To start off this reboot, we’ll be chatting it up with Kathrin Hutson so we can all find out why we should dive into the Accessory to Magic Series that begins with Book 1, The Witching Vault.
1. Greetings, Kathrin and so lovely to have you on the blog. I believe this series is a bit of a departure from what you normally delve into. Can you tell people a bit about who you are, where you’re from, and what people can know you from?
Hi, JD! Thanks so much for having me here!
A bit about who I am, eh? Well, I’ve known since I was ten that I wanted to do nothing but this writing gig, and after many twists and turns along the bumpy road of life, I finally made writing fiction my full-time job in October 2019. My husband is a stay-at-home dad to our four-year-old daughter, and I get to lock myself in my office all day to destroy my keyboard. 99% of that is actual writing. 1% may be fantasizing about actually destroying my keyboard.
I’m originally from Colorado in the US. My husband and I have spent an average of 2.5 years each in South Carolina, California, and Vermont (yes, in that order), and we ended up back here again in Colorado in July 2020. So I suppose I’ve done a bit of “returning to my roots”, though I’m sure this is probably just another stepping stone in our wanderlust-y journey.
You’re absolutely right in saying the Accessory to Magic series is a “bit of a departure” for me, as far as my backlog of genres goes. Historically, I’d been writing Grimdark Epic Fantasy and LGBTQ+ Dystopian Sci-Fi. The latter may be the genre in which I’d previously had the most success with my Blue Helix series. Both books in that series so far—Sleepwater Beat and Sleepwater Static (and there will be more) became international bestsellers and were Sci-Fi Finalists in the 2019 and 2020 International Book Awards, respectively.
So yes, the Accessory to Magic series—as the dark, violent, chaotic, hilarious Urban Fantasy/Cozy Mystery/action-packed Adventure that it is—brings a bit of a twist to my repertoire. And there’s a decent chance that in the near future, this series may just in fact be what more people know me from than any of my other works. I’m pretty excited about that.
2. Lol I hope no keyboards are ever harmed in the creation of your books. That’s cool though to take such a sharp turn to explore something new. So tell us, what is a spellbound bank and how does Jessica end up in her predicament?
That right there is the question Jessica Northwood asks herself over and over throughout this series. What, exactly, is this bank?
Well, the bank is a bank, of course—with a vault that’s “bigger on the inside” (thanks, Dr. Whoreferences) and which houses safety deposit boxes for all the magical and mundane possessions of Winthrop & Dirledge Security Banking’s eclectic and oftentimes dangerous clientele. And it’s so much more than that.
The bank also protects one of the only still-standing portals into another world—the birthplace of magic—and has a few disastrously convoluted rules about who and what may see, handle, investigate, or command said Gateway.
I took one of my favorite “definitions” of Urban Fantasy—a world where the setting and environment itself takes on a life of its own to become something of a “character” itself in the story—to a whole new level with this series. It had always been my intention to make the actual building itself a sentient being that interacted with Jessica, but to my great surprise when I was writing The Witching Vault, I discovered the bank actually had a voice. A real one. And it eventually takes up telepathic space in Jessica’s head for the majority of the series’ comic relief. One reader described the bank as “an annoying older sibling who’s only trying to help”, but in the least helpful ways and, of course, without a physical body. I’ve fallen in love with the bank, and many of my readers have expressed their own surprise at coming to love a sentient building as one of their all-time favorite characters. Success!
Jessica finds herself in the predicament of owning Winthrop & Dirledge Security Banking and becoming the new Guardian through no fault of her own. She’s an institutionalized ex-criminal recently released from magical prison and is looking for nothing more than a stable job to pay the bills so she can turn over a new leaf and get on with her life. Little does she know her new apprenticeship at this magical bank is just the first step in a series of wildly chaotic and oftentimes life-threatening yet hilarious adventures with the bank, Jessica’s own past and personal demons, and the magical world of Golden Colorado. She and the bank are learning together through trial and error, and the reader gets whisked along with them over the entire series.
