Ten years.

Ten years? Yeah. Ten years. My God. Ten Years! My only regret is that it took me five years to get started as a tour guide. I should have done it as soon as I got here.

When did you first decide that you wanted to write your book?

Words are my strong suit. I've been working on a vampire novel off-and-on since 2001. I participated in National Novel Writing Month very early on, and I've been writing vampire novels ever since. I’ve started them, and stopped them, but nothing ever clicked. I had really interesting characters, really interesting concepts, but I could never see one through to the finish.

I'd had a hell of a couple of years, with the Pandemic, and the accident, and temporarily moving away from New Orleans, and a bunch of other stuff. In November 2022, I saw a TikTok video about a unique outlining method that I hadn't heard of before. I decided to see if I could come up with an outline that I liked using that method and it just stuck. Ten days later I had a 75,000 word first draft and it went very quickly from there. So, twenty years or ten days, depending on how you're counting.

How did the podcast come about?

The podcast came about because, as a tour guide, I was constantly getting asked, “do you have a podcast?” or “have you ever heard of the podcast, Lore? Your tour reminds me exactly of this podcast!” Eventually I ended up listening to Lore and going, “I could probably do a podcast just like that. How hard can it be?” The answer? Very! I did end up writing, producing, creating, researching, doing the graphic design for a podcast called Rose Sinister Vampires that was on Google Play, Apple podcast, and Spotify for a while. I think you could still find it on Spotify because they upload original files, but I've taken it down almost everywhere else pending a revamp. That podcast was really popular. (By the way, the Revamp pun was absolutely intended.) The podcast was really popular, and it got me some really interesting international exposure that I am forever grateful for. My reach went far beyond New Orleans at that point.

What's the most interesting thing you learned being a tour guide in New Orleans?

The most interesting thing I learned being a tour guide in New Orleans was actually something I started learning as a liquor store clerk, and then expanded on when I took up karaoke as a hobby. Becoming a tour guide just reinforced it. Dealing with people as a public-facing individual is often a matter of performance. It‘s about connecting with people where they're at and helping them experience what they’re looking for.

When we are in customer-facing, public-facing positions, we have this incredible amount of power. We have the power to completely transform someone's day for the better or the worse. How many times in your life have you had a shitty encounter with somebody and it has made the rest of your day just awful because this spiral of negative intentions just worked its way outward? Conversely, how many times have you been having a really bad day, but you have an amazing encounter with someone unexpected, like, a bank teller, of all people, and all of a sudden every other encounter you have with other people after that is just a little bit nicer.

I realized that in these positions, you have the power to really touch people's lives.

Ten years from now, nobody's going to remember what I said, but people are going to remember how I made them feel. So I wanted to make people feel something. I wanted to make them feel connected to stories, and legacies, and histories that were both greater than themselves, but still exactly like themselves. I wanted to help people find where they existed in the grand scheme of human history and imagination. Connecting with people like that is a skill I honed as a tour guide.

Most writers, artists, and other people who step outside of the norm are neurodivergent. You yourself are neurodivergent. How do you think that plays into this performance aspect for you? Do you think it's more of a mask, or is it more of just a way of honing your authentic self?

Where do you untangle the knot of where one begins and the other ends? I could go on about this very thing for hours, and I often have with my neurodivergent friends. What is the authentic me? I think back to this line from Batman Begins where Katie Holmes’ character says something like, “Bruce, it doesn't really matter what you are on the inside. It's what other people see that matters. That's how they remember you.” So I think the authentic self, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, is the person that I present to them. Honing that performance is honing my authentic self. As far as the outside world is considered internally, I don't think that that necessarily matters as much. I am myself, whole and complete unto myself. Who I am to the world is what matters as far as how I will be remembered, and the impact that I have.

What is your favorite vampire legend from New Orleans?

So my favorite vampire legend from New Orleans has got to be the Casket Girls because it is such a convoluted piece of real history being deliberately misinterpreted through a very specific lens. It's almost comedic the way that the word cassette, which meant a small wooden box, has been misinterpreted to mean casket, a box that holds bodies. From this misinterpretation, or this  mistranslation comes this entire mythology involving the Catholic Church and nuns protecting vampires that occasionally sneak out of an attic at night to prey upon unwitting tourists. I mean, it's a glorious piece of urban legend that has taken on a life of its own. I love it! Is it rooted in reality?

What is reality?

