Vampires and Corsets: An Interview with Colleen Gleason, Author of the Gardella Vampire Chronicles - Page 4

For Max… either Clive Owen or Gerard Butler. Maybe even Joaquin Phoenix.

For Sebastian… Matthew McConaughey would be perfect, if he wasn’t so scruffy!

I also like Judi Dench for Aunt Eustacia, and Joan Cusack for Verbena. Jackie Chan is the wrong nationality, but I like his age and body build for Kritanu. And as for Lilith… well, Kate Bosworth is certainly emaciated enough to play her… if she had bright red hair!†

One of the things I really loved about reading The Rest Falls Away were the details  you included about the time period. How do you go about researching for your novels?

Thank you! When I started to write this book, I already had a good idea of the time period - from reading many other books set there, and also because I’d started another book a while back in that same era. So I had enough information to be dangerous, and to get started on the story.

But as that book, and the others, are in process, and I get into specific situations or places in the plot, I might find I have to do deeper research about a particular thing - and so I get on the Internet and start searching. That’s usually all I need to do to find out something simple, like what music they might listen to, or what they might eat for dinner, or where in London would be a good place to set a bar that catered to vampires.

But then there are other things that require more in-depth research. I am fortunate enough to live near a major university, so I go and haunt their graduate library when I really get in deep.

For example, in Rises the Night, my heroine, Victoria, goes to Venice and meets up with the infamous poet (and lover) Lord Byron. I was able to do just a bit of research on the Web about Byron to find out when he was in Venice, but I had to go to the library to find his journals and diaries about where he was living at the time, who he was living with (i.e., which mistress!) and what he was like… since Victoria meets him in person.†

Your book has been described as Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Jane Austen, and I know that you are a Buffy fan. Do you agree with that comparison?

Yes and no. On the very surface, yes, there are similarities: Victoria and Buffy are both young women at a very important stage of their lives -- one is debuting into Society to find a husband, and the other is in high school, arguably one of the most formative and difficult social times of modern life — and they both find out they have another role to play, a responsibility that not only puts them in danger and turns their lives upside down, but also gives them power and abilities beyond anyone else in their sphere.

Article Author: Katie Trattner

Ms. Trattner works for a non-profit agency where she is thankful for any internet time she can squeeze into her day. In her free time she reads one of the thousands of books stacked in her tiny apartment.

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