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Lurking Musings

~ Musings of a newly published writer

Lurking Musings

Tag Archives: Eric Northman

Interview: Jessica Cage

20 Tuesday Oct 2020

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Interview

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Tags

Lestat, Dracula, Eric Northman, Blade, Vampire Month, Selene, Jessica Cage, Slay: Stories of the Vampire Noire, characters of colour in fantasy, L.A Banks, Gerard Butler


For our third special October Vampire month interview to support the release of Slay: Stories of the Vampire Noire, we have Jessica Cage.

Jessica Cage is an International  Award Winning, and USA Today Best Selling Headshot of Jessica Cage, AuthorAuthor. Born and raised in Chicago, IL, writing has always been a passion for her. As a girl, Jessica enjoyed reading tales of fantasy and mystery but she always hoped to find characters that looked like her. Those characters came few and far in between. When they did appear they often played a minor role and were background figures. This is the inspiration for her writing today and the reason why she focuses on writing Characters of Color in Fantasy.  Representation matters in all mediums and Jessica is determined to give the young girl who looks like her, a story full of characters that she can relate to.

What is the earliest memory you have of writing? What did you write about?

My earliest memory of writing is my grandmother handing me a pen and paper and telling me to write down the story I was dying to tell her. She was a total book nerd and I was interrupting what I can only imagine was a steamy Harlequin novel. From that moment on, I would write her tall tales that only she would read.

When did you decide to become a professional writer? Why did you take this step?

I chose to become a professional writer when I was pregnant. I wanted to set an example for my son. How could I encourage him to go after his dreams while being too afraid to chase my own?

What would you consider to be your greatest strength as a writer? What about your greatest weakness? How do you overcome this weakness?

My greatest strength is my ability to give the reader an almost cinematic experience. I love for the reader to feel like they are not only reading the book but as if they are a part of it. Its one of the most common compliments I receive about my work. My weakness… commas. Darn those commas. No, I’m still not over it. I struggle with understanding where they go. They will either be all over the place or nowhere to be found. Thank the stars for my editors!

Tell us about the place where you live. Have you ever derived any inspiration from your home or from anywhere you have visited?

I live in the Windy City, Chicago and yes. I have absolutely put pieces of my home in nearly every story I’ve written. I’ll take you into the nightlife or describe one of my favorite spots to eat. Chicago is more than just the downtown most tourist see so I try to weave in my personal experiences with the city in the stories.

Which book, if any, would you consider to be your greatest influence and inspiration?

Can I just say L.A. Banks? Is that an option. I love her books. It was one of my first experiences with a woman of color witing the kind of high energy fantasy stories I wanted that also had a POC cast. I felt so empowered to do the same. Outside of her works, I find myself falling in love with any book that dares to test the limits of what has already been written. I love pushing boundaries and creating new concepts.

What drove you to write about Vampires?

A childhood obsession with Lestat and a questioning mind. I LOVED vampires but it didn’t feel right that they were human evolved (or devolved depending on who is writing the story). The first book I ever wrote depicted vampires as alien lifeforms who fled their home world to escape a darkness that was taking over. It was a blend of vampires and sci-fi and it was my dream come true.

What do you think is the attraction for Vampire fiction? Why is it such a popular topic?

Immortality. At least that what it is for me. Its the question of what would you do, who would you be if you knew you could live forever? For humans, life is fleeting. Its not promised to us. Through these stories we get to take risks and life a life that is uninhibited by the constructs of time and that is exciting and intoxicating.

In a fight between all the greatest Vampires of fiction, who do you think would come out on top?

Akasha. I choose her because she is a badass woman and ruthless. Even Dracula had a soft spot and she would have exploited that to no end. Second to her, Selene. Women rule.

What about in some other contest such as sexiness or dress sense? Who would win that one?

I’d have to say for sexiness Eric Northman or Gerad Butler’s Dracula 2000. For dress, I’m going with Blade! I loved his gear!

High Arc Vampires Series by Jessica Cage In Order — Monster Complex

How well do you think one of your characters would fare against the winner(s) of the above?

Alexa (my first vampire) could kick some ass. Not only is she a vampire, but she has magical powers. Kyla (my vampire in the Slay Anthology) would compete for style. Mara (vampire in The Alpha’s) would take the gold for dress hands down!