It's rooted in the shared reality of New Orleans as a weird place where weird things happen. Sometimes, it is a dangerous place where tragic things happen. Sometimes it is a place where people in power have, in fact, deliberately protected predators. So how is it not true? It’s interesting, even if it's just not true in the factual sense.

In the factual sense. What about historically, not necessarily in New Orleans, but around the world? Do you have a fear of vampire legends from history?

I love the early stuff. One of the things that I actually love is the way that vampire stories got recorded, and spread, rather than just ending up remaining as sort of these isolated rural legends from the eastern fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I love how vampire stories ended up in Western Europe at just the right moment for the vampire to take off as this political metaphor.

There were these two Austrian empire medical doctors who were sent out to these fringe rural communities to investigate what claims of an outbreak of the dead coming back to life and crawling out of their graves. They were curious at the prospect of reanimated corpses. Was there some actual disease that was reanimating dead bodies and Enlightenment-era Western Europe sent army doctors out to the fringes of the empire to investigate it.Their medical reports ended up being published in German newspapers, and they ended up being republished in Parisian and London newspapers and and it really took off from there. If it hadn't been for those Austrian army medical doctors, the vampire mythology as we know it in Western literature would never have existed.

I love the confluence of events. I love the Petar Blagojević story. I love the Arnold Paole story. Those really early Eastern European army medical doctor recordings of this series of legends that got the ball rolling to where the literary imagination would later come take it and run with it. I love those stories because they're very reflective of the specific fears of specific people at a specific time and a specific place. When you understand that, you become more connected to the humanity behind these stories and the monstrous becomes much more like us. You realize that, throughout history, and throughout culture, we are more alike than we are unalike, and we share a commonality of fears. The oldest and most powerful fear is the fear of the unknown. What is a larger unknown than death? I love it.

I always liked that the word fear actually shares a source word in Latin for fairy, and it actually just means unknown.

Yes, exactly. The fear of the unknown. The fear is the unknown.

Tell us more about your novel.

This Crimson Debt is a novel about a girl who becomes a vampire unexpectedly. This is not part of her five year plan, and she is very distraught by the experience. I sort of approached it thinking, you know, I would love to be a vampire, right? I would love to be a vampire, but there are probably people out there who, if they became a vampire, they would be deeply and profoundly upset, and unhappy, and let's explore that.

I will tell you a funny story. On TikTok, at the time that this novel was inspired, there was a trend going around using the sound from the Bo Burnham song “White Woman's Instagram”. I saw this creator who was a vampire cosplayer do a parody version of “White Woman's Instagram” with all of these cutesy vampire themes. I thought, “wouldn't it be weird if, like, exactly the type of girl from this song became a vampire?” That type of girl would not want to be a vampire. The type of girl who likes fuzzy socks, and scented candles, and tiny pumpkins, and has all millennial-pink matching cleaning supplies.

What would that girl do if she became a vampire?

That became Grace Kelly Cordero, named after Princess Grace of Monaco, who unwittingly stumbles into a vampire party on New Year's Eve, is transformed against her will, and then shuffled around to this old, boring, weird, traumatized vampire who has to sort of guide her through the experience of being undead. I really wanted to dive into what that experience would be like. It is a quieter, more meditative novel. At first, I really wanted to dive into what a person would feel and what their sensory experiences might be like if they were a new vampire in the modern age. The character of Grace, as she developed, became a very neurodivergent character. She became a character who is, canonically, an undiagnosed autistic woman. She has this relationship with her best friend that is an intense love that they have for each other. Is it romantic? Is it platonic? This Crimson Debt is a novel about friendship, and it's a novel about trauma, and it's a novel about community, and connections, and relationships. It's a novel about being almost 25, and not quite feeling like you're a full adult, but having all of these expectations pressed on you that you are. It's about finding yourself even when everything that you thought you had is torn away from you suddenly. How do you rebuild from rock-bottom? It's also a story about fangy, blood-sucking monsters, and neurodivergent monsters, and vampire sex, and queer vampires and all of that. 

So you already have several novels planned?

Yeah, it's going to be a big, long series. Once I got started, I just couldn't stop. So I have nine novels in this series outlined as of now, but only six of them actually concern the central five characters that you start to meet in This Crimson Debt. The others are like prequels that add to the overall arc of the story. I might just continue writing stories in this Community of Blood world until I die. This might be my Discworld, to borrow from the late, great Terry Pratchett. I just might continue writing stories about characters who exist as vampires in this Community of Blood just ad nauseum until I draw my last breath, whenever that may be.

