idea what he was talking about. She was 14! She didn't even understand what that meant. But once that kind of became known, in 1958, that was not a good thing for a girl to be promiscuous. So I was always fascinated by Caril and public perception of her. And that's what fueled some of it.
Sarah Enni: I did a little reading about this before we talked today and it was really wild. He, after being convicted to die, was allowed to be the main witness against her, which is bananas. And she maintained always that, I mean, first of all, many of the victims are her family and she says that he threatened... Anyway, it's a really grizzly, sad story.
And the most recent article I saw was she was petitioning to be pardoned because she maintains, still, that she was held hostage. Anyway, it is a fascinating story. It's actually been adapted for a lot. Like Bruce Springsteen made a song about these murders, there was TV shows and movies about it. How did you first hear about it?
Kendare Blake: I think my first exposure to it was the old TV movie from the nineties. I watched it with my mom, tucked up under the blankets, when I was a kid. Starring Fairuza Balk. Fairuza Balk played Caril Ann and Tim Roth played Charlie. And it was called Murder in the Heartland. It was made for TV, so it was kind of toned down. But even then, it was just such a fascinating story. And I couldn't believe that it was true.
And then later as an older teenager, I came across Natural Born Killers, that was partially inspired by the story as well. But like you, I just found it so wild that he was allowed to be the star witness. I mean, I know my ex-boyfriends are just very reliable when it comes to my characterization [laughs].
Sarah Enni: Right, you had a blog post where you sort of talked about how this idea had been tapping you on the shoulder for many years, but I'd love to just hear about how it developed.
Kendare Blake: The idea showed up before the idea for Three Dark Crowns. So All These Bodies has been around for even longer, but it was so not ready. It was just half baked and like this little monstrosity with like one eyeball and just like, runny infected skin. And he's just like, "Hey, do you want to work on me?" I'm like, "No, I do not. Thank you. I don't even know what you are and you need to just wait your turn. I've got these three queens to deal with." And it was like, "Okay, fine."
And then when One Dark Throne was finished and we had to decide what to do next, it came back and it was like, "Hey, remember me? I've got two eyes now. And I might be inspired by these particular killings. How do you think of that?" And I was like, "Well, that's a little bit better, but it's still too strange and go away. I want to keep working with these queens."
And then when Three Dark Crowns was ending and we were deciding what to do next, it just showed up. And it's like, "Now I have a vampire." I was like, "God, you're just not gonna stop are you? You're just gonna get weirder and weirder until I stop you right now and just do it." So before it could roll out with something even more odd, I just decided, "Let's see what this is about." And I started to work on it.
And I think of it as my goodwill book. You know, when you finish a book series and you're trying to sell something else to your publisher, you as a writer know, you kinda got to entice them. And you gotta be like, "Then this is also something that you would want to publish. Right?" And All These Bodies was so weird that I think that I got them like right when they were still on the goodwill of Three Dark Crowns.
Like, "Yeah. Three Dark Crowns did really well! Remember that? And I'm just gonna slide this right in behind it real sneaky-like, and you're not gonna worry that it's weird." Just a little bit of opportunity to take a risk that maybe I would not have been allowed to take otherwise. And I recognize that and I really appreciate it.
Sarah Enni: I love that it sort of developed over time and it was like stewing in the back of your brain getting weirder and weirder. But when you set out to start writing it, was it immediately apparent that you needed to go this more serious literary route? How did you kind of develop that?
Kendare Blake: It was. All These Bodies was the first time that I was ever trying to write a mystery. I'd never done that before. Normally my books take me on a ride. I have the concept, I have an initial conflict. And then I just kind of chuck everybody in a room together, me included, and see what happens. I'm very much a pantser in that way.
With All These Bodies, I knew where the story was going. And I knew exactly what had happened at each of these murders. Like I was at the murder scenes of every one of these people. And it's kind of strange because, the murders are in the past, we pick up the book right as the final murders have just occurred. And it's less like a, "Who's doing this?" Than a, "What actually happened?"
So that was strange. I wasn't sure exactly how I was supposed to parse out interesting details to keep hooking the readers, and hooking them along without revealing too much, or revealing it at the wrong time. So that was a challenge.
I knew immediately, though, that it was going to be a different kind of book. It wasn't going to be smart-assy, which I love smart-assy, I did miss that a little bit. There weren't gonna be any talking animals, which I do always miss my talking animals. But Michael was a great narrator. I was really lucky to get him.
He's an aspiring journalist and honestly, I think he's gonna be a good one. He was just so earnest and he was very involved and committed to telling the story correctly from the start. And he kind of pulled me into that as well.
So just having his voice there to ground everything, was really useful in the writing, which sounds weird because it's like, "He's not real Kendare, you made him up." But no! He is real!
Sarah Enni: He's real to you!
Kendare Blake: Yes! All of my characters have to have their own unique voices. And he'd been in my head for quite some time before I actually started writing his words down. So it wasn't something I needed to figure out on the page he was already there.
Sarah Enni: And you're saying, the first time you're writing a mystery, what comes to mind is that you have been a pantser the whole way. And mysteries are a real hard thing to pants.
Kendare Blake: You have to know everything that happens and you have to lay out the clues to lead people down the same path that you've already been down. So that was strange. I mean, luckily the book still found ways to surprise me. There are still things that happen, over the course of the book, that I didn't know were going to happen. But I knew the true story behind the murders the whole time. That's the difference.
Sarah Enni: Oh, okay.
Kendare Blake: So it was just like, "Yeah, okay. So these people, they died in bed on this date. And this was how old they were, and this is how it went down." So I had to kind of think like an investigator. If I was an investigator walking into this room, then what would I be able to parse out just from observation, not being myself who just happens to know everything.
Sarah Enni: So you started with knowing everything that happened, and that will inevitably help if you want to still kind of wing it a little bit and see where your characters guide you.
