| TAMARA THORNE | swimming in the sea on weekends - and writing horror stories about both and anything else that struck me. I especially loved exploring ghost towns. I tried to have an invisible friend when my real friends were doing it, but just couldn’t buy into it. I loved rigging séances at Halloween parties and kept myself awake in school by rerunning MAD Magazine cartoons in my head or writing dirty limericks. And my anthem was The Beatles’ Paperback Writer. I played it endlessly on the piano. That’s all I ever wanted to be. I felt that writing books was what I was born to do. Some things never change. Who are your biggest influences? Ray Bradbury is number one by far. His prose was poetry and I read and reread everything he wrote, learning about atmosphere and the elegance of words. Every summer from third grade through high school (and beyond), I reread Dandelion Wine. To this day, thanks to Bradbury, I feel nostalgia for a boyhood I never had in 1930s Greentown, Illinois. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House set me on my life’s course. In sixth grade, I found the book at the library and set my hand to writing ghost stories instead of science fiction. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and H. Rider Haggard’s Alan Quatermain were my favorite heroes, and soon Tolkien’s Aragorn joined the ranks. I wasn’t much for books aimed at girls/ women, though I read Little Women a number of times because of Jo March, who wanted to be a writer - and didn’t hold with girly stuff. I liked her a lot. What’s the hardest thing you’ve written? I love getting into characters’ heads more than anything, but one character who was extremely diffi-
cult for me was Eve, one of the protagonists of The Sorority. She was a cheerleader with real school spirit. She baffled me, but I eventually caught onto understanding her by considering that many people wouldn’t understand my love of ghost stories. At that point, I just accepted that her interests, though I couldn’t understand them, were as important as my own. The other book that was difficult, at least in the beginning, was Candle Bay. My editor really wanted a vampire novel and I wrote the story without a clear view of where it was going. It turned into something of a French farce, but eventually I could see the end, and to my eternal shock, I knew I had to leave it open for sequels. The big question was if vampire Stephen Darling would turn his lady love, Amanda Pearce, into a vampire. That was something I didn’t reveal in Candle Bay - I had a feeling about it and wanted to save it for later. And at last, it’s time to tell the world what happened ... You’re writing a sequel to Candle Bay now? Alistair Cross and I are writing the sequel together. I’ve known for years now what happened with Amanda and Stephen and when I told Alistair, he was tickled. Soon, he wrote some of my characters into a scene in his vampire novel, The Crimson Corset. Then we brainstormed Candle Bay’s sequel and had so much fun that we decided to write it together - and to make it a sequel to both Candle Bay and The Crimson Corset. Some of Alistair’s vamps join with the Darling clan to head up to Eternity and Icehouse Mountain for a very special celebration called Biting Man that’s sort of a vampiric Christmas or Easter. There’s forbidden romance and passion between alpha vamps Natasha Darling and Alistair’s Michael Ward. There’s Amanda Pearce, Stephen Darling and the trouble-making teen twins, Juicy Lucy and Poison Ivy. This time you’ll meet their cousin, Crazy Daisy, too. And from Crimson Cove come Chynna, Winter and his pal Arnie. Even DJ Coastal Eddie Fortune has Issue 8 | March 2017 |
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