I want to welcome Margo
Bond Collins. First I’d love you to introduce yourself.
Hi! I am the author of the new urban fantasy book,
Sanguinary. I also write contemporary romance and paranormal mysteries. In my
day job, I'm a college English professor and I teach online, though writing
fiction is my first love. I live in Texas with my husband, our daughter, and
several ridiculous cats.
Tell us about your
latest release.
In Sanguinary, there are only
fifty years left before vampires rule the world.
When Dallas police detective Cami Davis joined the city's vampire unit,
she planned to use the job as a stepping-stone to a better position in the
department.
But she didn't know then what she knows now: there's a silent war
raging between humans and vampires, and the vampires are winning.
So with the help of a disaffected vampire and an ex-cop addict, Cami is
going undercover, determined to solve a series of recent murders, discover a
way to overthrow the local Sanguinary government, and, in the process, help win
the war for the human race.
But can she maintain her own humanity in the process? Or will Cami find
herself, along with the rest of the world, pulled under a darkness she cannot
oppose?
You can order copies here:
Also available in paperback.
Now I have a few
questions for you – I have found readers do like to know fun things about us
writers.
1.) Who is your
favorite villain – it can be from a book (even one of yours), movie or TV show.
And why?
Grendel's mother in Beowulf—she's
so horrible that she doesn't even get her own name, and she is so protective of
her son that she goes out to avenge his death by being even more horribly
violent than he was, thereby both participating in and violating the rules of
what was a very masculine warrior culture.
She's hideous, and I adore her.
2.) Who is your
favorite character out of your books? Why?
That's a difficult question! I like all my characters in
different ways—even the villains in my books are real to me, and because I
understand them, I love them just a little bit. In Sanguinary, I adore Reese, the sarcastic cowboy-turned-vampire, for
his heart and wit. And Cami, the detective and narrator, is analytical and
professional, but she's moving through a world she doesn't really understand,
and she's often at a loss, as I think most of us have been at one point or
another.
3.) What do genre do
you write? What made you pick that one?
Urban fantasy, romance, and mystery. I've always been drawn
to the supernatural and paranormal in my own reading. As a literature
professor, I love to teach the old tales of the supernatural: The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight, Dracula. When reading
for pleasure, I prefer fantasy, science fiction, and paranormal romance. So I
guess it was inevitable that I would end up writing supernatural characters.
4.)What are you
working on now?
This is the year of the sequel for me! I'm writing the
second Night Shift novel (a sequel to Sanguinary),
as well as sequels to several other books (Waking
Up Dead, Legally Undead, and Fairy, Texas). I'm also writing a couple
of novellas for anthologies. This week
in particular, I'm working on the second Hometown Heroes contemporary romance
novel, the sequel to Taming the Country
Star.
5.) What got you to
start writing?
For
as long as I can remember, I’ve been making up stories. The first story I remember
actually writing down was basically fan-fiction of The Wizard of Oz. I wrote it in long-hand in a yellow legal pad.
I’ve been writing ever since. But about ten years ago, a friend suggested I
join in National Novel Writing Month (nanowrimo.org). Until then, I had always
written short stories. That year, I finished the first draft of what would
eventually become Legally Undead—it
was my third published novel, but it’s the first one I wrote.
6.) Where do you get
your ideas from?
Most of my ideas come to me almost in passing, when I see something
that catches my attention. In the case of Sanguinary,
it was a color. My husband and I have season tickets to the Dallas Opera, and
the interior walls of the Winspear Opera House—the ones that separate the lobby
from the theater itself—are a gorgeous dark red. As we were walking out one
night, I glanced back and saw that the tint of the outer glass walls turned the
inner walls to a blood-red. At the same time, I saw a woman in a dark red dress
of the same color. And of course that led to thoughts of vampires and murder
(doesn't that happen with everyone?! Or is it just sicko writers?)—and the
story spun out from there.
7.) What would people
who read your work be surprised to find out about you?
That I am terribly shy in person—at least at first. (Readers
would probably be less surprised to discover how snarky I am inside my own
head.)
8.) Do you have any
special talents?
I can recite all the monarchs of England in order . . . (not
all that exciting, I know, but it's what I've got).
9.) What was the one
piece of advice you received when you were an aspiring author that has stuck
with you? Why?
The very best advice I ever got was just this: keep writing new things.
Always have a work in progress. Finish writing a piece, do a quick edit, and
submit it somewhere for publication. Then move on to the next project. Don’t
wait to hear back—that way lies madness! If it’s rejected (and often it will
be; that’s the nature of writing for publication), don’t let it get you down.
Just send it out again and go back to your work in progress.
10.) If you could talk
to any famous figure (present, past or fictional) who would it be and what
would you talk about?
Aphra Behn (d. 1688) was the first woman to make a living
writing in English. She was also an actress and a spy for the King Charles II.
Virginia Woolf once said that every woman writer should leave a flower on
Behn's grave (and sentimentalist that I am, I've done just that). I would love
to tell Behn that she changed the world, and that 350 years later, people are
still reading her works and performing her plays and learning about and from
her.
11.) What song would
you say describes your life?
"Unwritten" by Natasha Bedingfield.
12.) If you could come
back as any animal – what would it be?
A jaguar. I love their languor and grace, and I respect
those claws.
Excerpt:
"Hey, Bradley." I beckoned
the crime-scene tech, who had finally arrived and was snapping on gloves.
"Is that a piece of paper under the vic's head?"
He bent down over my shoulder to get
a clearer view from my line of sight. "Looks like it's tangled in her
hair," he said. He pulled a pair of long tweezers out of his kit and
snagged the sliver. "Yep. Looks like it has a word written on it . .
." We both peered at the brownish, spidery writing.
"Sanguinary," I said.
"Is that written in blood?"
"Maybe. I'll get the lab to run
a basic analysis on it. If it's blood, we'll be able to let you know pretty
quick if it's human and if so, what type. DNA will take longer."
"Sounds good." I stared at
the woman a little longer. Her dark hair—almost
the same color as mine—spilled out around her, matted with dark,
coagulating blood. The two bloody marks on her neck shone like black stars on a
white background.
Vampire.
I knew that if I lifted her dress,
there would be other puncture wounds all over the body, and strange symbols
carved across her skin—pentagrams within circles and other ritualistic signs.
Exactly like the others. Ten murders in the four weeks since the beginning of
September—all centered in downtown Dallas, and many with affluent victims whose
families demanded action.
The department had been in a barely
suppressed uproar.
I stood up, my knees popping a
little. Five years ago, they wouldn't have done that.
And five years before that? Vampires
hadn't existed, except in books and B-movies.
It took time for the world to
believe. We hadn't even realized how to fight back when they'd first shown up.
This victim's ragged, bloody
fingernails suggested that she had tried to resist, but obviously failed.
The red dress she wore would have
originally matched the color of the relatively scant splashes of blood
surrounding her, but those stains had dried to a muddy brown, the same color as
the writing on the paper caught in her hair.
Her clothing suggested that she'd
been at the opera that evening, though the manager, roused from her bed, swore
that the building had been cleared and empty when she left.
One black, high-heel shoe lay
several feet away, toppled over onto its side, the heel broken, as if she had
stumbled out of it when it failed her as she ran from a pursuer.
Sanguinary.
I'd heard the word before from
vampires I had taken down—whispered as a threat, shouted as a warning: the Sanguinary is coming, the Sanguinary
will kill you all.
The Sanguinary is here.
It was why I was about to go
undercover among the vampires.