Kendare Blake: Definitely. And luckily, All These Bodies is a short book. It's like 70,000 words, maybe. Compared to Three Dark Crowns which has been pushing like a hundred thousand words. So it felt very succinct and less overwhelming cause I didn't have that much to work with. It was just all kind of moving the pieces around and maintaining the mystery, but getting to that ending that I knew was where we had to get to. Which is not normal for me either.
Sarah Enni: I wanted to ask, you're saying Truman Capote and In Cold Blood, are also a part of the inspiration here. And Michael, your narrator, is a journalist sort of in the Truman Capote vein. And I was thinking about the line between seeking the truth and humanizing a villain. And when I say villain, I mean, in real life, this person was a villain, right? Who committed these crimes.
I just am interested in what you thought as you went about it. Of course, I'm interested in how journalists, you know, the difference between being curious, and romanticizing something. That's gets a little sticky, especially when you're talking about stuff like this, that has real victims and real consequences. How did you think about that? And how did you want to explore that in the actual book?
Kendare Blake: Well, that was big in mind for the character of Michael. Michael is spending so much time with this accused murderer who everybody thinks is probably guilty, and definitely involved in one way or another, accomplice or victim, you're not quite sure. But she was there, you know that much. She was found covered in their blood. So it got pretty sticky for Capote himself. Did you see any of Capote movies that came out? What is it like 15 years ago now? Oh my god, they're so old.
Sarah Enni: I saw the Phillip Seymore Hoffman one, for sure.
Kendare Blake: Okay. So I've seen the Philip Seymour Hoffman one, Capote, which was excellent. And I also saw Infamous, with Sandra Bullock in the Harper Lee role.
Sarah Enni: Right, I forgot about that one.
Kendare Blake: And yeah, the little guy, Toby Jones, in the Capote role. I think they came out in the same year so Infamous kind of got overshadowed by that amazing Hoffman performance. But Toby Jones did a fantastic job portraying him as well. And kind of portrayed the flashier side of him a little bit, you know, that New York socialite gossip who was in with the downtown ladies, and then he swings into this small Kansas town and just bedazzles... not bedazzled [laughs]. Bedazzing is a different thing!
Who just dazzles these small towns people with stories about Humphrey Bogart and hanging out on movie sets and gets them to open up to him and allow him special privileges. And he thinks that's totally fine for a while. And he knows he needs to get access to the killers. And then he spends time with the killers and realizes that the killers are also real people and that they have their own story.
And that even if they have done a terrible thing, eventually if you spend enough time with another human person, you're going to see the human in them. And it got so messy for him. I mean, I think it broke him in many ways, having to be there for their execution and having to come to terms with that in himself. The fact that he cared about these people who did this monstrous thing and that he was exploiting them to some extent. Because he kind of needed them to die so his book could have an ending.
So that was always in my mind when I was working with Michael, because he wants to tell the story so well, but the more time he spends with Marie and the more he gets to know her as a person, how does he separate the girl that he comes to know with the person that he knows has to have been involved, in some way, with the slaughter of this perfectly innocent family and all these other innocent people?
And also, one of the big threads that runs throughout the book is the stories that young women are allowed to tell if they want to be believed. That always caught in my craw. Caril Ann Fugate, is there anything she could've said that would've made people believe her? I don't think so. I think they already had a pretty good read on who they thought she was. You know, she didn't smile enough. Doesn't that sound familiar? She didn't smile enough. She was promiscuous.
One of the reporters who was covering the story, one of the two main reporters who covered her story, actually said, "You know, I knew that within just moments of looking at her, I knew she was guilty. I knew she was at least an accomplice if not an outright murderer." I mean, he actually said this. He actually said, "I mean, she's done every sex act in the book, so she knows what's going on."
Like that means anything! Never mind that she probably didn't. She had a physical examination and every sex act in the book seems like a stretch. But even if she had done every sex act in the book, does that then mean she would also kill?
Sarah Enni: Be a murderer?
Kendare Blake: The need for Marie to be able to tell her own story and to have someone with an open ear, was very important to me. Because I was aware that her story was already being told in the newspapers and in the public in ways that she could not control the narrative. So having Michael there to help her control the narrative, was important. Even though people have asked why I chose Michael to be the narrator if it was important for Marie to tell her story.
But that was kind of just another level of that, like, "Yeah, in 1958, even if you want to tell your story, you're gonna need a boy to filter it through." But it was also a practical decision because Marie was the one who knows the truth. All of the secrets are wound up in her. So if I was to speak from her mind, I wouldn't be able to keep those secrets for very long. The reader would just have to know, and I didn't want them to know.
Sarah Enni: And the book would be over pretty quick. It also strikes me that using Michael as the point-of-view character, allows you to talk about ambiguity and truth. And what we, as readers of the news, think we know for sure, versus the unknowability of it was just her and this other person. And we can never really know what happened. I mean, I'm interested in what it was like to sort of delve into that.
Kendare Blake: And that's the main theme of the book is, belief. And why we believe the things that we do and truth and the nature of it. And we hear things like objective truth, but many, many, many times in reality, the truth is more subjective. I was thinking a lot about the murder cases that I've followed over the course of my life. We see them in media all the time. We can't avoid them. We all know murderers and we know murders. I knew Caril Ann Fugate and I don't know if she was guilty or innocent, I don't! I've researched the heck out of this and I still go back and forth. And there's just certain things that you will never know.
So yeah, it was definitely fun, um, or, not fun. It was interesting to explore that through the character of Michael who came into this as a journalist on the hunt for the truth. The truth to a journalist is such a sacred thing. And then for him to have to kind of reevaluate his definition of it over the course of the book was nice. If you can't tell, I really enjoyed the character of Michael. I got very attached to that kid. He's just a good kid.