Tell us the basic premise behind your latest novel.

My latest novel is about Sierra Grey who is a conjurn (or witch) who was chosen for darkness. In her world that means she will never know love or any of the joys of a human relationship. However, she is special, marked at birth as someone would change her world. After a chance encounter with a yummy guy, she starts experiencing emotions and powers that she shouldn’t have. The powers that be thinks that she is an anomaly that must be eradicated. She is forced to flee her home and find a way to save not only herself but her people.

You can learn more about Jessica on the following links:

  • Webpage- www.jessicacage.com
  • Twitter- https://twitter.com/jcageauthor
  • Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/jcageauthor/
  • Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/jcageauthor

You can buy Jessica’s books at the following links:

Website – www.jessicacage.com/shop

Amazon- https://www.amazon.com/Jessica-Cage/e/B00CNTUBGO/

[Vampire Month] Jen Ponce interview

03 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Musings

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Akasha, Amazon #1, Ann Rice, Blood Curse, Blood Drunk, Deviant Miller series, Eric Northman, Faith Hunter, Hammer Horror, Jen Ponce, Jennifer Ponce, Leo Pellissier, Lesbian horror, Lestat, Nebraska, Rachel Morgan, Sookie Stackhouse, Stephen King, The Bazaar, Vampire, Yellowrock


Today we meet the first of this year’s Vampire Month authors – Jen Ponce. I first met Jen through the Dragon’s Rocketship Facebook group and am welcoming the chance to learn more about her here. You can find out more about her on http://jenniferponce.com/about-jen-ponce/

1. What is the earliest memory you have of writing? What did you write about?
I wrote a lot, but the first thing I remember writing and getting an audience response from (which was epic, by the way) was a play I wrote and then performed with my Animal puppet. I was ten. I remember futzing over that little script for days, wanting it to be perfect. My older sisters (both in college), my brother-in-law, my nephew, and my mom were in the audience. I squatted behind the couch and let Animal do the talking. I remember it was a play about the Fourth of July, but I can’t remember much else about it except that my audience all laughed when they were supposed to laugh. That moment made me a writer.

JensHead
2. When did you decide to become a professional writer? Why did you take this step?
The moment I decided to become a professional writer was the moment I decided I was going to sit down and finish a novel. I’d written several with friends, but I’d never finished an entire book myself and I burned to do that. I set myself a goal and dangled tantalizing bait at the end: the DVD set of A & E’s Pride and Prejudice. I knew I’d never be happy with myself if I didn’t hold a book in my hands with my name on it. I knew that I wanted to be a professional writer ever since that moment I made my family laugh with something I wrote.
3. What would you consider to be your greatest strength as a writer? What about your greatest weakness? How do you overcome this weakness?
I think my greatest strength would be the ability to build suspense and my characters. I write by feel: does this chapter feel like it ends on a high note? Does this sentence feel scary? It’s kind of a weird thing but I think I’ve read so many books that the pace and rhythm of novel structure has settled into my muscle memory.

My greatest weakness would be settling into the story long enough to show what’s going on. I sometimes have a tendency to set the pace, to drive toward the end, that I forget some people like to know what the setting looks like, what the characters look like, etc. … I’ve been working on slowing down my prose long enough to settle readers firmly into the place of the book, into the physical body of the character. It helps to have writer friends with those strengths, who can point out places where my setting is thin so I can fix it. I’ve found that being more detailed is fun, though I’m still a “go go go” kind of writer.

4. Tell us about the place where you live. Have you ever derived any inspiration from your home or from anywhere you have visited?
I live in the Panhandle of Nebraska, which is a very homogeneous culture. Whenever I go places, I’m so grateful for diversity it’s silly. Nebraska is a beautiful place and it’s home to people with a great capacity for independence and self-sufficiency.
One place that I visited that inspired the creepy setting of one of my books, Bug Queen, was a coffer dam in Cisco, TX. It used to be the hub of all things social and fun: a gigantic pool, a small zoo, a skating rink. It was an extremely busy place … until there was no more money to keep it running. When my friend and fellow writer Kathy took me there long ago, it was a silent and eerie place. The pool water was covered with green and the remnants of one of the ladders for the diving board still jutted from the murky depths. It was the perfect spot for my alien fungus to drive its victims, to store them, and to let the fungus wriggling inside them grow.

