Interview with paranormal author Olivia Leighton

 FOR LOVE OF THE VAMPIRE, a boxed set of paranormal romance novellas will be published tomorrow and  author Olivia Leighton, whose work is featured in the set, dropped by to talk about vampires, and books and writing. Welcome Olivia!

Who’s your favorite on-screen vampire?

Hands down Elijah from the Originals.

If you could be any paranormal creature, what would you be?

I like a lot of characteristics of a wolf shifter, but nothing beats the draw of being a vampire to me.  They are cat-like in a way - sexy, stalk the night, can move silently, etc.

Do you have a writing ritual? For example: Do you have a set page/word goal of writing a day? Do you write on your birthday? Do you ever work on two or more projects at once?

When I sit down, I try to write as much as I can in two to four hours, then I’ll go back and edit/add to/take away from.  Since I have a full-time job and a boyfriend who works odd hours, I try to fit my writing in around those two things.  If that means I write on my birthday, so be it.  I enjoy writing anyway, so it would be a good way to spend my birthday!  And yes, I have several projects, but it’s normally in the form of working on book covers.  (I’m also a professional graphic designer.)

Do you have a favorite among the books you’ve written?

Honestly, I think the Vampire and the Owl is my favorite.  I like the thought of being a snowy owl shifter, and I’m quite fond of the town of Gilmer, TX which the story is set in.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a spin-off tale from Unbroken.  This one will focus on Daniel Collins (the vampire) and the woman seeking revenge on him from changing her back in the 70s.

What’s the last good book you read? Or:  What’s on your TBR pile?

- The last good book… It would have to be Champion by Mary Lou.  Funny thing… I read mainly YA dystopian tales even though I write PNR.  I have a shelf full of books, one side contains books I read and the other books I need to read.  The read stack features books like Champion and Angel Fall.  The TBR stack includes Young World and Hemlock.

The usual vampire in PNR seems to be a pale white straight male (whether sparkly or not) and a lot of readers seem to like it that way. Do you venture outside the paranormal norm with your characters?

 I don’t like to make my paranorms stray too far from their cookie-cutters, but I do like to put my own twist on things.  For example, my vampires can be killed with steaks, but they need to be steaks crafted from petrified wood.  UV rays can still burn them, but if they have a special tattoo, it protects them and they can be out during the day.

Interview with Christine Pope

Best-selling author Christine Pope has new book out in her paranormal romance series "The Sedona Files."  I thought this would be a good time to ask her a few questions.

Falling Angels is the next-to-last book (oh no!) in your “Sedona Files” series. When you wrote the first, Bad Vibrations, did you know you were going to chronicle the second generation of your characters?

Frankly, I didn’t even know it was going to be a series. Back then, I really didn’t know what I was doing, and thought writing standalone books was the way to go (hint: it isn’t, at least in the vast majority of cases). But then I began to think how about how I could expand that one book into a series, and started working out the bigger-picture arc of the alien conspiracy/invasion that’s always going on in the background (and sometimes the foreground) of the books. As for the second generation, after I was done writing Angel Fire, I realized I really wanted to tell Grace’s story once she was an adult, and it sort of fell into place that I’d create a second trilogy that takes place approximately twenty-five years after the end of Angel Fire. So that’s why I wrote books for the daughters of the heroines of the first trilogy: Grace (Kara from Desert Hearts’ daughter), Callista (Kirsten from Falling Angels’ daughter), and Taryn, the daughter of Persephone from Bad Vibrations. 

Check out the trailer for The Sedona Files:

You’ve got several established series out there—the Witches of Cleopatra Hill, the Latter Kingdom books, the Gaian Consortium stories—but it seems like you’re always coming up with something new for your readers. What’s next?

The Gaian series has been ended (although there’s a prequel short story coming out in an anthology in February 2016), and I’ll be wrapping up the Sedona Files and the Latter Kingdoms books this year as well. I do plan to write more Witches of Cleopatra Hill books, and more books in my Djinn Wars series. There are also plans in the works for a post-apocalyptic zombie trilogy to launch in late 2016. That one will still be romance, just darker and grittier than some of my other books (and no, the romance is NOT with the zombies). After that…I’ll have to see. I have concepts for several new paranormal romance series (and possibly another science fiction romance series), but none of those would launch until 2017 sometime.

In your PNR, you’ve had witches, ghosts, demons, and now zombies. Have you ever been tempted to write a vampire or werewolf story? 

Well…in a word, no. I know they’re popular, but I like writing about paranormal characters that haven’t been used as much. That said, the newest Latter Kingdoms book (which I’m writing at the moment) does actually include a version of one of those paranormal characters, but I don’t want to say much more about it than that. 