Sarah Enni: A good egg. You're functioning in actually the cross section of a few genres in All These Bodies. But mystery is what sort of, without spoiling things, is what we can kind of talk about, and the true crime element of it. And within the context of a true crime novel, and a mystery novel, you are interested in exploring ambiguity. But that's sort of uncomfortable for an audience, right?
An audience coming to these things, sort of like at the end of a podcast about true crime, I want to know who did it, and their trial, and what happened, you know? So you're sort of asking the audience to come with you on a journey that may, or may not, end to their satisfaction. I just want to know how you thought about that.
Kendare Blake: I knew [chuckles]. I knew that that was gonna be tough cause I'm like everybody else. I want to know. "Just tell me exactly what happened. Let me sleep at night. Just let me put this to bed." But when I was thinking about the murder shows and the documentaries that we've watched, very rarely do we actually...like think of the Zodiac. Do we know anything about that? There's a lot of, oftentimes, unanswered questions that we just kind of have to deal with as human beings. We just have to maybe make up our own minds.
And that's kind of what I was hoping that readers would do. I give you some of it. I tell you exactly what happened at the trial. I tell you the outcome of that trial and the end of Marie's story. But there are remaining, I mean, that whole, "What really happened" thing? Well, that's the question that you have to ask yourself. Do you believe Marie, or do you not? Do you believe this other narrative that's kind of formed around her?
And you can look at the evidence. I mean, there's evidence there but there's also questions surrounding that evidence. There were a couple of cases that I kept thinking back to as I was writing. The case of the Black Dalia, you know? A young girl, basically vivisected and given that horrible smile, a razor blade smile, and that was never solved. And she was dumped in broad daylight in a public space. Like, "How did they not catch that guy?" Like, "How?"
And there was another murder, it was an ax murder, and a whole family was killed. And they never caught him. He bludgeoned them all in their beds with the blunt side of the ax. And he left like a bowl of bloody water and some raw bacon on the table. That must've just driven some investigator just crazy like, "What's with the bacon? Why is the bacon here? Were you washing your fingers to maybe make some bacon and then just decided to leave?"
All those unanswered questions, and cases of unanswered questions, was in my mind as I was crafting the ending. But the ambiguity is on purpose. It's definitely deliberate and I wanted to leave space. I was trying to create a ripping good murder story, something that keeps you turning the pages. But I also wanted to leave room for readers to kind of scratch beneath the surface if they wanted, to dig for extra themes and stuff. So yeah, I know it's gonna drive some readers up the wall and I apologize for that. But I don't really.
[Both laugh]
Sarah Enni: But yeah, also authorial intent. I'm interested in what, and I asked this of Stephanie too, because there's some element to which we're all drawn to true crime. I just wonder for you personally, obviously some of this stuff was lingering, and you were thinking about it, and it was sticking with you. But what do you think you're able to access through true crime? And was writing about it and thinking about it achieving a catharsis for you? Or, what do you think you were working through with it?
Kendare Blake: Well, Hmm. I dunno. Maybe we all have kind of an interesting complex relationship with people who can kill. Because at some point, we all ask ourselves, "Well, do I think I could kill?" And you know, those answers vary given the situation. And when I'm watching true crime documentaries, something that I always love, I love the parts where they're interviewing the killers and getting a confession out of them. I love that!
Because it's so fascinating how many of them just seem completely detached, you know? Like they've completely dissociated from the entire event. It's not like you think that Ted Bundy, if you asked him about his crimes, well, he must've been so precious and pervy about it, that you would never get him to shut up.
Most of these people were like, "Oh, well, and then you stabbed him." And they'd be like, "Yeah. And then I stabbed him." "Well, how many times?" "Well, I think I stabbed him about 14, maybe 15 times." And there was like no emotion in their voice whatsoever. It's like they're watching it on a video feed, or something. They've completely gone somewhere else. Or maybe they're psychos. And there really is no attachment to that moment.
But that question, dissociation or psycho? That's always been really fascinating to me. So getting to write in a true crime kind of mindset and just getting to think about those kinds of people, the people that do crime, was really, I don't want to say fun, but it's fun.
Sarah Enni: And because you were working with the point-of-view of our narrator, who is not a participant, you're sort of holding onto the string of humanity there. There's sort of a grounded-ness to that. You can address these things and really get close to this person who may, or may not, have done these horrible things, or certainly witnessed them and was there. But you can bring it back and check in with the reader a little bit. I think that that was smart from an audience perspective. And maybe from an author perspective.
Kendare Blake: Marie, the accused murderer Marie, she was the hardest character to know for sure. She changed the most through drafts. At first she was very, very capable. She was extremely, well-spoken almost eloquent. I think I was almost aiming towards like the, "Ah yes. Well, this girl sounds almost Victorian." So you could believe that she could be on this vampiric spree with this vampire.
I was going very Interview With the Vampire style and it wasn't working. That's when I realized, "No, I've got to go more back to Caril. She's got to be an angry kid. She's gotta be an angry girl." And once I let her start running at the mouth, and start yelling, that's when I finally got to know her. So she didn't really take shape until the second or third draft.
Sarah Enni: Hmm, interesting. I'm interested from just a nuts-and-bolts perspective, did you always know it was going to be shorter like this? Or was length something that surprised you?
Kendare Blake: I always felt like it would be short. I just wanted to keep the story moving along. And there were only so many reveals that were going to happen. And the bulk of the book is Michael's interactions with Marie and parsing out the story of what happened. Initially there were a lot more of her recounting the actual details of the murders. But those, they're very similar, you know? Like, "Ah, you've heard one throat slashing, you've heard them all!"
So I cut them down to the most pertinent ones. And it's also in first person, and Michael's voice is very journalistic. He tends not to be very flowery. He's trying to write it kind of like a journal entry style. So I had the sense that it just wasn't going to be a fantasy with a ton of world-building or a magic system that I needed to define.