3. Now that is pretty epic indeed and reminds me like the building version of Terry Pratchett’s suitcase, but in building form. That’s pretty awesome. Actually, magic is something that fascinates so many of us. I’m curious, how does magic work in your urban fantasy setting and what can you tell us about the research done for spells, magic systems, and the Lore of the Accessory to Magic Series?
Magic has always fascinated me too. In this Urban Fantasy setting, the magical world is concealed from humans mostly through “human illusions” magicals cast on themselves, if necessary, and hidden pockets of “magical safehouses”—places where magicals are allowed to be themselves and can let down their guard, so to speak. Winthrop & Dirledge is one of these places.
As the series develops, we discover with Jessica that the Gateway in second-story hallway of the bank right next to her new bedroom—which she was magically forced to move into—is a portal into a different world. One of the last if not the last active portals in existence. As I’ve already mentioned, that other world is the birthplace of magic and the origin of all magicals who crossed over centuries ago before “assimilating” on Earth. And Jessica just so happens to find herself intertwined—both professionally and semi-romantically—with the infuriating fae Leandras. Like all fae (at least according to the widely accepted lore in multiple cultures), Leandras is aloof, mysterious, a bit of a dark and manipulative trickster, sexy in an exasperatingly untrustworthy way, insanely powerful, and just as impossible to decipher at first glance as Jessica.
These two have their work cut out for them when their fates are intrinsically sewn together regarding the protection and eventual opening of the Gateway. Plus, their clashing personalities create a wild ride of emotional tension (good and bad), an excellent partnership in epic battle scenes, a wealth of unraveling mysteries, and an opportunity for both of them to discover more about themselves just through being forced to face it in each other.
Leandras is also the key to the lore of this other world, Xahar’áhsh—his world—but Jessica has to fight at almost every turn to pry the information and knowledge from him, and it seems to always come with a price.
As far as spells and magic systems go, I’ve never really been a fan of uttered spells in dialogue (or wands). Magicals in this series have their own internal magic and abilities based on their race, and I prefer to let them summon their own power just like we mere mortals summon ours. To me, having to utter words for the use of magic seems as unnecessary as me standing from my desk and saying, “Left foot, step forward.” It’s an extension of the characters, though for spells and rituals requiring large amounts of magical fuel, groups of magicals come together for incantations to pool their own intrinsic magic together.
I don’t focus so much on the actual words of these incantations (I know… a writer not focusing on the actual words?) but instead on the emotions and physical sensations they evoke when being cast. That probably comes from my own experience working with my own personal and intentional magic. I’m definitely a spiritual person, non-religious, and while I’d prefer not to label my own form of spirituality, I’d say I most closely align with calling myself an Eclectic Pagan. So I do draw a lot of my inspiration in this series’ magic system and lore from my knowledge of Pagan rights, rituals, and lore.
One of the most exciting parts of creating a new world, in my opinion, is coming up with new and never-before-seen magical races I get to introduce in the characters Jessica meets along her journey. There are a few pre-existing races in the Accessory to Magic series—fae, witches, warlocks, elves, dwarves, orcs, trolls, giants, and ogres (those last six in my mind will always carry a certain physical “look” as seen in Blizzard’s World of Warcraft game. Yes, I also WoW). But then I’ve gotten to take it a little farther with races like Jessica’s very specific brand of witch as a vestrohím (destruction and chaos magic), cruorcian mages (blood magic), and changelings (unlike the historical Celtic rendition of a changeling being a fae child who was swapped out for a human child at birth, this series changelings are basically shapeshifters—a hand becomes a sword or a cup, a face becomes someone else’s, etc.). The Umbál, Matahg, Kulmáro, and Brúkii (not to mention the other races we eventually see in Books 4 and 5 that don’t even exist on Earth) are completely of my own making. Plus, there’s an immortal lizard.
4. Wow that’s a big ole deep dive into magic, though I have to admit wondering how you pronounce Xahar’áhsh and then trying to say it three times fast. But I digress, back to questions! Imagine there’s an oracle that has read your fortune for this series. What’s the biggest surprise the oracle will reveal?
