Interview with Colleen Gleason - Part 1

Tell us a bit about your new vampire series and what readers can expect from it.

My new series, The Gardella Vampire Chronicles, is different from other popular vampire books hitting the bookshelves today. First of all, it’s historical. The first three books are set in 19th century London and Rome.

Secondly, the series is meant to be a true series rather than a set of interconnected books--and by this I mean that the readers will follow the same main character, Victoria Gardella Grantworth, through a story line and character arc over five planned books.

And thirdly, in my books, the vampires are the bad guys. *g*

With such a large quantity of paranormal fiction on the market today, why vampires? What was it about vampires that appealed to you enough to write about them?

I actually didn’t set out to write a vampire book. I don’t like vampires! They’re creepy and demonic and they suck your blood!

But I did get hooked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, thanks to my friend Brian. And my favorite fairy tale was Cinderella—I love the Disney movie, the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, and was actually in the R&H show when I was in high school. I was going through a phase of listening to the soundtrack and watching the movies (I have two daughters…need I say more?) In fact, I’d even started to write my own Cinderella story set in Regency England a few years before…

And then I started thinking about what Buffy’s predecessors would have been like—and what if Cinderella had had to carry a stake? And poof! there was my story idea. And it just blossomed from there into something so much more.

Did you read a lot of vampire fiction before beginning your series? If not, have you read any since?

With very few exceptions, I don’t read vampire books, and hadn’t read any before I started my series. I’ve never read Anne Rice or Laurell K Hamilton or MaryJanice Davidson or Katie MacAlister.

I read JR Ward only after I’d written both The Rest Falls Away and Rises the Night, once I was sure I had my own mythology down-pat. I’ve recently read the first Sookie Stackhouse book as well. And there are others I will be reading, but before I wrote my books, I wasn’t really a vampire book lover.

As a vampire fan, I can vouch for the fact that the vampire genre in general has a lot of stereotypes and clichés. Was this something you kept in mind as you were creating your series? Did you try to steer clear of popular vampire clichés? Can readers expect any new spins or deviations from the usual vampire mythos?

I actually stuck with the basic tenets of the common conception of vampirism: they can’t go out in the daylight, they die from a stake to the heart, they don’t like garlic or holy water or holy accoutrements, they can’t enter a home uninvited etc., purposely~ because the focus is on the vampire hunters, not as much the vampires and how they interact. I wanted people to be comfortable with the common conception of vampires for this reason.

And, honestly, I don’t think of the books so much as vampire books—they’re more of a female superhero kind of book. It’s a female superhero in Regency England, and she happens to hunt vampires. This is the kind of book I—a non-vampire reader—would have picked up to read, and so would my mom and many of my friends who aren’t vampire book readers.

However, the mythology and vampire hierarchy in my series is unique (although I found out after the fact that the movie Dracula 2000 has a similar mythology), and my vampire slayer premise is very different from the Buffy and Van Helsing ones. I think that’s one of the most unique twists in my series—the background and premise of the Venators, the vampire hunters.

What made you set your series in Regency England? Did you have to do a lot of research on the period?

Regency England is the most popular period for historical romance novels, and although The Rest Falls Away isn’t a typical romance (because it’s one book in a series about the same heroine and the men she interacts with), I figured as a new author trying to break into publication, it would make sense to keep the market in mind.

Plus, it fit in with the Cinderella aspect, and the whole having to sneak-out-of-balls-to-stake-a-vampire premise. While Buffy had a hard time managing her double lives, I wanted Victoria to have an even harder time—in an era where women couldn’t even speak to a man without being introduced, or couldn’t go anywhere without a chaperone, I wanted my heroine to have to deal with the issue of how she was going to get out of the house to hunt for vampires at night while maintaining a semblance of respectability.

It was the juxtaposition of those two worlds—a world where women were meant to wed, bed, and breed, and world where she’s stronger and more self-assured than most men—that intrigued me the most about writing this series.

As for research, yes, I did do a lot of research...part of which included reading books written and set during that time period (a great excuse for rereading Jane Austen!). However, due to the many Regency-era novels already on the market, and having read them, I did have a good starting point.

Part 2