And the cast of characters is also very small. It's Michael and Marie in a cell, it's the town's sheriff, it's a couple of towns people from this small town that is terrorized and changed through this experience. So yeah, I always knew it was gonna be short.
Sarah Enni: Sometimes some people, as you say, your experience has been to write books that are longer. I feel like sometimes I've talked to authors who are like, "Oh, the next one will be short. It'll be nice and short." And then it balloons up!
Kendare Blake: It's like 150 thousand!
Sarah Enni: So it's admirable that you actually were able to keep the story in kind of the wheelhouse you wanted it to be in without letting it grow outside of its boundaries.
Kendare Blake: And that's the kind of writer I am. I think if you look at the Three Dark Crowns books, they got a little longer towards the end, like Three Dark Crowns is the shortest, I think it's maybe 83,000 and then One Dark Throne is like 90 some. But then the rest of them all stayed like 90-some. I just don't know what that is.
Sometimes I get a...
Sarah Enni: Like a rhythm.
Kendare Blake: Yeah! I work in Scrivener, which I know you do as well. And I set my little handy Scrivener daily word count. And so I feel like, "Is this influencing the rhythm with which I craft my chapters? Are my chapters becoming tailor-made to this word count?" And as I see my little green bar rising, do I start just like wrapping it up and bringing it in for a landing? And I don't know.
Sarah Enni: Because, as you say, you are not typically a plotter, but you are a pretty regimented writer. Am I right that you write pretty much every day?
Kendare Blake: Well, hmm. If left to my own devices, I would not write every day, but I have lately been on the kind of deadlines that require it. So yes, I will write a minimum of four days and I'll squeak in five or six if I can.
Sarah Enni: I hadn't thought about it quite that way before, that's a really interesting idea. Is the rhythm of a book determined by... if you are regimented and creating word counts, are you then there by setting a tone, or a pace rather?
Kendare Blake: I worry about that. Cause I noticed that I'm like, "Okay, all of my chapters now seem to be about the same length. This is bothering me." It's bothering me right now talking about it. Because the creative, you know, it should just be allowed to flow. I will say that All These Bodies had a much lower daily word count goal than my fantasies do.
I would be in the chair for the same amount of time. And if I got a thousand words out, it was a good day. Because Michael was very deliberate. Every word choice was important, the way that he told the story was important. Whereas with a fantasy it's more about the sweeping of the plot, and all the things that need to happen, and setting the scene very prettily. So even though it was short, it took me about the same amount of time to write as one of my fantasies, which is much slower.
Sarah Enni: And there's research for historical, and research for these actual events that they are based on. So yeah, that adds in a lot of time too that doesn't appear in a word count, but is vital to the book, to those kinds of books.
Kendare Blake: Yes, we don't think about that, usually. We're so focused on word counts and getting our butts in the chair, but there's a lot of stuff that counts as work that goes into it. There's a lot of prep work. There's a lot of downtime. You reach a point in a draft where downtime doesn't even exist because the minute you log off, you start thinking about what you're gonna do the next day.
And even if you stop thinking about that you know your subconscious is doing stuff because you'll just be in the shower and just be like, "And then it's on fire!" And you're like, "Well, I clearly wasn't thinking about that right now. So I'm still working on this dumb book."
Sarah Enni: It's growing its second eye, or what have you.
Kendare Blake: Yeah. Thank goodness.
Sarah Enni: I want to talk about In Every Generation.
Kendare Blake: Yes! Oh my god, let's talk about Buffy. Are you a Buffy fan?
Sarah Enni: I am a Buffy fan. So, I'm gonna tell you my history with Buffy and then I want to hear yours and how this came about. But I watched Buffy later in like 2012 or 13 or so. So I was an adult person. I don't know what I was doing instead of watching Buffy when it was on cause I'm exactly the right age for it.
But I was doing some data entry job and Buffy was on. I just binged the hell out of it and just watched the whole thing and was obsessed, am obsessed, absolutely incredible TV show. So I want to hear about your history with it and how this opportunity came about to write a YA continuation of this canon.
Kendare Blake: Oh, it feels like a miracle. And also [chuckles], I don't want to say a curse, but it feels like a miracle and a curse. So after Three Dark Crowns wrapped up, after Five Dark Fates, I was tired. I was really, really tired. I'd been on a crash schedule for that many years. And it was like the first time that I'd ever been behind on things. Like I was turning in things late.
It was getting away from me and I'd been with the queens and on Fennbirn for so long that I thought, you know... there's pressure on YA authors, in particular, to put a book out every year. And I was like, "No, I cannot. I'm so sorry. I wish I could, but I need time to reset. I need time to catch up. I need time to leave Fennbirn behind and mentally move on to do these other things."
So when we sold All These Bodies, in the deal where we also sold my next fantasy series, it was always set to come out, like All These Bodies was always gonna come out two years after Five Dark Fates. A little breathing room.
I was so excited about the breathing room. I was just looking at my calendar and it was just this broad expanse of time. And I'm like, "I'm gonna do this kind of research. And I'm gonna read this many books. And I'm just gonna flail around in it."
And then my agent contacted me and said, "Disney would like you to write a spinoff continuation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. What do you think?" And I said, "What do I think? I think yes, but no, I can't! I just cleared my schedule and I have all this beautiful time." And then I was like, "But you know? It's Buffy. And so yes, I will do this. I will do this one book". And she was like, "It's three books." And I was like, "Damn it!"
And I'm like, "Okay, magician woman. When do you think I'm gonna have time to do these three Buffy books?" And my agent is very calm, she is always chill. No matter what news there is, good, bad, whatever, it's always the same soothing, wonderful tone of voice. And she's like, "Well, let's look through your calendar and see just when we might be able to set these deadlines to make it very doable for you and the Buffy editor and make sure we hit all these delivery goals."
So she let me sit down and go through and kind of set, you know, like, "Okay, I think I can write the draft from here to here. And then could you please get me revisions from here to here? Because I have something else that I need to start right away after that." Because I have very specific windows of time.
