Questions

CHARLAINE HARRIS ANSWERS QUESTIONS FROM
HER FANS
Thanks to all of you for your enthusiastic response to the opportunity to ask me
questions. If I didn’t get to answer your specific question, I apologize in advance
for your disappointment. Here’s the selection process we followed: BFF Paula, my
invaluable best friend and assistant, sorted the questions into categories. She
discarded some of the duplicates, since obviously there was no point in my reading
the same thing over and over. I read all her choices, and I narrowed the field down
to about fifty questions. Then I eliminated a few more after a second winnowing.
This wasn’t an easy process, so let me explain why I chose to answer some and not
others.
First, if I thought the answer was already in the books, I felt it would be a waste
of my time to reply to the question. Second, if I knew the answer would be
included in future books . . . I put those aside, too, for the most part. Third, if the
question was based on the television show mythology rather than the book
mythology, of course I wasn’t going to venture my opinion.
Some questions I bypassed simply because I didn’t know the answer, or
because I hadn’t made up my mind yet. In some cases, the development of the
books’ mythology hadn’t led me to a conclusion on the correct response, and in
other cases, I simply don’t know yet if (for example) Eric’s other child will be a
factor in Sookie’s story.
I’ve corrected some of the spelling and a bit of the punctuation in some of these
questions. I’m compelled to do that.
So, here goes.
Since the True Blood TV series began, do you picture your characters as the
actors? I mean, when you’re writing about Sookie, do you picture Anna Paquin?
Or in your head do they just look the way you’ve always thought of them?
— KIM HAMBLETON
They look the way I’ve always thought of them. I’ve been writing the books
much longer than the show has been on the air.
Here is my big general question for Charlaine. I’m curious about her
plotting. How much of it does she do in advance and how much of it is
spontaneous? It just amazes me how some seemingly minor details in one book
turn out to be huge later on. For example, Sookie mentions her cousin Hadley,
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