So Much For Normal. An Interview with Kiersten White

Kiersten White is the author of Paranormalcy, which hit stores August 31. It is a super fun book and totally original! If you haven't heard about Paranormalcy, here's a description from Goodreads:

Weird as it is working for the International Paranormal Containment Agency, Evie's always thought of herself as normal. Sure, her best friend is a mermaid, her ex-boyfriend is a faerie, she’s falling for a shape-shifter, and she’s the only person who can see through paranormals' glamours, but still. Normal.

Only now paranormals are dying, and Evie's dreams are filled with haunting voices and mysterious prophecies. She soon realizes that there may be a link between her abilities and the sudden rash of deaths. Not only that, but she may very well be at the center of a dark faerie prophecy promising destruction to all paranormal creatures.


How long did it take your to write Paranormalcy? Did you find it any easier writing Supernaturally versus Paranormalcy?

Paranormalcy took me three weeks. Supernaturally took me four months. That ought to give you a good idea about which was easier! Paranormalcy I wrote for fun, but writing a book under contract was a very new experience, and much more stressful than I had anticipated. Still, I'm very proud of how Supernaturally turned out, and very glad I got to write it!

Is there a genre you could never see yourself writing?

Dystopian. I don't think I could maintain that level of bleak oppression for an entire book! Although my pet project right now is a ghost story, so I don't mind dipping into dark and borderline horror. I think the other issue with dystopians is their emphasis on the government and really the entire country/world being a huge factor. I like to put the fantastic into a real world setting, rather than building an entirely new world and putting normal things back into it.

So you said Paranormalcy is your 4th novel, what were the other 3 about?

One was a disastrously boring middle grade time travel novel, and the other two were part of a suspense/paranormal action series that I may return to someday.

I hear you've got an essay in The Visitor's Guide to Mystic Falls. Are you Team Damon or Team Stefan?

I am team Elena, Matt, Caroline, and Bonnie leaving town and never going back. Just kidding. Kind of. Probably Team Damon, because he's the only one who ever seems to have any fun on the show!

Paranormalcy is your debut novel. Have you read any other 2010 debuts that you really enjoyed?

Yes, absolutely! So many. I really liked Nightshade by Andrea Cremer, and Stephanie Perkins' Anna and the French Kiss is one of my all-time favorite books. Daisy Whitney's The Mockingbirds was a delicate yet powerful treatment of a very hard topic, and another instant recommendation.

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Thank you Kiersten!

You can find Kiersten on the web at her website, blog, and also twitter!

You can also find the fabulous Kiersten White on tour this fall! I'm super jealous of anyone who gets to go, because Kiersten seems fabulous. She will be in Oceanside, CA; Salt Lake City, UT; Tempe, AZ; Naperville, IL; Allen, TX; Austin, TX; and La Mesa, CA in the next few weeks. You can find out all the details here