Thursday, February 19, 2009

Charlaine Harris is writing a Sookieverse Sci-Fi novella starring Batanya and Clovache, the Britlingens from All Together Dead

This interesting article has an even more interesting footnote

Several readers have been asking about Batanya and Clovache, two Britlingens -- Xena-style women warriors from an alternate dimension -- who popped up in Harris' last Sookie Stackhouse novel, All Together Dead, which should just be coming out in paperback. (It seems the vampire monarchs hire these formidable creatures as bodyguards and general muscle, although how the two sides originally made contact is still up in the air.)

Harris said a novella starring the Britlingens is in the works.

Charlaine also mentioned this in the Arkansas Education Television interview last week

and on her blog


Mystery writer finds progress in Fantasy Tales


http://www.starnewsonline.com/

Charlaine Harris was pushing 50 as the new millennium dawned and felt she was stuck in a rut.

After nearly two decades, she'd published 12 books and earned an Agatha nomination for one of her mystery novels about Aurora Teagarden, a crime-fighting Georgia librarian. Still, she was pigeonholed as what booksellers call a "mid-list writer" - nice but unspectacular sales, no movie deals, virtual anonymity and absolutely no danger of being audited by the IRS.

"I wanted to progress," Harris said, in a phone call from her Arkansas home, "and I wasn't getting any younger."

Then she started playing around with a fantasy story, but one stuck firmly in a mundane world. What if vampires popped up around us - still a little exotic but as commonplace as, say, Democrats, bikers or Goth kids with tattoos and piercings?

The result was her 2001 novel Dead Until Dark, the first volume in her "Southern Vampire" series. The primary setting is Bon Temps, a small town in northern Louisiana. It's sort of a Cajun version of Mayberry, except that the folks in the trailer parks are likely as not to be werewolves (or werepanthers, or werebears or true shapeshifters, who can turn into just about anything).

Oh, and the vampires are out of the closet, er, coffin. At least after sundown.

In Harris' alternate universe, the Japanese invented a synthetic blood substitute that even comes in handy pop-top cans at the local convenience store. No longer forced to be feared and hunted predators, the vampire-American community has mostly gone public.

Read on

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