Author Abigail Roselock is joining me today, to try and tempt readers into sinking their teeth into her upcoming book, Prince of Fangs. Thank you, Abigail, for taking the time to chat to me. Please sit down, get comfortable and let’s begin.

Tell us a bit about your book
After he takes her mortality, what more can she give? How can she save her sire—how can she win the love of the Prince of Fangs?

Izzy is a grad student who tutors Karl Eibon, a handsome yet mysterious student. He’s rich, glorious, and out of her league. She’s content to leave it at that and get on with her busy life.

But then one night Karl’s mysterious world erupts during their lesson, dragging Izzy into the middle of an all-out war fought in the shadows, a conflict between the ancient houses of immortals known only as the Blooded…

How important are character names to you in your books? Is there a special meaning to any of the names?
Character names are fun to work on, think about, craft and polish. In my first book the lead is named Isadora “Izzy” Sharpe. She’s a smart gal, so the Sharpe bit reinforces that, but more important, is that she goes by her nickname “Izzy” instead of Isadora. Early in the book, she says something like:

“My mother gave me a lovely Regency name like Isadora and so what do I do? I call myself Izzy. Who does that? Nobody does that. Well, me and that one guy in that 90s hair metal band you pretend isn’t in your iTunes. Me and that guy. We’re the only ones who call ourselves Izzy. Only we would do that.”

So I hope she has a fun name with a little story behind it that shows a bit of personality.

Give us an insight into your main character. What makes them unique?
The first thing is she’s resourceful. Your survival chances aren’t too good in a paranormal situation if you don’t have it all together. So she keeps her wits about her, adapts to new situations and processes the world around her well. She might do okay in a Zombie Apocalypse, you never know.

But she’s not some leather-clad secret agent babe. This isn’t a thriller or a comic book movie, it’s a traditional romance within a vampire setting. So she’s human, an ordinary woman in her mid-20s, with no supernatural powers or paranormal abilities of her own. She’s thrust into this bizarre and at times frightening, at other times magical, situation and she does her best to cope and adapt.

Where do your ideas come from?
Anywhere and everywhere. Whenever one comes along, I make a note of it and later add it to a word document. Then when I need an idea, I go through the document and take something or rework something out of there. I do the same for characters, plots, names, settings, dialogue snippets, you name it. I have more ideas for stories and novels than I’ll ever have time to write…unless I really am an immortal vampire, writing through the ages…

What writing advice do you have for aspiring authors?
Just write. Don’t talk about writing, don’t introduce yourself as a writer, don’t even discuss it as a hobby until you start publishing. Otherwise it’s too easy to fall into a dilettante’s mindset wherever you’re tinkering and work-shopping and hanging around in coffee shops whittling away at another draft for the critique group instead of writing and publishing, gaining fans and earning income.

One route into publishing profitably to an actual audience is to write short erotica for Amazon. Short erotica has the advantage of being short and easy to write (five to seven thousand words or so, typically) yet still sells for a good price. Writing erotica exposes you to the perils, pitfalls and inevitable mistakes that you will make on your covers, blurbs, openings and everything else. But with the knowledge you gain, you’ll be ready to step into longer forms like romance, chick lit, or fantasy.

If you jump right into forty to fifty thousand word romance novel, you might fall flat on your face out of the gate, get discouraged, and end your dream. By working your way up by writing shorter works first, you’ll acquire necessary business, marketing, and other skills that will help you chase the dream, as well as feeling the sense of accomplishment of finishing something, releasing it, and getting paid for it.

If you didn’t like writing books, or weren’t any good at it, what would you like to do for a living?
I’d like to be a vampire.

Do you read reviews of your book(s)? Do you respond to them, good or bad? How do you deal with the bad?
I recently found a bunch of reviews for my erotica books on Goodreads that I didn’t know I had. So that was an entertaining surprise!

I read every single review. If somebody went to the trouble of leaving feedback, I take it to heart. I also read the reviews of other popular authors in my genre so I get a feeling of what readers want in that niche and what they don’t care for.

People who spend money on what I’ve written are my audience and I owe it to them to give them my best work possible and give them what they want. There are a billion other things they could be spending their time and money on, from Hello Kitty collections to Civil War re-enactments, so I appreciate their investment in me.

I don’t respond directly to the reviews, though. It just makes authors look unprofessional and argumentative if they are disputing with their audience. Bad reviews can hurt, but if you take them in the spirit they are given they can only help you improve.

What is your best marketing tip?
One word: branding.