5. Which book, if any, would you consider to be your greatest influence and inspiration?
That would be hard to say. I read and write in several genres. Stephen King’s It is probably one of my favorite books of all time, if I had to pick one. I am still awed by its complexity and the way he wove in the past and the present, all those characters, all those stories, into a novel that still sucks me in when I start reading it, even after many read throughs, even after all this time.

BazaarFrontCoverSkull6. What drove you to write about Vampires?
The Hammer Brothers films started me loving vampires. Those films gave me delicious nightmares when I was a kid, (and if you know me at all, you know I love nightmares—that’s where a lot of my stories come from.) The thing I always wished for was the vampire to live and was disappointed time and again that the vampire would get staked and the world would turn back to normal. Who wants normal? Love At First Bite gave me a good ending—the vampire gets the girl and they fly off into the sunset. Yay! And then the Vampire Lestat came along. If I wasn’t hooked already, I would have been. Anne Rice opened up a wider world view for me and made me hunt for more books about vampires. Some were hits and some were misses, but it was all story fodder.

7. What do you think is the attraction for Vampire fiction? Why is it such a popular topic?
For me, vampires are the promise of something magical. This world is so mundane that we humans are always inventing things to make it more fantastical. (Think Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy.) Why do we have these things? Why did our ancestors believe in jorogumo, fairies, daemons? Partially because there were gaps in our scientific knowledge, sure, but also because it makes life easier to think that just around the corner there could be a leprechaun we could catch to win some gold, or a genie to grant us wishes. I’ve always wanted to become a vampire and gain immortality—think of all the books I’d have time to read! Vampires give us magic and they give us sex and they give us darkness. There are things we don’t want to experience in real life that we enjoy reading about. We don’t want to murder (most of us, I hope) but we settle ourselves into the skin of a vampire main character and murder people. We relish the blood, the violence, the power, and then we go back to our fairly safe, mundane lives. Vampire fiction gives us an outlet, it’s a waking dream. Then we close the book and become human once more.

8. In a fight between all the greatest Vampires of fiction, who do you think would come out on top?
I’m liking Leo Pellissier, from Faith Hunter’s Jane Yellowrock series. I considered Lestat, but he does a lot of navel gazing and pondering the numinous, and I considered Akasha, but of course, Lestat does defeat her, so probably Leo. “Go Leo!”

9. What about in some other contest such as sexiness or dress sense? Who would win that one?

Eric Northman from the Sookie Stackhouse series would win sexy male. (Sorry Leo and Lestat, you’re cute too.) Ivy from the Rachel Morgan series would win sexy female. I crushed on her hard the whole time I read those books. Kisten too, but my heart is still sad over him.

10. How well do you think one of your characters would fare against the winner(s) of the above?
Lady Catherine would win against Leo. She is evil and sadistic and worse, it takes a specific person’s blood to even kill her. She’d have Leo’s head off and he’d be deader than a doornail in minutes. I don’t think anyone in their right mind would think she was sexy though. Evil has a way of shining through and hers is a very base kind of evil.Blood Curse 2.0 Front Only

11. Tell us the basic premise behind your latest novel.
Blood Drunk is the sequel to Blood Curse (featuring the evil Lady Catherine.) It’s the story of Claudia, a vampire focused on revenge against Patrick Montgomery, one of three brothers who figured out how to use vampire blood to lengthen their lives without turning. She thinks him responsible for the horrors she experienced at the hands of the Marquis de Chaval. (I based him on the notorious Marquis de Sade. I figured I should get something out of the horrors I experienced reading his books. Eep.)
Before Patrick became a vampire hunter, he was a pirate, and he was the one responsible for Claudia’s husband’s death. But of course, all is not as it seems, and as the story unfolds, the truth comes to light.
The main characters of Blood Curse, Lorelei and Issala, return in this book, as do Patrick’s brothers and Lorelei’s insane twin, Morganna, who seems to be following in Lady Catherine’s dainty footsteps. I’m planning two more books, each one focusing on a different set of characters and their individual stories against the backdrop of a larger, more complicated story line. Blood Curse sat for a short while at #1 on Amazon in the lesbian horror category and it consistently sits in the top 100. Since the next book’s focus is not on Lorelei and Issala, it’ll be interesting to see how it fares.