And you've worked with editors, of course, in your own writing. And usually I, at least, like to be very flexible with my editor's schedule because I know that she is juggling so many more projects than I am. I'm focusing on my one book and she's like focusing on 25 and trying to shepherd each of them through to publication.
So if she tells me that she needs an extra couple of months, well, that is A-okay, because I know that she needs them. But in this case I was like, "I really can't. I really need you to get them to me at this point." And luckily the editor of Buffy, Jocelyn Davies and for a moment Kieran Viola, they were like, [blows a raspberry] "Yeah, fine. Totally cool." I'm like, "Sweet!" And we were able to make it happen. And it was the most fun thing ever.
Sarah Enni: Amazing! Oh my god. Okay. But before we get into it, I want to have you talk about your history with Buffy and then we'll do the pitch. And then I want to talk about the writing experience of the book. But what's been your fandom experience with Buffy?
Kendare Blake: Oh god, I feel like I was a fan of Buffy from the womb. Like if I had stuff to do, I used to make my mom tape them on old VHS tapes when they were first coming out, so that I wouldn't actually miss the episodes. And she was like, "Do I really have to?" I'm like, "Yeah. And you also have to tape Roswell, please. Yes, it's on right before then. Thank you."
And she actually got really into Roswell and then my mom and I would talk about Roswell. And she was like a shipper of the other thing. And I'm like, "Eww, gross that ship." So talking shipping with your mom. Sometimes that's what happens.
And I didn't watch Buffy right away, but I think I found it like mid-season three and then backtracked and watched the rest and then watched it until it ended in 2003. And it's, I guess, my favorite show of all time. It's the one that I can re-watch the most and just always be amused and always find something new about a performance.
Even if I've seen the episode seven, eight times, I'll notice something new about something that a character does and just completely fall in love again. It was perfectly cast. It was perfectly written. I mean, ah, it's just a masterclass on so many things. I'm a huge, huge Buffy admirer.
Sarah Enni: As a writer, some of the stuff, I mean, they gave themselves unreal challenges. They pulled off wild season-long arcs. As a writer, you watch it and you're just like... and that was back in the day when TV shows were like 21 episodes a year! It was like, "How in the world did this possibly happen?" This like little miracle for eight seasons. And it changed networks. I mean, that was so dramatic when it was like actually happening.
Kendare Blake: And I think you develop a different kind of fandom when you have to wait from week to week and in the season break.
Sarah Enni: You're talking to a LOST fan here. It is so different from when people binged it.
Kendare Blake: You have so much time to speculate from week to week. And to really feel like you're going through things with the characters over time. That's something that I've noticed that I don't quite get when I binge something. Is that it all feels like it happened very fast and almost has less significance because it's like, "Ooh, it was like a month of your life. Who cares?"
Whereas with Buffy, it was like six months of your life and six months of her life. And then we had to wait over summer vacation with her, for her to go visit her dad and come back to Sunnydale.
Sarah Enni: Or die!
Kendare Blake: Yeah! Or die and come back from a hell dimension. Whatever! Whatever she was doing, we had to wait for her as fans. And then we got to come back with her for every school year and kind of grow up with her, you know?
So it was a special kind of fandom. It was very formative in my sense of humor, which is why I felt like I could write it. Because I'm like, "Well, yeah, I have a Buffy sense of humor, so yes, I can write Buffy jokes. I get them."
Sarah Enni: I'd love for you to give us the formal pitch for In Every Generation.
Kendare Blake: It's a new generation of slayers. So in every generation, a Slayer is born. But since they fought the first in the season finale, all the slayers have been activated, like all of them. Willow channeled the source of the Slayer power through the Scythe, activated all the Slayers, and there hasn't been a new Slayer since.
And when the book opens, there's been an incident, an attack on Slayer Fest, which is like the quarterly Slayer convention where they check in and see how everything's going with the Slayer army. And most, if not, all of the slayers are presumed dead.
This strikes very hard for Willow Rosenberg who is Buffy's best friend. And she's been living in Sunnydale this whole time, raising her daughter, Frankie, who's an eco-witch and super perky and cute and kind of very much like Buffy and Willow and Sailor Moon all put into one. She just has that kind of energy.
When that happens, the attack at Slayer Fest, Frankie becomes a Slayer. So now she's the first ever Slayer-which, and along with the help of some new friends; a Sage demon, a werewolf who is related to the Osborne clan of werewolves, she has to learn how to be a Slayer and step into her Aunt, quote unquote, Buffy's shoes, while keeping the Hellmouth from rumbling and facing her very own first, Big Bad.
Sarah Enni: Well, that was really well done. Good job.
Kendare Blake: Thank you.
Sarah Enni: So [pauses] how did you even wrap your head around that? How did you get into the canon and think about where you wanted it to go? What was this process like?
Kendare Blake: Oh god, it was so scary, I'm not gonna lie. It was so scary. It was so joyful, but so terrifying. They had an outline of the series. And much like my own outlines, when I outline my series, which are total lies that I give to my publisher because I don't know, as I've told you, how things are going to end I just make something up and it changes later.
They gave me a pretty decent outline for book one and then like a paragraph each on books two and three. Giving me the characters and, "This is the situation. There's been an attack. And, do something with that." And I was like, "Okay, you've given me a starting point. And you've given me characters I can work with. I can work with Willow. I can work with Oz. I can work with Spike."
And those were the characters that if you had asked me to write a dream Buffy book and said, "Which characters do you want?" I would have said those three. Well, except for Buffy herself, of course. I would have always had Buffy.
So I was like, "Oh, this is the best." But I had also heard, I have writer friend who writes in IP, and they've told me like, "Sometimes the rules can be very rigid, especially if there are other things going on within the universe that you have to write around and make everything fit together."
