Vamping Out: Using Famous Characters to Inspire Your Own

One of my favorite starting points for creating new vampire characters is to look around at my favorite characters from other genres and imagine what kind of vampire they might make. I also do this with historical figures, as anyone who’s read Ancient Blood can tell you, but that’s a different article. My choices here…

Avoiding Clichés When Writing Vampire Fiction

We’ve all been there. You’re reading a book you picked up on impulse because it sounded good when, a few chapters in, you’re struggling to maintain interest because every character and situation seems like something you’ve read a dozen times before in other books. Don’t you hate that? Editors and agents go through that a…

Exclusive Interview with Brian McKinley

March 2013 marks the month for a blog tour of Brian McKinley’s epic novel of love and undead, Ancient Blood. I managed an interview with the author, whose book I reviewed in December. What seems to you special about Ancient Blood, so much so you took the time and effort to put that many words on…

Review of Ancient Blood

I don’t read as much as I’d like anymore. One more reason to gladly review things for vampires.com since this forces a return to one of life’s great treasures: Reading! Ancient Blood: A Novel of the Hegemony came to me about a month ago. Let us start right now with the title.  A tad pretentious…