So I have to pretend to be my own oracle, huh? Ha!
What I do know that’s already been outrageously surprising is that this series has already (five months after publishing Book 1) surpassed my wildest expectations as far as how much readers seem to love it as much as I do. Don’t get me wrong, I know my books just aren’t for some people, and that’s okay! Isn’t that the point? We write different things for different tastes (and I definitely don’t like every book I’ve ever read, either).
Honestly, it’s hard to prophesy my own “biggest surprise” (wouldn’t that mean it’s no longer a surprise? This is deep I can go into the rabbit hole of my own mind…). I guess that’d be a tie between one of my favorite fantasy authors, say Neil Gaiman or Jacqueline Carey, picking up these books and saying they loved them, and someone wanting to option the film/TV rights. That would definitely be a surprise.
5. We DEFINITELY write for our audiences and to please ourselves, not the mythical market place lol. Still sending positive vibes so those surprises come along, because why not. Anyways, back to the interview! As a genre, urban fantasy challenges writers by having them meld the fantastical with the real to the point where lines are blurred and we don’t know where the story begins and where the facts end. What are some real world facts and details that had to be in your book?
Oh, boy. Honestly, I think I’d chosen to put off writing Urban Fantasy for so long because of the real-world facts and details. Hands down, without a doubt, the absolute least enjoyable part of the writing process for me is the research. And to make Urban Fantasy believable, yes. Research must occur.
This is the first series I’ve ever set in my home state of Colorado. Winthrop & Dirledge Security Banking is in Golden, Colorado, which I spent a lot of time in during high school because a friend of mine lived there. I know the neighborhood fairly well. And I think I probably chose the city of Golden because I’d always felt a little “off” there, like I didn’t quite belong. Jessica gets to feel that 1,000% more in this series.
So yes, when I research, it’s always about places, locations, directions (like how to take the East Colfax RTD bus to the Denver Public Library when any and every magical stranger is staring at you). For the most part, though, I got to keep Jessica inside the bank, where she doesn’t exactly feel safe. But I do!
6. Ha, that’s pretty cool and I also enjoy further exploring places I’ve been in and sharing those experiences. Super cool. By the way, you write in a variety of genres, from sci-fi, to dystopian, and tackle a variety of topics that some people might shy away from. What are some of the most challenging things you’ve faced before and which challenges piqued your interest to begin this new series?
I love this question so much! The most difficult challenges in terms of topics I’ve tackled in my books definitely came from my LGBTQ+ Dystopian series, Blue Helix. Sleepwater Beat wrangled homelessness, childhood trauma and abuse, drug addiction and addiction survival, suicide, the LGBTQ+ community, serious familial betrayal, living on the fringes of society… I could go on and on. So much of that book reflected so much of my life. Most of this was of course from my own experiences before 2010, when I finally got clean from a heroin addiction and started the process of completely revamping my life. Little tiny details with big connections to my personal story. At least, they felt personal to me.
Sleepwater Static tackled discrimination and “fear of the other” as well, but in a different way. I wanted to also touch on racial discrimination and racial injustice, systemic racism, interracial relationships, and biracial families, all blended in with overlapping topics from the first book (plus some fun new ones like toxic relationships, emotional abuse, and gaslighting). I’m fully aware of my privilege in never having experienced being the target of racism, and I have experienced being discriminated against for other things throughout my life as a queer person, a woman, a recovered heroin addict. I know what it’s like to watch my loved ones suffer, to give birth to and raise a child, to cut all ties with family members who believed certain things and acted in certain ways I just couldn’t accept as right on a fundamental level.
As a privileged white woman (forget all my other attributes), writing a book that touches on systemic racism and genetic mutation among everything else was nerve-wracking enough. I did so much research, used some phenomenal sensitivity readers, and bashed my head against the wall countless times hoping I wasn’t “doing it wrong”. Releasing that same book about systemic racism and genetic mutation the day after George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis and at the height of the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic just starting to find new “mutated” strands was one of the most strangely prescient things I’ve ever done. And it felt incredibly, powerfully right.
