The Great Contagion follows an ancient, sharp-witted cat with a human soul who helps a man confront a deadly sickness sweeping the land. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

The idea for The Great Contagion came to me when I was working on Cat Sidhe, another novel in The Merliss Tales series. Cat Sidhe takes place about fifty years after the events in The Great Contagion. I mentioned that the results of a great plague were still visible at the time of Cat Sidhe. After calling attention to this plague numerous times, I decided that I needed to find out what had happened. The result of that exploration was The Great Contagion.

More interesting is the idea for Merliss herself who is based on a real feline. A very thin, sickly, gray cat showed up on our driveway one Saturday and tried to get into our breezeway. We gave it some food and then took it to an emergency vet. The cat had no microchip and was not terminally ill. She was suffering from a respiratory infection, an eye infection, malnutrition, and thousands of fleas. In other words, she needed antibiotics and TLC. A few hundred dollars later, we left the vet with a new cat named Smokey, who was the sweetest lap kitty you can imagine. We never knew how old Smokey was, possibly pushing twenty. She spent her last two and a half years being spoiled by us. Thanks to Smokey, I felt inspired with the idea for an ancient gray cat in a fantasy setting.

What drew you to writing a fantasy centered on healing rather than conquest or warfare?

Many fantasy stories centered on conquest and warfare focus on protagonists occupying the upper strata of society. If you want your characters to directly influence events and you’re dealing with politics and warfare, the characters will need to be in positions of power. I wanted to write stories about characters outside the circles of political and military power and show them dealing with events outside their control, struggling to have an impact on their environment. The healing arts are one area in which a relatively low-status character can impact many others, including high-status characters. Healers also travel through villages and the countryside as part of their work.

How do you build tension in a story that unfolds at a measured pace?

The Great Contagion is composed of numerous subplots that interact and conflict. Some of the subplots center on conflicts and problems related to the people. Others revolve around Merliss, the old gods, and other magical creatures. There is also a subplot involving Merliss and the local cat population. All the subplots are tied together by the contagion, and Merliss is a witness to all the events described. I build tension by staggering high points from the various subplots and planting seeds to set the stage for later scenes of intense action. The level of action increases throughout the book.

What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?

The next book in The Merliss Tales series is The Forging of Merliss. The origin tale, this novel is set thousands of years in the past and will tell how Merliss’s spirit came to occupy the body of a cat. I hope to release this book by spring 2027.

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