By VampireBookClub, on December 15th, 2010 ()
 Rachel Vincent is known for giving us “throw the book” moments. It’s why we love her. She, like many of our favorite authors, knows how to make us fall in love with her characters to the point of being frustrated by their bad decisions. While her adult paranormal Shifters series ended earlier this year, we still have a bit more time to revel in the drama of her Soul Screamers series. The YA series straddles the line between paranormal romance and urban fantasy …and we love that.
We posted an early review of My Soul to Steal (Soul Screamers #4) yesterday, but today we have Rachel Vincent answering our questions and kindly giving up Soul Screamer goodies to a lucky winner.
 Vampire Book Club: For those who haven’t dived into the Soul Screamers world, can you fill them in?
Rachel Vincent: Soul Screamers is about teen bean sidhe (banshee) Kaylee Cavanaugh and her friends and family and their struggles to keep Netherworld elements out of the human world. They fight to save lives and souls on a daily basis, all while trying to keep teen hormones in check and maintain a decent GPA. The books are dark and gritty (especially after the first two), with some humor to balance all that out. And they’re great fun to write!
Vampire Book Club: We were fans of your Shifters series before Soul Screamers. What brought you to writing YA?
Rachel Vincent: I started writing YA when I found myself reading a bunch of YA and realized how much I truly loved it.
Vampire Book Club: After the events of My Soul to Keep (Soul Screamers #3), Kaylee is having a hard time forgiving Nash for nasty addiction to Demon’s Breath and its consequences. The teen heartbreak is palpable when reading. What’s your writing process like for a book so emotionally taxing?
Rachel Vincent: Um…I’m kind of known (or so I’m told) for breaking both skulls and hearts in my books, and I don’t pull punches, so…most books are emotionally taxing for me. I’ve been known to cry during the rough drafts, but I just power through and assume that if I cry, so will readers, and that means I’m probably getting it at least partly right.
Vampire Book Club: One of the characters in My Soul to Steal is a living Nightmare. What made her the perfect fit? (And was she inspired by anyone? You can tell us. Really.)
Rachel Vincent: Sabine is a perfect foil for Kaylee. Kaylee is a very nice, very conscientious girl whose life is built on lies (both those told to her, and those she has to tell, to hide what she is). Sabine is tough girl (for real—she’s been arrested twice) who tells the truth at all costs. At least, the truth as she sees it. And one truth she sees with absolute clarity (at least, from her perspective) is that she and Nash are meant for each other. Kaylee and Sabine are opposites, yet at heart, they’re very much the same. Both grew up isolated from the rest of the world, emotionally. That made Kaylee kind of shy and gave her trust issues. It made Sabine hard on the outside and absolutely fearless—she has nothing to lose. And she shakes up Kaylee’s world like nothing else ever could have. Click to continue reading Rachel Vincent Q&A: Soul Screamers, boyfriend-stealing nightmares and Reaper Tod
By VampireBookClub, on December 9th, 2010 ()
We love the epic fantasy Julie Kagawa has crafted in her Iron Fey series. In July the first book in the series, The Iron King, was our group read title, and we discussed the characters — and, OK, a lot of Ash vs. Puck. Everyone hated and then fell back in love with the “Hot Boy with a Sword” Prince Ash in The Iron Daughter. (We also named it one of the Best Books of 2010.)
Now, with The Iron Queen not far off, we managed to get Kagawa to agree to answer a few of our questions. Read on for Meghan, Ash, Puck and The Iron Queen (no spoilers). (We posted our early, spoiler-free review of The Iron Queen yesterday.)
Vampire Book Club: Unlike so many of the YA faerie books released lately, the Iron Fey novels are more epic fantasy than typical teen paranormal romance. We still get plenty of love, though. Tell us, what did you most want readers to take away from the series?
 Julie Kagawa: I grew up reading the works of Terry Brooks and J.R.R Tolkien, so they introduced me to the grand, sweeping, save-the-world plots. I remember the way those books made me feel; how you could get so attached to the characters you felt everything they were going through. I hoped I could create the kind of characters readers fell in love with, feared for, and cheered alongside with when they triumphed.