Oddly enough, with the Accessory to Magic series, I honestly didn’t intend to put nearly as much of myself into Jessica Northwood as I ended up doing (go figure). Yes, from the very beginning, she was always meant to start off as an institutionalized ex-con newly released from magical prison. No, I haven’t been to prison, but I have been to jail and have gone through the legal system with criminal charges (which, after a lot of hard work, were expunged like they never even happened). And that was as far as I thought I would go.
As it turned out, Jessica and I might even have more in common than I had with Leo Tieffler (the main character of Sleepwater Beat). The Accessory to Magic series touches a little on drug addiction, on normalizing queer relationships, and on emotional abuse through familial power dynamics (“created” family, though, not blood relations). But the biggest topic I ended up tackling with this series was actually the terrifying, chaotic, inconceivable, and paradoxical journey of tackling one’s own inner demons.
Jessica’s still running from her past. She stripped away half her magic and locked it up in a tin box in her underwear drawer, because she didn’t want to make the same devastating mistakes she made when she was whole and had the power to truly be herself. For a long time, I ran from my past too. Only I didn’t have a vestrohím’s chaos magic—I had my writing. I locked that up for four whole years after I got clean, because I didn’t believe I deserved it after having, in my mind, “chosen to abandon my writing for heroin”. Only when I finally forgave myself and allowed myself to be whole again—to open that box of my magic and use it for good through my writing—did I really discover how little I had to run from in the first place. My demons were already exhausted. All I had to do was keep moving forward one step at a time.
Jessica, on the other hand, still has very real demons coming after her, and they…are…deadly. A handful of readers who’ve picked up this series have expressed intense frustration with Jessica’s stubbornness, that she does the exact opposite of what she’s told to do even and especially when there’s no additional information or evidence to back up why she must do as she’s told. That’s something I’ve always struggled with—doing or not doing something just because everyone tells me I should or shouldn’t. I have to figure out the right path for myself. We all do, in our own way. And just like Jessica, I’m still learning that I can neither blame myself for nor define myself by my past mistakes—nor can I do what has to be done on my own journey completely on my own without reaching out for help and guidance from others.
That doesn’t mean either one of us necessarily has to like it… So I’d definitely say she gets that stubbornness from me.
7. Ha! If I unpacked all my characters and which flaws that’d be its own book. Do appreciate such deep answers though. Switching things up though, magical potions are normally made with toad thingamajigs, dragon dandruff, eye of newt…but at For Writing Out Loud, we know that food goes hand in hand with magic. If you had to cast a spell crafting your own sundae, two scoops, a sauce, and a topping, what goes in an AMS sundae and what does the spell do to people who eat the sundae AND read your books?
This is fantastic!
Two scoops: peanut butter and coffee
Sauce: honey
Topping: crumbled Pop-Tarts, of course
First and foremost, Side Effect #1: Anyone who reads this series and eats the sundae will absolutely understand why I just built this sugary behemoth.
Side Effect #2: Getting zapped by icy blue energy upon opening doors.
Side Effect #3: An itchy neck and possible loss of 2-5 hours in the blink of an eye.
And if you read the books, you’ll have your explanation!)
8. Hahahah sounds tasty! And now I want Pop Tarts. Inspiration can come from anywhere. What are some offbeat things that clicked with you and made their way into your books?
Well, I definitely tackled all the things that stemmed from my own personal life experiences. Those were massively unintentional and certainly didn’t get folded into the initial stages of planning this series.
I also didn’t intend to give the bank an actual voice and make it (yes, the bank is still an it) an actual character complete with the emotional range and intelligence of a hormonal teenager despite its centuries of sentient existence.
And then, of course, I always see certain magical races the way I’ve been seeing them for years in World of Warcraft. There’s always room to put a new spin on old ideas, right?