Bio for author Jen Ponce

I’m a voracious reader and growing up, I constantly looked for heroic female characters. To my disappointment, so many of the women in the genre fiction I was reading were doormats, weak-willed, boring, incapable, or even downright dumb. That’s why my fiction features strong women. Women who are heroic, women who don’t fall in love and forget who they are, women who fight for what they believe in. If you are looking for character-rich stories that drive you relentlessly toward the big finish, then you just might like my books. Keep in mind I’m a big fan of blood and horror too. Do you like to be scared while you watch a kick ass woman save the day? My books might be just the thing to keep you up all night long.

 I’m a writer, a mother of three boys, a cat herder and zombie apocalypse aficionado. I also love vampires, so if you meet one, send ’em my way, okay? I would appreciate it.

If you’re interested in my Kick Ass Woman’s Manifesto, please visit my website here: http://jenniferponce.com/kick-ass-womans-manifesto/ and follow my blog if you like what you see.

Happy reading!

Find Jen on Facebook and Twitter

 

  

 

[Vampire Month] Megan Cashman interview

11 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Vampire Month

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Tags

Alexander Skarsgaard, Ann Rice, Dracula, Eric Northman, Gary Oldman, Interview with the Vampire, Interviews, Jonathan Rhys Myers, Megan Cashman, The Dark Proposal, Vampire, Vampire Month


Our second Vampire month contributor is Megan Cashman, a New Yorker and former journalist turned author. She is the author of The Dark Proposal.

1)      What is the earliest memory you have of writing? What did you write about?

As a kid, I used to write about kids at school, and their everyday experiences. I was in first grade when I started doing all this, and I think I did it because even then I had fun creating characters. Image

2)      When did you decide to become a professional writer? Why did you take this step?

I wanted to write a book even as a young kid. It took a long time to take that step because I had other aspirations. But when I was one of many unemployed people in the world, I decided it was a good time to finally write that book.

3)      What would you consider to be your greatest strength as a writer? What about your greatest weakness? How do you overcome this weakness?

My strength is that I have good insight as to what makes people tick. I also think I write scenes that provide good visuals for my readers. My weakness is when I think I may be boring my readers, so I end up cutting parts out that may be necessary for them to understand something. I also tend to be very wordy, so I have to do a lot of editing. I try to overcome my weakness by crafting a paragraph or sentence in a way that doesn’t sound very wordy or boring to a reader. I have to keep my readers in mind when I consider cutting out words.

4)      Tell us about the place where you live. Have you ever derived any inspiration from your home or from anywhere you have visited?

I was born and raised on Staten Island, NY. It hasn’t inspired my work yet, but The Dark Proposal takes place a great deal on Staten Island. I have some future ideas that are inspired by other places I’ve lived or visited.

5)      Which book, if any, would you consider to be your greatest influence and inspiration?

That’s hard to tell because there have been so many. I do wish to write as well as Khaled Hosseini, because his two books The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns are written so beautifully. They also draw you in from the very first sentence, so I hope to do the same with my books

TheDarkProposal_Final_small6)      What drove you to write about Vampires?

They are so appealing! Their immortality, their seduction, their longevity, their power, their arrogance and their fears. There’s something about a creature that lurks in the shadows that makes it more appealing than other paranormal creatures, even though they have their merit too.

 

7)      What do you think is the attraction for Vampire fiction? Why is it such a popular topic?

It depends because there are so many different kinds of vampire stories out there. For some, vampires are the most seductive creatures. For others, they are the most frightening. But others see vampire stories as an opportunity to tell other stories as well. The film, Byzantium, comes to mind.

8)      In a fight between all the greatest Vampires of fiction, who do you think would come out on top?

Oh boy, that’s tough. Dracula is what really brought the creature into the mainstream. Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire humanized it, and influenced vampire stories today. It’s so tough to decide.

9)      What about in some other contest such as sexiness or dress sense? Who would win that one?