Vampire Book Club: In the Iron Fey series you incorporate characters from A Midsummer Night’s Dream into the faery world. Were you nervous early on about reactions to using characters from a classic?
Julie Kagawa: Well, I knew that comparisons would be inevitable. But the faeries from Midsummer Night’s Dream are everywhere in literature now, and Shakespeare himself wasn’t the first to use them. It’s like saying all vampire stories copy Bram Stoker if they so much as mention Dracula.
Vampire Book Club: Aside from Shakespeare’s multifaceted fae, what other works inspired the Iron Fey series?
Julie Kagawa: Aside from the authors I mentioned, I get a lot of inspiration from anime and video games. Gamers and otaku might see hints of Squall Leonhart and Heero Yuy in Ash, Tasuki in Puck, and Sephiroth in the Iron King. (I wear my geekdom proudly.) But I’m also inevitably drawn to stories of heroism and sacrifice, where everything seems hopeless, where the heroes triumph in the end but at great personal cost. Some of my favorite endings are the ones in The Return of the King, Dragon Age Origins, and Fushigi Yugi.
Vampire Book Club: It’s clear you’ve significantly researched fae mythology, and incorporated those we hear about more often like redcaps and satyrs. But each member of the Iron Fey is your own creation. Which was your favorite Iron Fey to design?
Julie Kagawa: Probably Ironhorse. He was an interesting character from the very start, with his own set of moral codes and honor. (Also, it was fun making him speak in all caps, lol.)
Vampire Book Club: In the upcoming third book The Iron Queen, our girl Meghan decides she’s done letting the boys fight for her and asks Ash to teach her to fight. She’s used glamour as a weapon before, why did you give her a sword this time?
Julie Kagawa: Since most of the fey fight with weapons, it seemed only logical to give Meghan a sword. It was also a natural extension of her personal growth; she is done with letting others fight her battles, so she’ll need something to take the fight to them.
Click to continue reading Julie Kagawa Q&A: Faeries, Prince Ash and The Iron Queen
By VampireBookClub, on November 10th, 2010 ()
 Meljean Brook, author of The Iron Seas and The Guardians series We fell in love with the world Meljean Brook created in The Iron Duke. Read our review and you’ll see we loved the world, the characters and the romance. We loved the merger of steampunk (think: machines, etc.) and more traditional romance.
Meljean was kind enough to answer our questions about the strong women in her book (you’ll love Lady Corsair), the pirate, the zombies and what makes a steampunk-romance blend work. Read on for her answers.
Vampire Book Club: Steampunk is just now on the rise, and the concept of merging it with romance is very new. What elements of the two genres did you see as easy to merge?
Meljean Brook: I think the first element is the sense of adventure that often permeates steampunk – adventure and discovery. Obviously, the adventure part translates well to a romantic plot, but in this case, the discovery does, as well: The excitement of meeting someone new, the danger and the risk involved as you explore the possibilities. On both literal and symbolic levels, it simply works in both steampunk and romance.
Then there is the gritty, physical component of steampunk – the industrial part of it. This lends itself to so many issues of class and social change, and also to conflict between the romantic leads. Falling in love is never going to be easy for someone in the Iron Seas. Everyone has a painful history, everyone has seen terrible things … and yet they are in the midst of a world-wide transformation, culturally and technologically. Whether that transformation is a positive thing or not depends upon the characters who shape that world – and the adventures that our heroes and heroines take will tell the stories of those characters, and the results of their actions.
Vampire Book Club: How did you develop the ideas for all the machines and technology — Mina’s mom’s eyes for example — because with technology it all has to be plausible.
Meljean Brook: Obviously the nanotechnology described in the novel is beyond our capabilities today, but while researching for the novel, I discovered that it’s not too far beyond our capabilities. Scientists are working on some amazing stuff, and although much of it is theoretical or speculative, it exists in the realm of possibility … so I felt comfortable using it.
As for the other machines, the steam-based engines and vehicles, I based those on real historical technology. It’s been tweaked and changed, and it all works a little better than the real technology truly did, but the ideas for them are rooted in either sketches or working inventions by Victorian (or earlier) scientists.