And the first book takes place in Chicago?

The first book does take place in Chicago. At first I had it set in a city that could be anywhere. It could be New Orleans, it could be San Francisco, it could have been a lot of places. But as I continued to write and develop the story, I realized that Chicago fit. And the more I started leaning into Chicago, I realized that New Orleans and Chicago have a long shared history, largely due to the sunbelt migration, which does not factor into my first novel, but the river as well, and the lakes and the water. I wanted to sort of challenge myself to create a novel in a setting that was unfamiliar to me, and sort of move beyond the expectation of a vampire novel set in New Orleans. To create a world where Chicago has its own vampires and what do they look like, and how do they live. That having been said, book two largely takes place in New Orleans because I cannot abandon my roots. Apparently, people love a New Orleans vampire story, so we're going to do it.

Everyone calls it the Midwest, but it's extremely metropolitan. It's a huge city.

It's beautiful. I can see why people would love it. Transplants like Grace, who came from Toledo, Ohio, and why she would love Chicago.

It's often been called the original Gotham. Like, the skyline for Gotham came more from Chicago skyline than New York City skyline. I've been to Chicago multiple times, and at night, it has a very ominous, foreboding, cold skyline.

Chicago really is the epitome of the American gothic. I do want to write more about the Chicago vampires. Like I said, I have nine books outlined in the Community of Blood series, and I will probably outline more as more ideas come to me. But I like the idea of knowing at the beginning where I am going for a long series because I think that that helps me, as an author, avoid some of the pitfalls that other writers whom I've admired greatly have inadvertently made. They've planned for, like, one or two books, or they've planned for a trilogy, and then it takes off and they have to come up with additional scenarios. So my book could end as a trilogy, or a duology, or it could just keep going forever. If enough people like it, I'll just keep writing it forever. Still, I think planning where I want it to end up at the beginning has helped me as a creator.

Seeing the branding that you've put out, like the social media posts and everything feels very cohesive. It feels like it's already a well-developed world. I want to know more about some of the inspiration that you're pulling from for the imagery, and how it ties into your novel.

So some of the imagery was a late addition when I started working on it. First of all, thank you for your kind words about the imagery and the graphic design. I did hire a web designer, and I did hire a graphic designer to sort of help me come up with a bit of a cohesive brand. We work together. I took what she did. I do a lot of stuff in Canva on my own because I am a bit of a control freak when it comes to creative visuals. My graphic designer, and web developer, Laura Kuhn, of Midnight Boheme here in New Orleans, is absolutely brilliant. She's the one who came up with the idea of having a visual logo that we could use across multiple book covers to tie them together, and she wanted to do something very text-based. However, Community of Blood. C.O.B. those initials, there's no way to make them look pretty. It's Cob. It's not cool. So I started thinking symbolically. What are some of the images that I associate with vampirism, and what is the history as I know them to be, and how would these vampires have sort of drawn on symbolism to create a visual for themselves? That's how I came across using an owl. Strigiformes, the scientific name for owls. From there you get Strix, and from there you get Strigoi, from there you get Strega. You get so many words from the owl that have come to mean witch or vampire in various Romance languages across Europe. Going back even further than that, the Lilithu from Babylonian mythology gave rise to the Hebrew Lilith legend. Lilith was often associated with owls. Owls are nocturnal predators. They are associated with the night, and then having the ring of moon phases encircling the owl.

In my motive, I wanted to find a way to sort of suggest that the Community of Blood is very fem-centric. There are more women vampires, fem vampires, enby vampires than there are, say, men vampires, male vampires, or masculine-leaning vampires, and there are reasons for that. Culturally-specific reasons for it. In my world, that will become obvious as the story unfolds over multiple books. I was an anthropology major in college, and so I do draw from those studies and that way of thinking about the world when I'm creating the world that I'm building in fiction.

I love that. I also love how you're already tying in some of the merchandise that you've created like the pins that you're giving away with the book that match the owl wax seal on the cover of the first novel.