I actually found Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker’s Dracula to be both sexy and well dressed. I think the accent helped. But hey, even Alexander Skarsgaard as Eric Northman is good competition for Oldman. Oh jeez, how can I forget Jonathan Rhys Myers as Dracula?jonathan-Rhys-Meyers-in-Dracula-nbc-ftr

10)   How well do you think one of your characters would fare against the winner(s) of the above?

I think Daniel Bertrand, the boyfriend to my main character, will be tough competition for all three. However, once his true nature is revealed, his sexiness plummets quickly.

11)   Tell us the basic premise behind your latest novel.

The Dark Proposal is about a college graduate named Claire McCormick who thought she had the perfect boyfriend in Daniel Bertrand, until he reveals that he is a bloodthirsty vampire with the intent on making her one too. Frightened, she desperately tries to rid herself of him, only to painfully learn that he is too malicious to defeat. She struggles to come to terms with reality as she discovers how unstable the vampire world is in the modern age, and how some of them don’t realize how cruel Daniel is even to them. It is the first book in a trilogy, called The End of Eternity. I am working on the sequel right now, and plan to have it out later this year.

Megan Cashman is a former freelance journalist living in New York City. Always asking, “what if?” she turning toward fiction writing in order to explore our world, and many other worlds. Always analyzing and daydreaming, Megan looks forward to sharing her worlds with many others.

Blog: megancashmanbooks.wordpress.com
Twitter: @MeganCashman
Facebook: Facebook.com/megancashmanbooks
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6519000.Megan_Cashman
Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009AL4RKE
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/276775

[Vampire Month] Erica Hayes interview

22 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Vampire Month

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

30 Days of night, Ann Rice, Australia, books, Dracula, Eric Northman, Erica Hayes, Forever Knight, Gary Oldman, Lacroix, Lestat, paranormal romance, Shadowfae, The Famous Five, True Blood, Vampires


Our final Vampire Month victim is Australian writer, Erica Hayes, author of merica_smany books including the Shadowfae series which has some of the sexiest covers I have ever seen. Shadowfae is all about fairies and succubi but there are vampires in there too. Despite being decidedly antipodean, she has somehow found herself in Northumberland in the UK…

1) What is the earliest memory you have of writing? What did you write about?
I recall writing a kiddies’ adventure tale when I was in primary school. Scribbling, more like. I was awful at handwriting. The last kid in my class to be allowed to write with a pen… but yeah. The story was a bit like The Famous Five,  except my characters went around digging holes and discovering underground cities. Or something. Sadly, the manuscript is lost…

2) When did you decide to become a professional writer? Why did you take this step?
Not so much a decision as a thing that happened. I just kept submitting stuff until something stuck. It never occurred to me to stop. My first novel was terrible… the owner of this blog may recall that one 🙂 My second was a little better. My third got ‘good’ rejections. The fourth – the one that got me an agent and my first publisher – was the one that broke the mould. It was different and sparkly and a bit demented. It stood out. That’s the key.

3) What would you consider to be your greatest strength as a writer? What about your greatest weakness? How do you overcome this weakness?
Weakness? Time management. I write kind of slowly, and I am too easily discouraged or put off when my day doesn’t go well. If I have a crappy start, it often screws the rest of my day. I lose a lot of writing time that way. To solve this problem, I try to do my word count first, other stuff (like promo, emails, research, crits etc.) later in the day. That way, my best creative energy gets spent on my own work. And If I get discouraged and mooch off to watch TV and feel sorry for myself, well, at least I’ve done a few words for the day.

PK_cover4) Tell us about the place where you live. Have you ever derived any inspiration from your home or from anywhere you have visited?
My first urban fantasy series (Shadowfae Chronicles) is set in Melbourne, which is the nearest big city to where I grew up in Australia. It’s a charismatic, moody, vibrant place. Perfect for vampire gangsters.
Right now, I’m living in Northumberland, England for a few years – long story – and hey, it’s certainly added authenticity to my ‘cold, miserable weather’ scenes 🙂 No, seriously, it’s a lovely place, steeped in history. Maybe I’ll be moved to write an historical…

5) Which book, if any, would you consider to be your greatest influence and inspiration?
Eh. I’m not sure. Maybe all the bad ones that sell a zillion copies, and I go, ‘hey, I can do better than that!’ There’s an awesome speech by Stephen King somewhere on YouTube where he talks about being inspired by mediocre books. Priceless.