So in the first draft I didn't use Zander at all, even though I needed him for a plot point and I just had to work around it ineffectively. I was afraid that since I hadn't been given express use of Zander, that I couldn't touch him. I could mention him, but he couldn't appear.
And then my editor was like, "Well, wouldn't this work better if it was Zander?" I was like, "It would! Can I have him?" And she said, "Yeah, go ahead." So I wrote a whole other draft using Zander. And that was really fun because I hadn't figured on getting to have Zander's voice on the page and I loved Zander's voice and it was great to be able to use him.
But there were things like that where I was so intimidated about what I could and couldn't do. Obviously there were rules about people you can kill and people you can't kill and what you think characters should be doing or where they're at.
Sarah Enni: I guess part of the difference here is that you are being asked to create canon of your own. Buffy in its world exists. Kiersten White (New York Times bestselling, Bram Stoker Award-winning, and critically acclaimed author of many books, including the And I Darken trilogy, the Slayer series, the Camelot Rising trilogy, and her upcoming adult debut, Hide. Listen to her First Draft interview here) has written some in this universe, there's comic books, so there's, a really expansive universe.
And the wonderful thing about things that exist in those kinds of ways is like, "There's this branch, of whatever. There's this run." And there's a little bit more flexibility, I think, in the minds of fans about what's canon, and what's not. There's a little bit of flexibility with the reality. So I would imagine it'd be a little bit less terrifying.
I was worried about it though, because within this trilogy, what are you intending to be canon? And just the shows. So as far as In Every Generation is concerned, it's just the shows. So it's Buffy and Angel. And anything Buffy related that happened on Angel, like Spike coming back from the dead in Angel and now he's back here. So that's explained through that.
We get to touch on that a little bit and I get to reference stuff from Angel as well as stuff from Buffy. Which is fun cause I was also an Angel fan. Like I followed him over there.
Sarah Enni: What was this experience like, as you say they kind of have an outline for you, were you sending chapters? What was the editorial experience like?
Kendare Blake: I drafted the whole thing over a summer, and I'm doing the same thing over this summer. I wrote the first book last summer and book two this summer book three next summer. And I've basically just got like from June to September, that's Buffy and that's what I'm doing with my time.
And then I just turned it in. And I was kind of worried because I was like, "Well, okay, you gave me this jumping off point and then you gave me the rest of it, but I kind of chucked the rest of it out and just went in a similar, but different, direction."
And then I think at the end of their proposal, they had some snarky send off like, "And then they went out for pie." You know? Like, "Hmm, yeah, save the world and then we'd go out for pie." And I think that's basically all I did. At the end they do go out for pie, but the rest of it was totally not. Like I created my own Big Bad, I had my own character development.
So no, I just gave them the whole thing and then hoped they liked where I went with it. And they did. And then we went back and forth a few times. I think we went through two or three rounds of bigger edits and then two or three rounds of line level edits. And then the arcs came out and then we still hadn't gotten our sensitivity reads back. So it went through one more even after the arcs. But it's fun every time. That is the thing is, Buffy is so much fun.
Sarah Enni: Especially, I can imagine, you're bouncing it with all these bodies who are coming off of the dark fantasy stuff. This is so humor forward. And I know you as a very funny person. So it is funny to think that you just had to spend all this time in this world where you really were restraining yourself and being a little more literary, a little more like serious, and then getting the chance to kind of bust out.
Kendare Blake: Yeah, oh god, I just went hog wild. Nothing is serious. When I was writing In Every Generation, it was during the pandemic, you know? So it was a very, very dark time. And I was using my writing as an escape. Like many of us were. Like, "Let's just get out of this reality and hang out in something that's infinitely better. Even zombie fiction would be better at this point."
Sarah Enni: I was gonna say "Hooray! Demons." Yes, a relief.
Kendare Blake: Yes, anything! Murders. It's great. I love it. But my only goal was to channel [pauses], if you watch Buffy, she matures and the show matures along with the seasons. So with the first book of Every Generation, I was really trying to channel those early season kind of energy, because Frankie is young. She's barely 16 when the book opens, much like Buffy was young.
And Buffy came into the series as an experienced Slayer. You know, she'd already gotten some confidence. She'd been a Slayer for about a year before she shows up in Sunnydale. So she's already got some Slayer swagger. Where Frankie has none. She's so just out of her depth and, she's a real try-hard, that's my Frankie. She's such a try-hard and she's gonna get it in the end, but by golly, she's gonna look pretty foolish for a while.
So I was really wanting for it to feel like a classic Buffy episode and have the things about Buffy that I found super nostalgic. I wanted check-ins that were believable with our beloved characters. I wanted to write a Willow that you could believe, this could be Willow as a mother. I wanted an Oz that, this could be Oz if he's trying to raise his teenage nephew werewolf. This could be Spike. Well, you know, he's Spike.
[Both laugh].
Kendare Blake: And I wanted Scooby meetings in a library. I wanted patrols through the cemetery. I wanted a Big Bad who's kind of wacky and zany, but also super evil. And, of course, I wanted a hot swoony demon, that is a Buffy staple, I'm sorry, he needs to be included. So I just wanted all of that and it really saved my quarantine summer. It was so much fun. And in short, do you watch Cobra Kai?
Sarah Enni: Yes. I've only seen one and a half seasons, but I was obsessed with it.
Kendare Blake: I am obsessed with it. And that is what I was trying to do with Buffy. I was trying to Cobra Kai the hell out of it. I think what Cobra Kai does so brilliantly is it gives you just enough of a callback to give you that... the nostalgia in Cobra, Kai does not feel shoehorned in, whatsoever.
It's just right there. There it is. That's what I want. I want the waxing on and the waxing off, but I want it within a story that is an updated, full-of-heart story in itself. I wanted it to pull from the zeitgeists that surrounded Buffy in the years after the show ended, like Cobra Kai did by making Johnny the character focus.