What is your least favourite part of the writing / publishing process?
Copy-editing is a slog. I intend to use a pro copy-editor on my romance books in addition to my own eyes, but it’s always tough because at that point you’ve seen the same passages over and over so many times you can’t always see the mistakes.

What are you working on now?
After Prince of Fangs, I’m working on a horror romance called Dagon Summer. It’s unconventional in that it’s set in the 1920s and borrows heavily from the mythos of H.P. Lovecraft, particularly The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Thing on the Doorstep.

Can you give us a few tasty morsels from your work-in-progress?
Absolutely!

From Prince of Fangs:
The man who doesn’t know I love him—Karl Eibon—is bleeding all over me.
I can’t do a damn thing about it either, because we’re locked in the trunk of a Mercedes-Benz S550, screaming down a dark highway to hell. At least I’m still intact. They shot Karl.
Why would you shoot the person you’re abducting? Why? Who does that? Even worse, they gagged me, bound us hand and foot, then shoved us feet-first into a sleeping bag. We ended crushed together like something out of a romantic comedy—minus the laugh track.
It’s night outside; it’s pitch black inside the trunk. I already tried popping the lid. It’s locked. An angry letter to Mercedes-Benz regarding trunk latches and kidnappings is on my bucket list, assuming I survive long enough to make one.
Regrets? Never finished my Master’s thesis. Never got past the first season of Buffy even though I’ve had the DVDs for, like, ten years now.
Never made a bucket list.
Never told Karl how I felt.
Goddamn it Karl, wake up!

From Dagon Summer:
She once told me that the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear. I laughed and said lust is just as old and sometimes stronger. I cited Freud and demanded her source; she said not to argue about things I did not understand. Both maxims proved true, in the end.
If I learned anything from her, it is that everything springs from those two wells: everything flows from unfulfilled desire and the foreknowledge of our own demise. When love and death combines, as it did in her, the combination can warp a heart, it can alter the world.
I learned this when I visited her in Innsmouth, the decrepit old seaport where she was born. This was in the summer of 1924, during the height of the .:EoD:., when the cult’s grip on her town remained unbroken and their disquieting sigil hung everywhere in that decayed and wasted place.
By her, I mean of course the singular power that shaped my life: Asenath Waite.

I hope to release Prince of Fangs sometime in August. Currently, a free preview of the opening chapters is available by signing up for my newsletter. It’s also an opportunity to become an ARC reader for that book and for my future work. So those who sign up for the newsletter will receive the complete book for free in PDF or MOBI form as a thank you when it’s published—all I ask in return is an honest and open review on Amazon when you’re done.

Dagon Summer will come after that, and the sequel to Prince of Fangs.

What’s the strangest thing you have ever had to research for your book?
Did I mention I used to write erotica? Let’s just leave it at that.

What would the main character in your book have to say about you?
Since Izzy is a book aficionado and a graduate student in literature, we have some common interests and could be friends. She would try and convince me deconstructionism is worthwhile and that literary critics aren’t fraudulent beasts. However, she’s not a writer and I’m not a grad student in literature, so we’d just have to agree to disagree. Another key difference: I’ve never had a gorgeous vampire walk into my life and initiate me into a secret world of warring immortals…

Are your characters based on real people, are they imaginary or a combination of both?
I almost never consciously model a major character after a real world person. I might borrow a personality trait here and there, but for the most part my characters are passionate and supernatural and living lives beyond the ordinary. It’s rare to meet people like that in reality. Also, all fictional characters come from within the author herself, even if she thinks she’s basing it on a celebrity or someone she knows, because they are filtered through her consciousness and her experience.

Who are your favourite authors, and why?
Anne Rice because she writes vampires and erotica; C.J. Cherryh because she writes awesome alien minds; and H.P. Lovecraft for the creepy, cosmic horror.

What sort of research or world-building do you do for your book?
Since the story is set in contemporary northern California, the research is minimal—at least compared to say a Victorian or Regency story, where I’d have to do a lot of historic research. I still have to research random details like types of phones, how to get out of a locked car trunk, and so on. But I made it contemporary because I knew for a paranormal vampire book, I’d have to do some world-building: what are vampires, how are they made, are they organized, does the government know about them, etc.

It’s a big job and while you can just gloss over a lot of that, it’s going to be a better book if it’s thought-out and consistent. At the same time, I deplore reading backstory and background material in fiction, especially romance, so it’s pushed into the background as much as possible and only mentioned in the story when needed.

Where can readers go to discover more about you and your books?
Blog | Twitter | Goodreads