A Vampire a Day: Of Saints and Shadows By Christopher Golden

I'm a fan of Christopher Golden's. I've mentioned that I'm an admirer of the illustrated novel Baltimore, which he wrote, and his Joe Golem: Occult Detective series is wildly entertaining and I love the world it's set in--a mostly drowned New York where the poor people live in the watery areas and the rich live uptown. I didn't know that there are actually multiple volumes of Baltimore, so hooray for that. (Here is a list of his books, if like me,  you don'thow many books he has for you to discover and enjoy.)
I love that Golden writes in multiple genres, and for teens as well as adults. I love that he writes video games and comic books as well as novels. (Is he the ultimate geek or what?  I'd love to run across him at #SDCC some time.) He's also very open to fans approaching him on his Facebook page and from his posts, he seems like a really decent guy.
I found Of Saints and Shadows in a used bookstore, captured by the cover, which uses familiar vampire tropes (crosses, daggers that look like fangs, red backdrops) in a way that seemed elegant and decadent and interesting.
I didn't know at the time that it was the first in a series--I'm not sure it WAS meant to be the first in the serie (it was published nearly 20 years ago), but it was urban fantasy of the first order. I LOVED his protagonist, Peter Octavian.
This novel has pretty much everything I crave. Golden has created a really rich world and mythos for his vampires (who lust after the "blood song") and the backdrop of the Venice carnival is particularly gorgeous. (Why should all the vampire stories be set in Paris?)
You will REALLY like this one and there are half a dozen sequels in the series to enjoy after this one.

A Vampire a Day: Jim Carrey in OONCE BITTEN

this 1985 movie is a take on the Countess Bathory legend about a countess who bathed in the blood of virgins. In this iteration, Lauren Hutton's vampire Countess must drink the blood of a virgin to maintain her eternal beauty. But this is the 80s and virgins aren't that easy to find. Until...Mark Kendall (Jim Carrey) comes along.

the movie was made five years before Jim Carrey broke out in In Living Color and nine yearss before he starred in the trifecta of films that turned him into a superstar--Mask, Ace Ventura, and Dumb and Dumber. Once Bitten was released to 1095 theaters nationwide--it didn't even get a release in Carrey's native Canada--and grossed just a little bit more than $10 million. Even twenty years ago, that was a pretty poor performance.Janet Maslin, legendary critic for the New York Times gave it a thumbs up ("Call me crazy, but I liked it") but she was pretty much the only one. It's really a TERRIBLE movie, although i have friends who like to wallow in 80s kitsch and claim that it's actually a perfect time capsule of L.A. in mid-decade. Which may be true, but I don't have a lot of nostalgia for either the time period or the city.

A Vampire a Day: The Blood Gospel by James Rollins and Rebecca Cantrell

This is book one of the Order of the Sanguines series and I picked it up because I'm a huge fan of James Rollins' Sigma series of thrillers. This book pretty much has everything I like. Were you a fan of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code? Then you will like The Blood Gospel. Vatican secrets? Ancient books that hold secret knowldge. A beautiful archaeologist. Plus--VAMPIRES!

I don't know Rebecca Cantrell's writing and I found myself wondering how the two writers actually collaborated. I've collaborated on scripts, but never on fiction and I'm always interested in the process. And why is Rollins' name bigger on the cover? I like the design of the cover but it does make Rebecca look secondary. And how do the two authors know each other anyway? Inquiring minds want to know.

At any rate, this is a fun book that delivers as a supernatural thriller.

A vampire a day: Shakespeare Undead by Lori Handeland

Continuing with the theme of Shakespeare.  This is one of my favorite historical mashup books. I remember reading an interview where the author talks about how she cooked up the idea when all those ABRAHAM LINCOLN VAMPIRE HUNTER/PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIE books were out. I loved the idea of an undead Shakespeare (also used in ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE) and I really lked this book. I haven't read the sequel, ZOMBIE ISLAND, but I like the cover.

I'm a membe rof the Lori Handeland's FULL MOON CLUB--you get all sorts of nifty swag when you join--and a fan of her Night Creatures, Phoenix Chronicles, and Sisters of the Craft series. She's written more than 30 novels and they run the gamut from paranormal stand-alones to the series, to straight-out romances. I like it when an author I like is prolific. Go Lori!

How TV networks see Shakespeare

You know how people always say that if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be writing for television? Well, GalleyCat jusr published this great infographic that shows how network execs would break down each play. Check it out here.