 Vampire Book Club: Rhys is an epitome of an alpha hero, but really Mina does more rescuing. Is it just the best of both worlds or was it purposeful to have our heroine be the one saving the day?
Meljean Brook: It’s a bit of both – I love to write about strong women who use their brains and their guts, women that I can really cheer for and admire. And, let’s face it – Rhys didn’t need to prove himself in the “I can be a big man who beats up the bad guy” department. We know that he’s a badass, that he will shoot when he needs to, that he’ll take care of the problems in front of him. But what kind of a woman is Mina? We don’t know that, and so I liked showing exactly the type of woman she is (and that Rhys will fall in love with.)
But it’s also purposeful. Not to give away too many spoilers, but Mina faces a particular problem – and the only way it can be solved is by showing a LOT of people exactly the type of woman she is. So for that particular rescue, she had to be the one doing the saving … and to make it believable to the readers, we had to see her doing similar stuff all through the novel. To have her suddenly be this kick-ass heroine – after she spent the rest of the book being rescued by Rhys – wouldn’t make any sense. Click to continue reading Q&A with Meljean Brook: Strong women, hot pirates and zombies
By VampireBookClub, on October 5th, 2010 ()
 Nancy Holder After reading Crusade, co-authors Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguié’s first title in a new young adult vampire series, we had questions. They created an impressive world. And if you read our review you’ll remember we were floored at how eerily real the vampires “coming out” event occurred.
Luckily the ladies were willing to fill us in on the new series, the shocking parts of the book, upcoming witchery and more.
Vampire Book Club: What can fans of your Wicked series expect with Crusade?
Debbie: This series has just as much action as Wicked and for Wicked fans, don’t worry, there is a witch in Crusade!
NANCY: The villains in this story are vampires but they are allied with werewolves and magic users. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback that people are loving Skye, our witch. We love her, too.
 Debbie Viguié Vampire Book Club: Why did you two decide to go with vampires this time out?
NANCY: We were invited to write a story for The Eternal Kiss, an anthology edited by Trisha Telep. We wrote “Passing,” in which we built an entire world where the vampires have waged war on us, and Hunters are trained to fight them. When we were finished, we realized we had the springboard for a new series. Luckily, Simon and Schuster agreed.
DEBBIE: It just really clicked in that story and we had too much story to be contained in a few short pages.
Vampire Book Club: One of the elements of the book I was most impressed by was the way the vampires ‘come out of the coffin,’ as it were. What spawned that idea? Did you want it to be eerily real?
NANCY: It’s getting harder and harder to keep secrets! So we figured the vampires would agree that it’s getting impossible to hide their existence from us any longer. So they do a “first strike,” telling us they’re our friends. Which they very much are not.
We really wanted it to seem real. We patterned Crusade after World War II. The vampires are the Nazis. Our hunters are the resistance.
DEBBIE: We definitely wanted it to seem real.
Vampire Book Club: What brought about the idea of one ‘saved’ vampire?
NANCY: Just as in World War II, there were good Nazis, in our war, there is a good vampire. Only one (at least so far!) He doesn’t know why he’s good. I think that’s a fascinating topic–why are some people so evil, and some so good? How does that happen?
DEBBIE: I believe that no matter what your programming is (genetics, upbringing) you can choose to be who you want. It might not be easy, but your destiny is yours to control if you choose to.
 Vampire Book Club: Did you purposely set out to cover both sides — vampires are cruel and evil, but one can still love? Sneaky, ladies. (We like sneaky.)
NANCY: Yes. We put it in “Passing” and we kept it for the series.
DEBBIE: We really liked the traditional view of a vampire as a creature of darkness, of evil. However, to every rule there is an exception and Antonio appears to be it.
Vampire Book Club: Do Jenn and Antonio have a chance? (Because I really like them.)
DEBBIE: Even in the darkest night there’s hope.
NANCY: Could be, could be.
Vampire Book Club: The betrayal Jenn experiences while home in San Francisco is massive. Was it hard to write? Did either of you have any hesitation about going so dark early on?
