At SFREVU, Sam Lubell enjoys Carrie Vaughn’s final Kitty Norville book KITTY’S MIX-TAPE.

This collection has seventeen stories with author notes and a music playlist for each. Fellow urban fantasy writer Emma Bull contributes a nice introduction. Four stories are original to this collection and two previously appeared on Vaughn’s website. The others originally appeared in magazines and anthologies. Six stories feature Kitty.

Fans of Kitty will welcome her reappearance here especially since the author had said the series was finished. Readers new to Kitty and her adventures will find this book a decent way to start their acquaintance, although they will miss some aspects of the stories if they do not know who these characters are and what their connection is to Kitty. Still, some of the stories are about the early history of the characters, before they meet Kitty, and Vaughn successfully provides information about the major characters in Kitty’s life.

[…]

Reading this book caused me to remember how much fun is in the Kitty books and I’ve started re-reading them, which considering the size of my to-be-read pile is a strong endorsement for this book.

Joe Sherry for NERDS OF A FEATHER, FLOCK TOGETHER is excited about the book.

One of my greatest discoveries was winning an online contest that I don’t remember entering and receiving copies of Kitty and the Midnight Hour and Kitty Goes to Washington in the mail. After giving them the side eye for no good reason, I started to read and Kitty Norville quickly became one of my favorite characters and I could not get enough of the series – and then it ended and Carrie Vaughn moved on. But wait! Here’s a story collection and even though I’ve likely read at least half of the stories in it, there are two brand new Kitty stories! I’m here for this!

As is Ashley Sapp, THE RUSTIC READING GAL.

This week I’m featuring KITTY’S MIX-TAPE by Carrie Vaughn releasing October 16. I love this series and am so happy to be getting some more stories set in this world! 

On the Tachyon Publications Channel, Zeppo (with a little help from Jacob) unboxes the book.

Vaughn contributes a guest post for Cat Rambo’s THE WORLD REMAINS MYSTERIOUS.

So, “voice” is the thing that makes us want to read the story. To spend time with the characters and their story. How, then, does one learn to write in a “voice” that makes readers want more?

Nobody’s quite figured that out, near as I can tell. But I can share how I finally started getting a handle on the concept: I wrote fourteen novels about the same character.

Kitty is a werewolf who hosts a talk radio advice show for supernatural creatures. She first appeared in a short story in Weird Tales in 2001. The final novel in her series, Kitty Saves the World, was published in 2015, and this year a collection, Kitty’s Mix-Tape, pulls together short stories set in the world, plus a few brand-new stories. So I’ve been writing this character for more than twenty years. “Voice” was key to getting her right.

Kitty’s identity as a radio DJ was instrumental in her development. In a very early (abandoned) draft, Kitty was passive. Other characters argued while she stood there observing and thinking snarky thoughts. This wasn’t going to work—as clever as her snark seemed at the time, she wasn’t an active participant in what was happening, which is sort of a requirement for the protagonist, yes? (There’s another lesson and blog post there, I think—you’d be surprised how often I tell people in critiques: your protagonist needs to do something.