Interview and Giveaway with Patricia Briggs!

Drum roll, please! *Suz starts banging on a drum* UTC is thrilled to present our January Author of the Month! We present to you, Patricia Briggs! Patricia Briggs is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the vastly popular Mercy Thompson and Alpha and Omega series. If you haven't read any of these fantastic urban fantasy reads yet, then you are missing out majorly! Don't fret, UTC has you covered. You can check out her books on her website here.

Now without stalling any longer, please help us welcome our Author of the Month, Patricia Briggs!

Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to chat with us! Let’s get started! Tell us 5 things about you that will surprise us.

Although I have a major in German, I cannot speak it – proof that I will not quit something despite empirical evidence that I have no ability in that area. Happily I am quite good at history, which is my other major.

Outside of writing/SF conventions, I am shy. Any of you who have been to a book signing or convention I’ve attended will probably be surprised. I have trouble calling people I don’t know on the phone.

I am just starting to breed Arabian horses. Though gray is my least favourite color of horse, the first mare I’ve bred is gray – and I bred her to a gray stallion. Color actually doesn’t mean much to me in horses <grin>.

My husband and I bought an old carousel to restore and populate it with animals. I expect this endeavour to take us ten years.

I drive a Toyota. (Though my daughter’s car is a VW Jetta and we’ve had three other Jettas, two Vanagons, a Eurovan, and a Passat.)

Fair Game, the third instalment of the Alpha Omega series is releasing soon. Cue excited squeals. What can readers expect from this eagerly anticipated release?

If you haven’t been reading the Alpha and Omega books, you need to catch up because things happen in this one that will affect Mercy greatly. Also, Boston, serial killers, werewolves and fae – it’s got to be a fun ride, right?

Your books cover a combination of supernatural creatures, from shifters and vampires, to the fae and ghosts. Which one do you like to write about the most?

Werewolves are my favorite, but this is a trick question. There are so many different kinds of fae to choose from. If you add them all up then I suspect that they top even the werewolves. Especially since, quite often, I can give a nod to old fairy tales that I and about two other people in the world have read.

How did you celebrate when your first book was published?

We bought a Buick with 100,000 miles on it and a salvage title (because it had been caught it a flood in Florida – though we lived in Montana) that didn’t run because it was a pretty color. Rebuilt the engine and then drove it for the next seven years – and every darn time we drove it to my husband’s parent’s house it died (nearest available parts were 70 miles away).

When you started writing, did you ever expect to gain the success you have?

Oh, when my first book was published, I knew it would be a best seller <grin>. By the time I’d published two or three books I was just happy to be published and would never have dreamed that my career would take off the way it has. Oddly enough, I was right, though. When Masques was republished last year it hit the NY Times. So my first book hit the NY Times – fifteen years later <grin>.

What would you say is the best part of your job?

Getting up every day to go play with my imaginary friends and not getting locked up in a funny farm!
You've put Mercy through some tough situations. As an author, how do you handle that?

The best characters take a licking and keep on ticking. It’s not the only purpose of storytelling – but certainly one of them – is to show readers that bad things happen to us all, and it’s possible to move on and still be happy. Fantasy, the kind of fantasy that I write anyway, is about bringing hope to hopeless situations.

You've recently revisited some of your earlier works, like Masques. Did you change anything from the original stories? What made you go back to them?

Masques got a polish that wanted to be a deep sanding to remove all the rough spots – but I was afraid there would be nothing left when I was done. I am a better writer now than I was when I started, and I’m the better part of two decades older. It was difficult not to write an entirely different book – but that wasn’t the point of the exercise. It took me longer to do than if I’d just written a new book, but I’m pleased with the balance of old and new.

Masques had been out of print for a very long time and there was a big demand for it. I also had a sequel written that I liked quite a bit that had never been published. But I didn’t want to republish a book that wasn’t as good as my current books for fear that someone would pick it up and be disappointed. So the solution was to revise the original.

What are your plans for the next Mercy Thompson book?

I’ll start writing it tomorrow and have a better handle on it. Let me just say that I’m very glad not to be the protagonist in an urban fantasy series. Poor Mercy. Vampires, I think, this time. And the afore mentioned events that are going to start snowing trouble down on Mercy and the Columbia Basin Pack.

I think Mercy is a favorite heroine for many people in the UF genre because she seems very real. But which heroine would YOU like to take out for a drink?

I think either Elena (the name of both the werewolf from Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten/Stolen etc and the vampire hunter from Nalini Singh’s Archangel series) would be fun. And relatively safe for all of us.

If Adam could have a "guys night out" with a character from any other book, who would it be and what would they do?

I’m trying to think. Curran (from Ilona Andrew’s Kate Daniels series) would be uncomfortable, at least until they’d worked things out. Harry Dresdeon and Adam would get along just fine – but they don’t have a lot in common (Samuel would play D&D with Harry and his werewolf buddies). I think that Adam would do quite well with either Micah or Jean Claude (from Laurel K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series). He’d go hiking with Micah – or to Les Miserables with Jean Claude.

Thank you so much for stopping by UTC today and sharing with us!

Because Patricia Briggs is our author of the month and we are huge fans of her work and think everyone should read all her stuff, we want to give you the chance to win ANY book of your choice from her backlist OR we will pre-order Fair Game for you, which releases March 6!  Whether you're an old fan or a newbie or somewhere in between you can win!  This giveaway is open internationally and will last all month long.

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2. Fill out the form below