Sarah Enni: You had a wonderful quote where you said, "If you want to visualize the writing of this book, just imagine the iconic scene from Singing in the Rain, except instead of Gene Kelly, it's me. And instead of that wet street with that lamppost, it's Sunnydale cemetery full of vampires." [Laughs] Which is a really great mental image.
Kendare Blake: That was pretty much it. That was my summer, just swinging through Sunnydale cemetery.
Sarah Enni: On your Instagram, you've also been keeping your followers updated on writing the next fantasy series. You mentioned the code name is Amazon Jedi's. What can you tell us about it? You had, "It features a Fennbirn queen after her reign and after she's left the island - spoiler alert - she's a famous war Queen and I freaking love her." So we have that much information, but what can you tell us about it?
Kendare Blake: So I kind of worry that there's a misconception, that it is another Fennbirn book, it's not. It's not. The Fennbirn queen is in it, she is a character and she's more of a character than I intended. I kind of intended for her to be a cameo, but if you know anything about Fennbirn queens, they do what they want. And she did.
She was like, "No, I'm in it now, deal with me." And I ended up having so much fun writing her. But Amazon Jedi's, the first book should come out in 2023, it got pushed back a year. That was my fault. I didn't realize I miscalculated. Remember when I said that I laid out my calendar? I guess I must have input like an extra 12 months in there, cause I thought I had time to write book two and I didn't.
I started flailing as I was coming to the end of writing Amazon Jedi's one. And I thought, "Well then I'll write Amazon Jedi's two...when?" There was no time! There was absolutely none. So I asked my editor and she said, "It's okay. We can push it back a year." So that'll be 2023 and 2024. And Amazon Jedi's is the perfect code name for it because that is what it is. It's like if the Jedi order was Amazons.
So if you are into, strangely enough, the prequels, the Star Wars prequels, if you like that, like Obi-Wan and Anakin apprentice-master energy, there's a lot of that in Amazon Jedi's. Cause it's about a young girl, an orphan, a foundling, who was found by the order. And now she has to prove herself and pass four tests to become a full member of the order.
And to do that, she has to guide a hero on to his glory and is not supposed to fall in love with that hero. Just an FYI, that's like a little footnote that maybe she missed, but you're not supposed to do that. So, of course, chaos ensues.
Sarah Enni: Oh, I love that! So I know you can't tell us much more than that, but I'm so excited to read it. I want to hear about what this has been like being on this... you had a really intense schedule for the whole previous series, four books.
And then you sort of thought you were in the clear for a minute, and now you have this long stretch where you have to be really committed to a schedule. And that has happened over pandemic and our continuing struggle with the pandemic.
So I would just love to hear about what that's been like for you and what, if anything, you've learned about your process through this?
Kendare Blake: I have been more productive over the pandemic than ever before. And I think that is because a lot of things that were happening in the world, and in my life, made me run straight for my office to hide. I wanted to get away from everything.
Over the year, the first year of the pandemic, my mom, who is mentally ill and physically disabled came to live with me. And I became her caretaker, her 24/7 caretaker, which was an adjustment. And not to say that I was running away from my mom, but I was totally running away from my mom.
Sarah Enni: We've all been there.
Kendare Blake: And she would be like, "Yeah," you know? My mom and I have that kind of relationship where we yell at each other and it's fine. It's fine. I'm always grateful to be on deadline no matter how hard it is, and no matter how it feels like I'm scrambling, or maybe I'm resentful of having to rush, I'm always grateful that someone wants my book.
Like, "Somebody's gonna take this and do something when I'm done with it." And that's a wonderful feeling. But I did feel guilty about missing so many deadlines. I've never missed a deadline before and I missed this one by a year. A year! Whew, yeah. So how has it been for you?
Sarah Enni: Well also really productive for similar reasons. I was like, "Quick, let me do anything besides just read the news all day." It's really hard to even remember back. I don't know if you've done this, but this mind exercise of like, "No, really, what was it like in June of 2020?"
And just mentally bringing back in all the factors that were at play then. And it's like, "Oh yeah, that was horrible." It was a really, really tough, sad, stressful, angry time. And how did we do it? You know?
It's like one of those things where you look back and you're like, "I don't know. I think everyone was just trying, in their own way, to make it through." And for me, making it through meant writing a whole bunch and doing a lot of podcast stuff.
And, for me, I definitely changed how I work. I got a lot more goal-oriented. I was like, "I can't just be doing manic work all the time anymore. I have to be more strategic and figure out my shit." So I did a lot of that work, which will carry forward and I'm really grateful for it. But it was definitely like, "I either do this or I explode mentally."
Kendare Blake: We're what? We're over a year-and-a-half into the pandemic now, over a year-and-a-half. And I don't know if I had it just mentally in my head that this was just gonna last a year and then we'd be back on track, like A-okay.
I think we keep, or at least I do, I keep putting these goalposts in my head and then having to move them like, "Well, if we just make it to the vaccine, then it'll be okay. If we just make it to this, or this, or this. And eventually everything will just go back to normal."
And the fact that it hasn't, and it feels like this 2020, I keep wanting to call it 2020, even though it's almost the end of 2021, because it still feels like 2020. And this whole two year...god, what if it's three year? Three year phase of time when we look back on it, it's going to feel like one congealed, mass of crap.
It's just going to be this blurry... like, I have no idea what time it is. I have no concept of you look back and you think like, "Oh yeah, that was like nine months ago." No idea. There's no sense of that. It's the same thing every single day with no breaks.
I live in the Pacific Northwest, so we have very subtle change of seasons, too. So that doesn't help because it feels like it's all the same. You're in California, you know what I mean? So yeah, it's really, really odd.
Sarah Enni: I've been talking to friends about like, "What do you think?" You know how - and forgive me for bringing 9/11 into this conversation - but you know how when you look at movies that came out the summer before 9/11 happened and you're like, "Wow, that was a different world.” And art just shifted because America shifted.