I may have also taken some inspiration for the Naruli people (native to and found only in Xahar’áhsh) from the movie Avatar. Slightly. You’ll have to read through to Book 4 to see what I mean.
Probably the most surprising bit of inspiration I had for these books was the fact that the seed of an idea for a magical bank wasn’t actually technically a new idea meant for my books. I’m also a career fiction ghostwriter as well as pumping out my own books, and one of the first Urban Fantasy series I’d written for a client sparked the idea for a magical bank. I pitched them an idea of a series spin-off revolving around said magical bank, and the client passed.
But the idea just would not let me go.
So I let it take root and grow into this thing that has become so much richer, so much more vibrant, so much more chaotic than it probably ever would have otherwise. I gave it my own special flavor, of course, and so far, my readers have been just as happy with Jessica and her trusty-yet-juvenile bank as I have.
9. I love that you gave new life to what would have been a lost idea. What are some items on your writer wish list in regards to this series, future projects, and mediums to explore?
Wish list! Well, for one, I’m currently writing the fifth and final book in this series, The Spellcast Gate, and cannot wait to see how the entire story resolves itself when it’s finally finished. Yes, I have mapped out the series arc. Yes, there will always be surprises as I write, because the best ideas come to me when I’m in The Zone and in that state of story-crafting flow. Who knows? The end may not turn out anything like what I’ve planned. Honestly, it usually doesn’t.
After this, I have another Urban Fantasy series bopping around in my brain. I don’t want to give away too much just yet, but it essentially follows a demon bounty hunter tasked with punishing practitioners of dark magic before stripping them of their esoteric artifacts and reagents. And along comes a new client who tricks her into unwittingly binding herself to him as something of a…dare we say…demon familiar. It’s obviously still a work in progress. Ha!
There’s also the third book in my LGBTQ+ Dystopian Blue Helix series, Sleepwater Reverb. This one I’m really excited about, because (true to form with the other two books) we get to see the rest of Sleepwater’s story from the perspective of a brand-new character. And anyone who’s enjoyed watching the world through both Leo and Bernadette’s eyes is going to love what comes up in Book 3.
I won’t beat around the bush here; this series is dark, gritty, and definitely not for the faint of heart. But I can say that this new main character is probably both the most broken and the most violent of them all. So get ready for explosions in Mexico and the sound of physical agony (I can’t wait for fans to pick up on those hints)!
10. Love it! Sounds like a full workload and PLENTY of awesome adventures across the board. And now all that’s left is to roll out the virtual red carpet from the ATL over to Colorado and tell us where people can find all your books including your new series.
Of course!
My website has everything one would ever possibly want to know about all my books in one place: kathrinhutsonfiction.com. And I occasionally write up a personal essay here and there about writing, my life, my journey to get where I am, and whatever needs to come up when the mood strikes. You can also sign up to my newsletter there, where I send out frequent updates, sneak peeks, dark surprises, and first access to all my Advanced Reader Copies and awesome deals/giveaways.
I can’t even say how much I love getting emails from my readers. Getting to write back and forth with some readers who’ve been with me since I started this gig in 2015 is better than Christmas presents. It’s better than getting glowing reviews, honestly (though those are amazing too and I will never complain about them!). My email is author@kathrinhutsonfiction.com, and you can also contact me through my website.
Social Media!
Facebook.com/kathrinhutsonfiction
Instagram.com/kathrinhutsonfiction
Twitter.com/exquisitelydark
All my books in both paperback and ebook form are available on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/~/e/B016N498BS
And the paperbacks of all my books can be found wherever good books are sold (but if you want to support this author directly, you can purchase signed copies of my paperbacks straight from my website at kathrinhutsonfiction.com/shop. To support local and independent bookstores, check out my books at bookshop.org and order online there!).
Thanks so much for having me!
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Wow, wow, wow. What a fantastic interview! Thanks so much for spending some time with us Kathrin and wishing you absolutely all the success. There you have it folks. My, my, my what a fun dive into Miss Hutson’s world. Feel free to connect to her and til next we meet in words.
Peace, love, and maki rolls
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