And I had always liked vampire stories because they are great material that can be refashioned in lots of ways.

I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.

This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.

Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person.

I have any number of completely dark obsessions and fascinations, and none of this was present in my profile or my growing profile as a writer.

So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.

One of the traps or the pitfalls of writing a trilogy - or a triptych, or whatever term you want to use - is that the second book can be a long second act to get you from book one to book three, which borrows all of its energy from the first book.