DEBBIE: That was actually my favorite part to write because it was so horrific and so poignant. I did not feel any real hesitation regarding that scene. However, I can tell you that there’s a scene coming up in book two that we debated about and decided to pull back slightly from our original plan because it was just too much and there would be no forgiveness for the character involved ever. It happens in a church and is a key moment in the book and you’ll probably figure it out next year when you read it!
NANCY: Yes, we did debate that element in book two back and forth. We decide to pull back. In the San Francisco section, man, that was so hard for me to write/deal with. Debbie wrote the first draft of that and I revised. I’m glad I didn’t have to go there first. Thanks, Debs!
Click to continue reading Nancy Holder & Debbie Viguié Q&A: Vampires, witches and action
By VampireBookClub, on October 4th, 2010 ()
We are so lucky to have Chris Marie Green with us today. If you recall, we gave away a set of the first three books in her Vampire Babylon series last month for BlogFest. We had more than 1,000 entries. We took that as a sign to give you more on her unique vampire series. Chris was kind enough to answer our questions about her vampires, writing authentic fight scenes, Hollywood’s obsession with fame and immortality. . . . → Click here to continue reading Chris Marie Green Q&A: Vampires, fight scenes and Hollywood
By VampireBookClub, on September 14th, 2010 ()
 Shiloh Walker weaves strong characters, real romance and fantasy together constantly. There’s a reason her titles will span a full shelf at your local bookstore.
Earlier this month, the second book in her Veil series was released. We liked Veil of Shadows (read our review) even more than it’s predecessor Through the Veil (read our review). So, we’re super excited to bring you an interview with the paranormal romance bestseller Shiloh Walker!
Vampire Book Club: For those who are haven’t met the rebels in the Veil books, could you tell our readers about the Veil series and this latest entry, Veil of Shadows?
Shiloh Walker: The Veil series is based on three worlds… our world, a ‘middle’ world, called Ishtan, and Anqar, the third world. Each of the worlds are separated by a ‘veil’ and normally, they can’t be crossed. But the people in Anqar-specifically, Warlords, were able to develop the magic needed to manipulate the energy that creates the veil and they can cross over, using what they call Gate magic. They’ve made Ishtan their personal breeding playpen, so to speak, raiding it for female slaves. They’ve done this for centuries. The rebels in Ishtan, as you can imagine, aren’t very happy. They fight back, and they fight back hard. In the first book, Through the Veil, they managed to do enough damage to the veil that the gates are destroyed. But now they have to deal with the aftermath.
Vampire Book Club: Many of your characters have supernatural gifts that are more mental, like magic and telepathy. Is it a conscious decision to keep their powers cerebral?
Shiloh Walker: No, not a conscious decision, at least. The all-powerful character just gets rather tiring to read about, for me, and to write about. I like mixing things up.
Vampire Book Club: What draws you to these less finite preternatural abilities? Do you think they are more easily relatable?
Shiloh Walker: Well, again, the all-powerful creature just gets so boring after a while…but yeah, I do think when there’s something more ‘human’, it’s easier for me to get inside their heads, and maybe that’s easier for them to come alive for the readers.
Vampire Book Club: We had a long lag between Through the Veil and Veil of Shadows. You were definitely busy in the interim, but what brought you back to Ishtan and its rebel fighters?
Shiloh Walker: Well, I’d always planned to write more in that world…it was basically a matter of timing with the publisher, deadlines and that sort of thing. It wasn’t ever pushed to the side, it was just a matter of getting it done. Click to continue reading Shiloh Walker Q&A: Veils, Syn & Xan and Morne being a bastard
By VampireBookClub, on July 18th, 2010 ()
We’re enamored with the Downside Ghosts series by Stacia Kane. We’ve made no secret about it. After reading the first two books, questions were bubbling up about the development of The Church of Truth, the future of our much flawed and beloved Chess Putnam and the Downside speak. Luckily, Stacia is as much of an insomniac . . . → Click here to continue reading Stacia Kane Q&A & Contest: Church documents, Downside speak and the future of Chess Putnam
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