I've been reading this book about directors that served in World War II and how their art changed after they came back from that. So it's definitely on my mind, like, "What is the landscape gonna be?"
I like to think that we're going to be impacted by this in maybe positive ways, like thinking differently and more realistically about what's important, et cetera, et cetera. But what do you think you could see changing as a result of this?
Kendare Blake: I definitely think that people will have been changed. We've had to come up with a lot of coping skills that we didn't have before. And looking back and seeing how art, in particular, and the things that we consume, the things that we create, changed. I have no idea. I couldn't even hazard a guess.
If I had to hazard a guess about the immediate after, it would be a strict air of refusal. Just denial. I don't want to reflect on this time. I don't want to read fiction about the pandemic. I do not. I want anything else. I want anything else.
Sarah Enni: And again, forgive me for the - 9/11 is such a tortured metaphor for it - but we didn't all of a sudden see a rash of novels or books or movies about 9/11 directly, it was more like, "We've all changed." And the tone of everything. It was like indirectly influential in all these things. And that's what I was thinking cause I'm with you, I am not going to watch a pandemic rom-com, or god knows. You know? None of that.
But there's absolutely going to be just like shades of it in every other thing, and working through how this affects all of the rest of our lives. That's gonna be, I think, the fertile landscape.
Kendare Blake: And I think it'll be more. I think it will be larger. It'll be more expensive than 9/11. Because while 9/11 affected us in the way that we saw the world, and the way that we understood the world changed, 9/11 was something that very few of us had to actually go through, had to actually endure. I didn't lose any family, personally, in 9/11.
I don't think that's going to be the same as we come out of this pandemic. It's going to have, even for those of us who were lucky enough to not lose somebody that we love and know, we also had to live through the experience of it. This is shared. This is worldwide. We have all had the same 18 months. And I have no idea. I mean, what can we say?
I saw a nature documentary about how nature came back to life over the year that we weren't in it. How whales came back, and seabirds had like their best breeding season in like 50 years, and just different ways that nature has rebounded without humanity encroaching on it.
This whole thing almost feels like a huge experiment. There's been no other phenomenon that has affected humanity in the way that this has affected the entirety of humanity. Us staying in, had visible effects on the whole planet. There's nothing like that.
Sarah Enni: And this is why, I mean, there is no answer to it. We're all just gonna have to wait and see. But I will say that I talked to a literary agent - and I really can't remember now who exactly it was - but they were like, "All I can say is the stuff I'm seeing from my clients is weird."
[Both laugh].
Sarah Enni: It's like, "Great. I'm down for that. Everyone get a little kooky. We've all been inside. Just mine in there, see what's there. Let's get weird for a while, cause we gotta shake things up." That's how it really feels.
Well, that was a tangent, but thank you for going with me on this because it's something that's like, obviously top of mind, especially for artists. I'm just like, "What's gonna be relevant? What's gonna be interesting?"
I'd love to wrap up with advice. You know, actually, I'd really love to hear advice for people who might have the opportunity to write in a canon or in an IP environment. Like if you've learned anything about how to coordinate with people, or when to really just go your own way? Or I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.
Kendare Blake: So a lot of that advice is going to be kind of premature because a big part of it is going to be how the book is received. And I keep telling myself this, even though it's hard because Buffy is filled with so much joy, and the writing of it is filled with so much joy, and the book itself is very lighthearted. It's not seasoned too heavy. It doesn't have that drama because it's an introduction to the characters. You need to get to know them before I can really rip them apart and have you care about it.
So Kiersten White, who you mentioned, wrote The Slayer and The Chosen books, like the minute the announcement came out, she DM'd and she's like, "Oh my god, Hey! I'm so excited for these books! And if you ever need anything, you know, just whatever." And if you are writing in an IP and somebody who's written in the IP makes that offer for you, like take them up on it.
Because just knowing that she's there and if I have a Buffy panic moment, I could just be like, "Kiersten, am I doing this wrong?" It's a nice security blanket to have. And also be mindful of your fandom. That's a piece of advice that I have heard, and the Buffy fandom is great and cool and, so far, have been very, very chill.
But some of those fandoms, depending on which you're writing for, can get kind of intense. Be prepared to be challenged by the fandom, and to have your choices challenged. And also understand that that's a valid challenge because for something like Buffy, or for something like Star Wars, it's been around for even longer, or something like Lord of the Rings. It's been around long enough, and consumed by enough of us, that we all feel a sense of ownership over it.
And you're not going to please everyone. And some fans who, despite sharing a love for it like you do, are going to feel like you did it completely wrong. And you have to expect that. I'm saying this for myself as much as anyone else, because I'm trying to prepare for that because it's going to hurt.
But I understand that. Because you want someone to write more of this thing that you love, but you don't want them to write more of this thing you love because you want them to touch it, but you don't want them to touch it too much or in the wrong way. So yeah. Fandom's complicated.
Sarah Enni: Oh Kendare, this is so fun. Thank you so much for giving me all this time today.
Kendare Blake: Oh, well thank you for having me. And I hope that we can do this someday again in person and just hang out, but I'm grateful for this podcast because it has given us an excuse to continue to get together over the years.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I agree. It's been fun.
Kendare Blake: And I can't wait to see what you're doing next because I really loved Tell Me Everything. My friend and I were just talking about it this morning. Cause I continually send it with her on vacation. I'm like, "This is the perfect vacation read. Read it now. You're gonna love it!"
Sarah Enni: Amazing! Ahh, thank you. That's so sweet.
Thank you so much to Kendare. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @KendareBlake and follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram) and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram).
First Draft is produced by me, Sarah Enni. Today's episode was produced and sound designed by Callie Wright. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks to social media director, Jennifer Nkosi and transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson.
And as ever, thanks to all you Scooby's, for listening.
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