Not to be craven about this, but I did not go into this endeavor just to make art for art's sake. I would very much like to make money doing this because I like money. There are things that I would like to do with my life. My dog needs very expensive surgery. We live in capitalism, right? I need money. Please buy my book! Please buy my merch! I promise you it's very pretty! (It Is!)  It's very cohesive! I created the kind of merchandise that I've always loved, which is the kind of merchandise that makes you feel like you are participating in the world in a tangible way, but not necessarily an overtly-branded way. I want you to feel that, when you purchase these things, if you decide to, that you are participating in this world somehow. I created the Community of Blood, and the vampires that I did because my world is very diverse and I wanted to create a world where all of my friends were welcome to imagine themselves as vampires. I kind of want my merch to be something that people feel communicates that sense of community to them as well. Community is a very big theme in my books, and in my branding, and in my own personal values as a creator and as a human being. So it felt right to make that all cohesive.

I'm definitely the target market for this. I'm the kind of person who, when I finish a book, especially when it's a series where the new one isn’t out yet, I immediately go online and try to find merchandise, even if it's “only” fan-made. It can make me feel like I'm in that world just a little bit longer because I'm, like, reeling for weeks after finishing a novel where I just kind of still feel like I'm living in that world and I want something to hold on to. So, I think that's really cool and well thought out.

Thank you. I want to eventually have pins like the ones that the character Calliope wears. I want to have a flask like the one that Harold has available. I want to have items that are mentioned in the book available for people who would like to bring that reality into their lives.

Awesome.

And, of course, T-shirts and tote bags and stuff.

Tell me more about some of your favorite vampire books.

My favorite vampire book we're going to start with is the OG classic, Interview with the Vampire. I first read that when I was six years old. I was terrified by the character of Claudia, as I think any pretentious reader at the age of six would be. I rediscovered Interview with the Vampire at 18 after I finished high school and I experienced it from a very different perspective. I related very much with Louie and his indecisiveness, and his Hamlet-like qualities, which is very much where I was at, at age 18.

I also love the book Bloodsucking Fiends by Christopher Moore. It's set in San Francisco in the 90’s. It is very much of a time and a place and it paints a vivid image. I did like the character Jody, who became a vampire unexpectedly, although the way that she reacted to her transformation is very different from the way Grace reacts to her transformation. But those are some of the books that inspired me. I Love the Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. I love the poetry of her prose and the way that the deep mystery at the heart of her novel just unfolds very slowly. I love her introspective, meditative way of contemplating the vampire and the nature of evil and morality and these deep, deep themes.

I love some of the Chelsea Quinn Yarbro books that I read in the 90’s. Hotel Transylvania and the Count of Saint-Germain Series. I love the vampire novel that George R. R. Martin wrote, Fever Dream, which takes place on a steamship on the Mississippi River. Just the way that the world was built, and the conflict that the human characters had. Like, I'm dealing with these monsters. Like, I love it. I love all of them. Salem's Lot was hugely impactful on me because of the way that these very folklore vampires were superimposed against what was modern America. It seems removed from us now because it's set in the 1970’s, but just that idea of the ancient making its way into the modern, and how the modern mind can be challenged by the presence of something ancient and evil and beyond comprehension. It's almost Lovecraftian, what King did in Salem's Lot. So I love the fear and the tension that he built up with that.

Those are some of my favorites. Recently, Alys Arden’s The Casquette Girls takes my favorite New Orleans folklore and does a brilliant piece of fiction around it. Again, a very long series world-building that's just on point. Female protagonists who are relatable. Part of what makes them lovable is that they don’t play into the “they’re not like other girls” trope. They are! In fact, the central protagonist is just like other girls. She's relatable. I love that.

That's a trend that's going on on TikTok right now. It's the whole female rage written by men versus female rage written by women. I've always liked asking this question of fem-presenting vampire authors. What do you think of the differences between how men write vampires and how women write vampires?

Again. I love Bloodsucking Fiends by Christopher Moore. It's probably one of my favorites. Well, he wrote sequels to it, but the first book was intended to be a standalone. So I read it as a standalone. The way that he wrote the character Jody and her relationship to men, and her relationship to body image, and her relationship to her hair, and to her makeup, and her anger, and her sorrow at being transformed, I thought in a lot of ways, he did a damn good job doing that, especially in the 90’s. Fantastic. Someone did his research. 

I've always experienced rage, In a way that might be more on the masculine-leaning side. And maybe that's because of how I was socialized. Maybe that's because, growing up as a neurodivergent person, the only real friends that I could make were boys. So I was, for a long time, an “I'm not like other girls, I'm a nerd! Pick-me!” Sort.

I think We all go through that phase.