6) What drove you to write about Vampires?
I’m not sure I’m ‘driven’ to write about them. But I do find them interesting, and fun to write about. It’s good fun being inside their heads.

7) What do you think is the attraction for Vampire fiction? Why is it such a popular topic?
In my genre – romance – it’s because of sex appeal, first and foremost. Vampires are hot because they’re dangerous and magical and immortal and could kill you in an eyeblink… but they don’t, because YOU ARE THE ONE. It’s a powerful fantasy.
Also, we find the society they live in endlessly fascinating, in all its possible iterations. There’s so much you can do with a monster subculture. Vampires as hidden, vampires as slaves, vampires as overlords, vampires are the only people left. They’re our enemies, our allies, our protectors, our predators. Or hell, they just mooch around drinking beer and picking up girls. The choices are endless.
But you know what? I think we like monster literature, and vampire literature in particular, because we’re desperate to believe that this – the mundane world in which we live – isn’t all there is. We want secrets, bigger pictures, higher purpose. We want there to be something out there.

8) In a fight between all the greatest Vampires of fiction, who do you think would come out on top?
Well, it’d have to be someone who can move about by day. Otherwise you just wait until they’re asleep in their coffin and BLAM! hit them with a shovel or something. Dracula was kind of disappointingly easy to kill, once they got the hang of it.
Still, you’d have a hard time defeating Anne Rice’s vampires. Lestat is basically a god, by the time a few books go by… author wish-fulfilment, much?

9) What about in some other contest such as sexiness or dress sense? Who would win that one?
Hmm. Eric from the TV series True Blood is pretty hot. At least, he was before he got wussy. I like to pretend that season 4 of that show never happened…
Dress sense? Gary Oldman wears some pretty sharp suits (and blue eyeglasses!) as Dracula.
Honorable mention to Lacroix from Forever Knight, who always managed to look dead cool despite the fact that everyone else in the show looked like a bad-hair eighties refugee.
Scariness? Salem’s Lot scared the piss out of me when I was younger. Also, the boss vampire from the movie 30 Days of Night is one scary mofo.

10) How well do you think one of your characters would fare against the winner(s) of the above?Redemption_Cover Image
Ha! In my later Shadowfae Chronicles books, Poison Kissed and Blood Cursed, I have this metrosexual vampire called Vincent. He’s a second-rate gangster and no one take him seriously, so he was feeling sorry for himself one night and had a little accident with a vampire threesome, and got himself infected with the vampire disease. It made him a little crazy. He eats everything that moves.
He’s good-looking and has pretty cool dress sense, if you like clubby and sexually ambivalent. But he has more enthusiasm and malice than real power. Lestat would probably kick his ass.

11) Tell us the basic premise behind your latest novel.
Oh, okay 🙂 My latest book is called Redemption, and it’s a fallen angel/vampire apocalyptic romance. In near-future New York City, demons are hijacking the seven signs of the apocalypse to bring on the End and create hell on earth. Warrior angels must stop them.
In Redemption, my frosty angel hero, Japheth, is tracking down Rose, an angel-slaying vampire minion of hell. They meet. They kiss. They try to kill each other. Violence, action, angst and hot romance ensue.
You check it out at my website: http://www.ericahayes.net/redemption.html

[Vampire Month] Dianna Hardy Interview

20 Tuesday Mar 2012

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Guest posts

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

A Silver Kiss, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Demons, demons and angels, Dianna Hardy, Eric Northman, greatest weakness, guest blogging, guest posts, poetic things, Poetry, professional writer, Spike, The Witching Pen, Vampire Poetry, Vampires, Witches, writing


This week we take a close look at author (and Vampire poet) Dianna Hardy as she suffers the probing questions of the interview…

Dianna Hardy is a multi-genre author of paranormal things, dark things, poetic things, sexy things, taboo things, and sometimes funny things. Writes about witches, demons and angels. All info can be found on her website DiannaHardy.com

What is the earliest memory you have of writing? What did you write about?

