Interview and Giveaway with Cassie Alexander, author of Nightshifted

Hello, honorary librarians!
A few months ago, I was checking out something extremely important (read: wasting time) on The Book Depository, and I accidentally discovered Nightshifted. I've been thinking about it ever since and I even chose it for my first Waiting on Wednesday post. When I got a chance to review it, I was truly giddy with excitement. I liked it a lot, so imagine my joy when Cassie agreed to do an interview here at The Library! We had a lot to talk about, I hope you'll enjoy reading our chat. 
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Hi, Cassie! Thank you so much for agreeing to stop by our blog and talk to us about your upcoming debut, Nightshifted. I have to say that I recently finished your book and thoroughly enjoyed it. I always get so excited about a fresh new voice in urban fantasy. Could you tell us a little bit about your book?

Nightshifted is about Edie Spence, a nightshift nurse who works on a ward for supernatural creatures. I happen to be a nurse in real life, so the medical stuff is as real as it can feasibly be when vampires are involved.


Characters like Kate Daniels and Mercy Thompson, who are powerful and special in one way or another, dominate the genre, and yet Edie is just a very lonely girl who works by night and sleeps through the day, deals with a brother addicted to heroin, and has reduced her social life to a series of nameless one-night stands. She has no special skills or powers. Do you think it was risky to write an anti-heroine in a genre so full of kick-ass heroines?

I hope not! But I get what you’re saying.
I’d been reading a ton of urban fantasy, I do enjoy the genre quite a bit...but I felt distanced from the characters in those novels. I was going through a rough time, starting out in my job. Being a new nurse is scary, disgusting, and hard. You love it, or you wouldn’t be there, but it definitely does not love you back for awhile. Years, maybe. Your patients and other staff can be abusive, often without consequence, there’s a continual (reasonable!) pressure to not fuck up, and the things you’re seeing at work no one else wants to hear about at home. It’s almost like PTSD. And nurses that have been around awhile already know how to cope, but they can’t give that knowledge to you, because it’s something you have to earn with experience and time.
So reading urban fantasy about people who were naturally super special and kick ass and fantastically pretty was lovely escapism for awhile...but then I started to feel like those books didn’t apply to me. Those heroines weren’t people I could relate to. I wasn’t special. I was spending my nights cleaning up blood and shit. I was so scared I was going to screw up and hurt someone, some shifts I could hardly breathe.
Since I was a writer before I was a nurse, it felt natural to try to write it out. So in long-winded response, I wrote Edie for me. I didn’t really think about marketing stuff. I just wanted to see someone who was finally like me on the page.

As you said, you are a nurse yourself. I won’t ask how much you relied on your experience while creating Edie’s world because I’ve noticed so many details only a nurse could know, but how do you mantain the balance between your day (or night?) job and writing? What does a normal day in your life look like?

I sleep in till 2-5 PM depending on if I worked the night before. Then I get up, try to go to the gym so my back won’t hate me, and hang out with my husband or write. I write on break at night at work, or while everyone else is asleep when I’m at home. (I’d like to point out in the first draft of this interview, I was writing it at 5:30 am...but this time around, it’s merely 4:04 am, ha.)

It’s really hard to maintain a balance, but my husband is incredibly supportive of my career and respectful of my time, and I’ve accepted the fact that it may be another month until I see season two of Game of Thrones.

On that note, working nights in hospitals seems incredibly dull. Edie spent her entire shift on pediatric ward browsing the Internet, at least until the dragon showed up. Since there are no real dragons to make your life more interesting, is a nurse’s job really that slow and uneventful?

When you’re lucky, it’s that slow. Not on every floor, every shift, but yeah, there are some nights you’re just being paid to stay awake. Sometimes there are demented people who just need someone to sit in the room and make sure they don’t get out of bed and the hospital gods bless you and they actually stay asleep. Some nights, you can even read a book!
(I did try to get super accurate a few times about the Life of a Nurse in the book, and almost always had to delete those scenes later as too technical. I also had a ton of extra patients and care situations, and my agent wisely told me to reduce their number, because it they were distracting from the plot. So that’s why Edie isn’t as busy as I was last night at work, ha.)
Usually it nursing is busier, although my floor’s really good about keeping breaktime sacred. And sometimes it’s so busy and awful that you finish up two hours into dayshift and come home and have dreams you’re still at work, hanging up infinite IV bags.
On night shift you really have to form a cohesive team -- you’re there without any ancillary staff, doctors are never happy to be woken up, and sometimes it feels like you’re the only one there with the patient’s best interests in mind. I’m lucky to work with some of the most amazing women I know. We have each other’s backs in a way that I think only people in combat could understand.

What comes after Nightshifted? Could you tell us about the rest of the trilogy and possible other projects?

Moonshifted is the 2nd book, and it’s out on 11/27/12. It’s more werewolf focused, and also on Y4. Shapeshifted is the 3rd book, and it’ll be out next late-May, early-June, and it’s set outside the hospital, but still preoccupied with health care.
I’m interested in writing further books, but I swear each of them have full endings. I’ve also got a few ideas for related novellas kicking around in my head, but we’ll see if I ever have any free time. Season two of Game of Thrones isn’t going to watch itself ;).

Thanks so much, Cassie! Good luck with the rest of the trilogy and happy book release!

Thanks Maja! I appreciate it! :D

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