We all go through that phase. But for me, it was very pronounced. I defined myself that way for a very long time. I still feel that for me, my rage is very violent and it is very reactionary, and it is “burn down the whole world,” “cut off his head,” “just destroy the thing that's in front of you right now”. But I see different ways of incorporating anger in the female friendships that I have. I see the way that it is cutting and knife-like and precise in its delivery because it has to be for safety reasons. I am also, in a lot of ways, privileged, because I walk through the world as a tall, well-built, strong-looking woman.

I am five feet, nine inches tall, and very broad-shouldered. I don't have to deal with a lot of the catcalling issues, or the threats to my physical safety issues that I know a lot of the women in my life have to endure. So I think because of my neurodivergent upbringing, and the way that I was socialized, and because of my physicality, I often don't relate to that very pinpoint, precision rage that I see a lot of women in my life wielding so powerfully. I feel like I'm a bit of a clumsy bludgeoner sometimes when I'm angry.

I feel like I'm both. I relate to most of what you just said because I'm also six foot tall, and femme-presenting, but very broad, and broadcast “Don’t-Fuck-With-Me” energy. I do get cat-called, but I hate it. Especially when dealing with men, I react in a very masculine way. When it comes to dealing with women. I do not. But I've also read and heard a lot about how neurodivergent people are more likely to not be on the binary gender spectrum. I still have to figure that out, I think. I appreciate that you're the first person who's answered that question that way. Okay.

Hooray for being weird. Honestly, I kind of want to talk about the way that religion shows up in my book, because the character Grace is a Catholic, and I'm a pretty devout atheist.

Were you raised in a religious school system?

Yes, I was.

And that comes out in your books in a reflection of religion.

Yeah, it does. So I had an interesting experience with religion growing up because my mother was a lapsed Mormon, and my father was a lapsed Presbyterian. They were both kind of like hippies. So, when I was born and for the first several years of my life, I was raised non-religious. Then my mother sent me to a religious school because I was growing up in LA at a time when the public schools weren't exactly the greatest. So I went to the local Catholic school for the first six years, and during that time, both of my parents kind of had profound religious experiences and became Evangelical Christians. So when I was in the 7th grade, I went to a very, very restrictive, conservative Evangelical Baptist school for three years, until I became suicidal and I had to leave that one. Then I ended up going to a much more liberal, but still deeply-religious Baptist school for the last three years of my high school experience.

Of the three religious schools that I went to, I will say that I felt that the most loving and accepting one, and the one that most reflected the Christianity that you read about in the Bible. Basically, the one that taught the closest to the teachings of Jesus was the Catholic school that I went to for elementary school. So when I was creating the character of Grace, her faith was very important to me. I wrote her as a kind of a “Cafeteria”, but still a very devout practicing Catholic, because it was in many ways, it was a it was a fantasy for me to imagine the sort of Christian who embodied the spiritual teachings that I was instructed in growing up, but never really saw reflected in the actions of the people around me. I mean, there's a reason that I left the church, and I left religiosity behind me. There's a reason that I personally identify as a non-religious, agnostic atheist. Now, I might have a spiritual side, but I don't believe in God, and I don't believe in the Christian God. I think that there is power in that belief for the people who sincerely hold those beliefs.

So often in the media, Christianity, and especially Catholicism, is treated with these ugly, broad strokes. It's treated as a shorthand to convey villainousness, or small-mindedness, or somebody who is easily duped. Grace is a very intelligent, very compassionate, beautiful person who also draws from her faith in a way that gives her hope and meaning when things start to fall apart for her. I don't see people of faith presented in beautiful and nuanced ways in media often enough. I wanted to see more of that. So I put it in my book.

I like that. And I do have a handful of friends who are Christian, and they do embody that. Otherwise I wouldn’t be friends with them. Yeah, my experience was being raised between New Orleans, and the Bible Belt area. It gets pretty toxic with some types of Christianity really quickly. This is something that Anna Rice herself struggled with throughout her entire life, between her Christian beliefs and her love of vampires. Are they at odds or can they come together? I think that she finally got it reconciled in the end, and we all got to experience more of her vampire fiction because of that. I think that's a really good thing to see in vampire literature.