I think the first “book” I ever wrote was Little Miss Rainbow, when I was around eight years old. I drew pictures in it and stapled it all together, but don’t ask me what the story was actually about because I have no idea – I can’t remember! Possibly something about how Little Miss Rainbow got her colours, or shares her colours to make people happy.

When did you decide to become a professional writer? Why did you take this step?

I thought I was going to be a professional writer at around sixteen and seventeen, when I was heavily into my poetry phase, and also writing a few short stories, some of which I managed to get published in small press magazines (before the days of eBooks!). Those ideas were quickly stifled by people that scoffed at the idea, and by a general disappointment in the education system at the time (I was doing my ‘A’ Levels). So I sort of brushed it aside for other stuff. More recently, it was giving birth – almost three years ago now – that had be going insane with boredom, and wondering what the hell I could do with myself. There’s something about being a mother that really asks you to tap into your creativity, and I refound my love of writing again. Only now, digital books exist and self-publishing is accessible. I never looked back.

What would you consider to be your greatest strength as a writer? What about your greatest weakness? How do you overcome this weakness?

Greatest strength: characterisation (that is, getting inside a character’s head).

Greatest weakness: procrastination. The solution? I have no idea I’ll let you know when I find it!

Tell us about the place where you live. Have you ever derived any inspiration from your home or from anywhere you have visited?

I am not inspired at all by where I live at the moment. I like countryside, or at least being within 20 minutes walking distance of a good country / woodland walk, and at the moment, I’m living in a town that’s sort of grey and a little urban, and … ugh … I’d love to move away. Countryside and natural things around me inspire me: rolling hills or mountains, trees, woodland, etc.

Which book, if any, would you consider to be your greatest influence and inspiration?

I do not even know where to begin with this question – there have been so many over the years. More recently, it was reading Heather Killough-Walden’s Big Bad Wolf series that inspired me to write paranormal romance, not least because that was a self-published series that hit the Kindle bestseller list (and has since then gone way beyond that). I loved her writing style and the story, and it motivated me to write my own paranormal romance series – The Witching Pen Novellas. (This one’s not about vampires.)

What drove you to write about Vampires?

Vampires have always been a huge love of mine. They’ve always represented a shadow to be embraced; monsters in which you can find beauty within ugliness. It was this concept that inspired me to write A Silver Kiss (Vampire Poetry). This is a gothic collection of dark, freestyle and rhyming poetry that studies the above idea of the shadows within human nature, using the vampire as a tool for that study.

I’m also a third way through a novel called Project Veil (working title), which is my own brand of vampire mythology. There’s no release date yet, but keep an eye out!

What do you think is the attraction for Vampire fiction? Why is it such a popular topic?

Everyone is looking to find beauty and acceptance within their darkness – that is what vampires represent, and that is why I feel they are popular.

In a fight between all the greatest Vampires of fiction, who do you think would come out on top?

Oh God, I don’t know! Probably Spike from Buffy, because he handles his torture with tongue-in-cheek humour and is forever the optimist. That smacks of ‘winner’ to me.

What about in some other contest such as sexiness or dress sense? Who would win that one?

Eric Northman for sexiness (when he’s being a bad boy, not when he’s being a drooling romantic).

How well do you think your character would fare against the winner(s) of the above?

Oh, my main guy in the upcoming Project Veil would win hands down. Even I’m drooling over him, and I wonder if that’s the real reason why I had to stop writing the novel for a bit 😉

Tell us the basic premise behind your latest novel.

 I can’t really talk about Project Veil yet, as it’s so new and still being written and plotted out. But I can talk a little about The Witching Pen Novellas and its spin-off novel The Last Angel. I touch – just touch – on vampires in the third book of the series, The Demon Bride, and they’ll be mentioned again in The Last Angel, although vampires will not play an active part. They are intertwined with my mythology involving ‘bloodthirsty angels’. From this mythology, comes the book Project Veil. So although there will be no direct link between my current series and Project Veil, there will be that mythological tie that is touched on in The Demon Bride and The Last Angel.

 Current info can be found here: http://www.thewitchingpen.co.uk and anything about Project Veil will be updated on my main website, or my Facebook Page.

 

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