Author Patricia Briggs exhales supernatural ‘Smoke.’
Patricia Briggs is the author of the urban fantasy series starring coyote shapeshifter Mercy Thompson. At a time when the bookstore is chocked full of superhuman women fighting the supernatural, Thompson has always stood out as the best of the bunch. Now as Briggs releases the 12th book in the series, “Smoke Bitten,” we had a chance to ask her about her famous hero.
Q: How do you decide the general moral compasses of your fictional races in the Mercy Thompson books?
A: Part of the answer is that I didn’t want it to be easy to be a member of any of the various supernatural races, and I kept that it mind when I took a good look at folklore and set up the characteristics of the various races. Once I had those — then I had the conditions of existence of my characters. Being a good witch, a white witch, means choosing to be fodder for any black witch who happens upon you. Evil means power. Being a vampire means that you are willing to kill someone else in order to stay alive. Tough to be a good guy when that is a condition of your existence.
Q: One thing you expand on a lot in the books is the wide range of interests that your characters have. Are those things tied to your own interests or is there some other reasons you always assign characters hobbies?
A: My characters are my imaginary friends — and I want them to feel like that for readers. I want them to feel like they have a life that continues outside of their time strolling along the pages of my stories. That means that they do things that aren’t on the pages, the same kinds of things I do with my life when I’m not writing.
Q: Do you ever feel a disconnect between the way Mercy is portrayed on covers or in comics and the way you describe her in books, particularly regarding her Native ancestry?
A: Dan do Santos’ covers are based on a real-life model who tended bar across the street from the place he was living when he got the commission. I saw the first sketches of Mercy while I was still writing the first book. So, the Mercy on the cover of the books … is the person I see in my head when I’m writing the books … I was a little concerned because the person on the covers doesn’t look obviously Native. Neither does Mercy in the books. I was speaking to a group of Native Americans and brought that up myself. I was told that Natives are Natives, no matter what they look like. Which sounded very wise to me.
Q: How do you make sure that Mercy stands apart from all the other protagonists in urban fantasy?
A: When I began the series, that was a consideration, but by this point, Mercy is a person to me. I know who she is, how she thinks and why she believes the things she does. I never worry about her being too similar to other people’s protagonists, because to me, she is an individual. I understand her better than I understand myself.
Q: A friend of mine described the werewolves in the early Mercy books as “fragile masculinity theater.” Agree or disagree?
A: My husband was the oldest of seven in a family of very dominant personalities with territorial drives—where politeness mattered and might very well dictate survival regardless of whether someone was masculine or feminine. I used my experiences with them to inform my werewolf interactions … I decided that a group run by men whose formative years could be centuries in the past — well that added a lot of sexism to the situation. I could have chosen differently, I suppose, but it made me sublimely happy to throw my coyote in the midst of the injustice and see what she would do.