MELISSA DE LA CRUZ INTERVIEW

fantasticbookreview.blogspot.com has an interview with Melissa De La Cruz.

I love your twist on vampires in the Blue Blood Series, how did you come up with the idea?

I’ve always loved stories about tragic rich people, and I’m a big vampire fiction fan. Stephen King and Anne Rice are my favorite writers, so I’ve always been looking for a way to combine those two influences. I was online one day and stumbled on this website that listed all these prominent and wealthy Americans who traced their ancestry back to the Mayflower, and it wasn’t just people like the Roosevelts and the Bushes, but people like Marilyn Monroe and Oprah and Alec Baldwin — which I found so fascinating. So I thought: what if all these people are famous and rich because…they’re vampires?

And I’ve always loved the story of Paradise Lost, of the angels cast out of heaven and I wanted a real mythology that explained how the vampires came to be, so when I put two and two together, I was really excited about it. I’ve always wanted to write an end-of-the-world kind of epic in the style of the Dark Tower books.

What’s next for Schuyler in the Blue Blood Series, can you give us a little teaser?

In Van Alen Legacy, Schuyler is running for her life–on the wrong side of the Committee, and falling apart in a lot of ways. I always think of “Revelations” as my “Empire Strikes Back” – you know, the bad guys win… that sort of thing. I know the ending of the book didn’t please a lot of readers. And not that Van Alen is “Jedi”, but there’s a lot of action, a lot of spirit and the story was really fun to write. I was consumed by this novel for six months, I couldn’t do anything but think about it. I was just obsessed with it and I’m really happy with how it turned out. There’s a lot that’s explained and resolved in the novel, but a lot of new mysteries as well.

More here

I keep meaning to start this series. Her take on vampires is cool. What do you think of this series? What do you think of the things Melissa shared in this interview?