How My Writer’s Library Helps My Writing and Research

Fantasy and science fiction readers are naturally open to the unexpected, and they like new takes on old stories. The trick is to bend expectations enough while keeping things believable. My in-house writing library helps me maintain authenticity while pushing the boundaries of my characters to make them fresh and interesting to contemporary audiences.

(Avoid Common Research Pitfalls in Historical Fiction.)

As a writer, it probably won't shock anyone to know that I grew up loving to read. But there are a few details people may not know about me that inform my writing today. When we were children, my sister and I had a beautiful set of encyclopedias in our house. The leather-bound reference books proved to be a never-ending source of wonder as I perused the pages, eager to read their seemingly inexhaustible contents. The other detail is that as a child, I would ride my bike to the Los Angeles Public Library branch near my home and sit on the floor for hours, pulling books off the shelves. Many years later, I became a newspaper reporter, eager to glean the facts of my stories before putting them down on paper.

This brings me quite obviously to vampires. Traditionally, vampires only come out at night. In Dracula, the inky blackness of the midnight hour is terror-filled as the vampire stalks poor, unsuspecting Mina while she sleeps. Her dreams are full of longing for a beast she cannot name, only to awaken with small puncture marks upon her neck in the morning. For decades, in most vampire novels or movies, everything terrible happens after the sun goes down. Lights are turned on, fires are stoked, but no one, it seems, is immune to the ruthless hunters as they stalk their prey. Thanks to Dracula and countless similar stories, we learned that the only way to kill a vampire is to drive a stake through its heart, cut off its head, or expose it to direct sunlight.

But what if you want your vampires to walk in the daylight and drink whisky? The answer, of course, is an encyclopedia, specifically one devoted to “Vampires, Werewolves and Other Monsters.” Written by Rosemary Ellen Guiley, it’s a masterful A-Z guide of everything you need to know to stay true to the genre. In her introduction, Dr. Guiley writes, “The vampire is the entity, force or presence that brings illness, misfortune, death, and destruction. It is the demon parasite that threatens to suck health, vitality, and life away from its victims.” That is, of course, the basic framework of what vampires signify. If you want to know how to move away from that trope and blaze a new path for an ancient horror character, you have to understand their beginnings so you can write them into a new future.

In my case, the vampires in The Others, the first book of The Council Trilogy, my new urban fantasy series set in San Francisco, work for the common good of humanity rather than against it. They are players in a secret society of supernatural beings that meddle in human affairs to keep the balance between good and evil stable. William and Josef appear in the daytime and drink Jack Daniels neat when it suits them. Ethereal William, with his creamy white skin and shocking red hair, is also known to eat a bit of raw fish now and again, his almost 200-year-old body able to digest what younger vampires cannot tolerate. Of course, he still feeds, drinks blood—and offers his own to Olivia, the book’s heroine, to help heal her wounds after she’s been gravely injured.

Olivia unlocks her hidden supernatural gifts with the help of a strong peyote tea brewed by her spirit guide, Elsa. I picked up some important physical characteristics of the peyote plant using a slender but impactful book in my library called Wicked Plants, by Amy Stewart, which is a delicious compendium of deadly plants that can and do kill.

My small but burgeoning writer’s library is full of helpful books I can turn to at a moment's notice to help assemble the contents of a deadly potion, identify a lethal weapon that can be worn under a cocktail dress, or choose the proper offerings for a Voodoo altar. When I was working on my series, I knew that I wanted my main characters to be modern versions of witches, vampires, and shapeshifters who hide in plain sight of the people around them. 

But there must always be a connection to the origins of the species for our characters, no matter how much we push them to evolve. William, for example, can be an ambulance driver in World War I, but he can’t go to a fancy restaurant and eat a three-course dinner with a rack of lamb and mashed potatoes. Make no mistake, they are old souls, and their centuries of experience help create the book’s tension, but they also don't sleep in a box filled with dirt from their homeland to survive like Dracula.

I love and still use public libraries for research. After one particular visit to the Main Library in Seattle, where all the books about witchcraft were checked out, I knew I had to have a collection at my fingertips. My library includes books about witchcraft, tarot cards, astrology, ancient weapons, poisonous plants, and cursed objects, to name a few. The latter is of particular interest to me as I am toying with a new series that involves retrieving magical objects that have been lost or stolen—a particularly dangerous avocation. I can’t wait to dig into my research to identify what the first adventure will be about. I may even have to head out to flea markets and garage sales in search of curious objects to collect. There is nothing I love more than adding to my library. 

Check out Evette Davis' The Others here:

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