Today I recognized the holiday.....

I wore a long-sleeved white shirt open over my red tank top and blue shorts. I added blue earrings and white sneakers and went off to to leohat's bbq. I picked up the red, white, and blue flowers on the way. Also cupcakes. The deck was nice, but the rain chased us inside.

Oh yeah, some of the neighbors were making things go boom. We shut the door so we could hear each other talk. :)

LKH - interview excerpts

I thought these were pretty good. I am trying not to give spoilers, but if you follow the links you may get some - at least for Blue Moon & onward.

On her education:

My degree in biology is probably one of the main reasons my "monsters" seem so real. I start with real animals for my were-animals. I try to use as much "real" science as I can.

On using real people as characters:

I do not use real people as characters. I'm superstitious. Bad things happen in my books. What if I killed someone off and then a few days later the person I based the character on also died horribly.

Anita's genesis:

Out of college, I started reading a lot of hard-boiled detective fiction [with both male and female protagonists.] The men got to cuss, the women rarely; the men got to kill people and not feel bad about it, if the women killed someone they had to feel really, really bad about it afterward and it had to be an extreme situation; the men got to have sex, often and on stage and very casually, but if the women had sex it had to be off stage, very sanitized and they had to feel guilty about it afterwards. I thought this was unfair.
- in The SF Site

On research:

When I did Guilty Pleasures [I interviewed a policeman.] Asking about ghouls in a cemetery raiding graves, I said ‘I know that in real life that doesn’t happen,’ and he got the strangest look on his face. And he said, ‘People have teeth too.’ He had been called to cemeteries where people had raided graves and done pretty much what I was writing about, except not as thoroughly. That was the moment I realized that anything I’ll ever come up with on paper has already been done. Once you take out the magic system or the stuff that won’t work with physics as we know it, I cannot invent anything they haven’t already done."
- from Locus Online

Advice for new writers?

( You mean I have to, like, write? )

On sex scenes

( ... )

For five books and every crime scene, the camera had never flinched. So what did that say about me that when it came time to have sex on paper I wanted to flinch? It says I’m very American. We’re fine with violence; sex makes us uncomfortable.

Jean-Claude had been a ladies man for over 400 years. And he’s French. After five books of buildup, it had to be good. That first scene was the hardest.

On writing about multiple partners:

For research, I interviewed some households that have three people in a “couple.”
- from St Louis Post-Dispatch