It's important because vampires were people, too, as the True Blood show kept saying. People have all sorts of complicated and nuanced and varied ways of relating to the divine. Why not show that there's a Jewish vampire in my novel whose worldview is deeply informed by my Jewish friends, including a couple of rabbi friends whom I consulted when developing this character? How do I convey a character in this sort of a situation without fucking it up, without being offensive? Now, you can't go through life without offending somebody. There's going to be somebody who's going to be offended by the way that I present some of these characters for any number of reasons. But I really tried very hard to create a world where my diverse friend group would feel safe imagining themselves a part of.
I'm also open to criticism.

If I fuck up, I'll pivot, and change direction. I really want to showcase these diverse people, with diverse faiths, and diverse beliefs, and diverse outlooks. There's room for everybody at my table.

That's super important.

Different gender expressions, every letter of the Alphabet Mafia. Everyone. Like, let's bring it. Let's have real, actual diversity. Let's have POC vampires who don't lose their melanin when they're transformed. Like, that's important, too. Sorry, Stephanie Meyer. Sorry, Anne Rice. Yeah, sorry, not sorry. Let's not do that anymore. That's not edgy. That's offensive. Deeply offensive. Let's not do that.

So, aside from all these books that you have planned in your podcast coming back, are there any projects or people that you've wanted to work with that you hope to get to in the future?

As much as I've got this book planned out, I don't know what the next step ahead of me is. Like, I grossly underestimated the number of copies of print books that I would need for my first run. I sold out in my first week, which is both humiliating and humbling and awesome and amazing and also a learning experience. I have to go back and order a whole bunch more books. The demand far outstripped my ability to supply them. People that I would want to work with in the future? Like, I don't even know. I can tell you what I would like to do. I would love more than anything else for the book to take off to the point that maybe I do get an agent, and I do get some big publishing money behind me to really help bring this vision, this story, these characters, and the whole visual aesthetic around it to life with more money than I can sort of string together. I would love to see it get the TV treatment. I would love to see it get the Hollywood treatment. As long as, you know, Hollywood didn't like, gloss over the queer representation, which is a huge part of it. Individuals that I'd like to work with? I don't necessarily know. I love working with Vampyre Magazine. I mean, you guys are amazing. I always love chatting with you, Rachel, and you have introduced me to some incredible people that I would like to work with again, but I don't know, I wouldn't be able to tell you. Like, I definitely want to work with this person, but I am looking forward to the people that I don't even know that I want to work with showing up in my life. I am open to experiences that I can't even imagine right now and I am excited about what might be ahead of me. Terrified, but excited.

Awesome. So tell me where people can come and meet you and get a signed copy of your book.

So, Friday, January 27, between one and 04:00 p.m.. I will be selling the last remaining copies of this Crimson debt in front of Sydney's Wine Cellar at 917 Decatur Street in the French Quarter in New Orleans, Louisiana. And the reason that I am selling in front of Sydney's is because, first of all, I work there right now as a liquor-store clerk, (a professional purveyor of vice, if you will). That shop, the manager, and the owners have always been supportive of me. Twice in my life, I have come crawling back to New Orleans on bloodied hands and knees, and that shop has embraced me, given me a job that has connected me to a huge community that I love, made me feel like I was a part of something, and paid me enough money that I could support myself. That is a profound and awesome thing to have in this world, and in this life under capitalism. To be able to set my table up in front of Sydney's and to do my first signing there feels like a full-circle moment. I've been talking about this book for six, seven months since I first arrived back in New Orleans. People up and down the street are excited for me. They're happy, and I want to share that moment with them. There will be other signings coming up, though. There's probably going to be a signing at Boutique du Vampyre to be announced. There's going to be a signing at the Endless Night Vampire Weekend in Los Angeles on the 18 of February at Bar Sinister 02:00 in the afternoon on the main stage. I will be reading from This Crimson Debt and doing a book signing afterwards. 

And we are also doing a signing at the Bazaar as well for a Vampyre Magazine with Kristen Bauerm the covered model for this issue, Pam from True Blood, and Shane Mahan, along with Rose, who is a longtime contributing author of the magazine this article is featured in. Shane Mahan made the fangs for the original Interview with the Vampire, he's a world renowned effects artist. He also did the Fangs for the new TV show for AMC. So this is exciting.

This is very exciting. So, again, there are amazing, overwhelming, awesome things happening in the future. I know that this is just the beginning. I can't wait to collaborate more with you to write more articles for Vampyre Magazine, which is one of my favorite projects to contribute to. It's been a wonderful journey. You've been incredibly supportive this entire path for me.