Welcome to FAR, Margaret. Margaret L. Carter is the author of Besieged Adept, Maiden Flights, Embracing Darkness, Shadow of the Beast, Child of Twilight, Dark Changeling, Wild Sorceress, Sealed in Blood, Crimson Dreams, From the Dark Places, Heart’s Desires and Dark Embraces, New Flame, Night Flight, Foxfire, Demon’s Fall, Guardian Spirit, Residual Fumes, Tall, Dark, and Deadly, Different Blood: The Vampire as Alien, The Vampire in Literature: A Critical Bibliography, Shadow of a shade: A survey of vampirism in literature, Specter or Delusion: The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction, and Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics.

Besieged Adept and Wild Sorceress were co-written with Leslie Roy Carter. How did these books compare to your solo books?

They are set in an imaginary world, while all my solo novels published so far take place against the background of our familiar reality (the "primary world," to use Tolkien's terminology, as opposed to a sub created "secondary world"). My other novels all have significant love story subplots, even those that aren't technically romances, but so far romantic elements remain a small part of the Aetria novels. Also, if it matters, WILD SORCERESS and BESIEGED ADEPT are longer than any of my solo novels except DARK CHANGELING, because of the complexity of their plots and the large numbers of characters involved. My husband Les created the setting and plots for these novels, and he's a better plot-constructor than I am.

How does Aetria’s story differ from the tales in Maiden Flights?

Very different! For one thing, there is no sex in WILD SORCERESS and BESIEGED ADEPT, whereas the stories in MAIDEN FLIGHTS are both fantasy erotic romance. These two stories are also rooted in fairy-tale motifs, unlike the two collaborative novels, which have more affinity with the sword-and-sorcery sub genre of fantasy. And of course the fact that the background of the Aetria novels originated with Les makes them different in plot and tone from my solo works.

Virgin Blood from Maiden Flights is the story of Rapunzel with an erotic twist. What inspired you to retell Rapunzel?

Ellora's Cave, the publisher, wanted to start a series of erotic romances based on fairy tales. I picked "Rapunzel" because it has always been one of my favorites, next to "Beauty and the Beast." The latter has been retold many times (in fact, I have a vampire "Beauty and the Beast" adaptation in the fanzine GOOD GUYS WEAR FANGS, issue No. 4, information under "Vanishing Breed Vampire Universe" on my website), so I chose the slightly less used "Rapunzel" motif. The darkness of the story appealed to me. In the original tale, remember, the hero meets a very cruel fate. Making my hero a vampire seemed appropriate, not only because of my fondness for vampires, but because that change provided an interesting alternative explanation of how he gets into the tower and how Rapunzel ultimately escapes.

What led to Dragon’s Tribute’s inclusion in Maiden Flights?

The composition of the book comes from a simple logistical decision. Ellora's Cave can't publish an e-book as a paperback unless it reaches a certain minimum length. To get these two stand-alone short e-books into print, we had to combine them to achieve enough wordage for a viable trade paperback. The two stories fit together because they share a fairy-tale tone and subject matter.

How was writing Embracing Darkness for Silhouette Intimate Moments different/similar to writing for the independent book press?

When I wrote EMBRACING DARKNESS, I had no particular publisher in mind. I simply wrote a romance that caught my imagination in the same way I did with SEALED IN BLOOD and CRIMSON DREAMS, using the nonhuman, nonsupernatural vampire species that forms the background of all my vampire novels. Because it came out too short for the average single-title publisher (like most of my novels), I decided to try the dominant mass market category romance publisher, Harlequin/Silhouette. I had heard that one of the senior editors, Leslie Wainger, liked vampires. It was just a wonderful stroke of fortune for me that she did like EMBRACING DARKNESS. In editing, I happily didn't have to make any significant changes in my vampires that would have conflicted with their traits as established in my existing works. The only compromise I had to make was in de-emphasizing certain aspects of male vampire reproductive physiology that might have diminished the hero's appeal to the category romance audience. In SEALED IN BLOOD, for instance, I could go deeper into the limitations of their ability to have sexual relations with human females. In EMBRACING DARKNESS I also had to explain the workings of the blood bond differently from the way I might have in a book directed toward a more specialized audience of avid vampire fans, whom I would have counted on to be familiar with that trope already.

Shadow of the Beast is a story of humanity and violence. Jenny’s battle with the dark power within herself drives the story. Were these ideas what drove Jenny’s story?

Yes, especially the latter. I have always been fascinated with getting inside the mind of the monster, which is why I love Suzy McKee Charnas's novel THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY and her novella "Beauty and the Opera, or the Phantom Beast," a retelling of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. I like to read and write about "monsters" who have to make ethical choices, learning to live with and control the beast within themselves rather than getting "cured" and becoming just like everybody else. Several of my works essentially revisit the Ugly Duckling story, which I think is the Ur-myth for a lot of young fantasy, horror, and SF fans. We grow up feeling like misfits. Ideally, like the Ugly Duckling, we ultimately discover that the characteristics that make us feel peculiar and inadequate turn out to be hidden strengths. Jenny, learning about her werewolf nature, and Roger in DARK CHANGELING fit into this template.

Child of Twilight, Dark Changeling tells the story of Roger Darvell's struggle with his vampire blood while living among humans. Was it your fascination with vampires that led to Roger’s story?

I have been fascinated with vampires since reading DRACULA at age twelve. The third story I ever wrote was a novelette (over thirty single-spaced typed pages, when I was thirteen) about a man unwittingly transforming into a vampire, confused and frightened about what's happening to him. The female vampire who transforms him, Sylvia, eventually developed into a major character in DARK CHANGELING. Over the years, Roger was spawned in my imagination and morphed from a priest who turns into a vampire without at first realizing what's going on, to a half-breed born of a vampire woman and her human lover. Somewhere along the way, I decided Roger would make a much better psychiatrist than a priest, but I kept him a practicing Catholic to enhance the tension between his secret bloodlust and his high ethical standards. DARK CHANGELING began as a fix-up that combined several different stories and novellas featuring Roger, written over many years. I smoothed out the rough spots and wove this group of stories into a unified plot.

How was writing about SF cons and vampires in Sealed in Blood different from your previous vampire tales?

I had fun with those scenes, because a lot of amusing things go on at cons. That setting, I hope, entertains people who have never attended a con but especially those who are familiar with fan culture and enjoy seeing it portrayed in fiction. I wanted to make SEALED IN BLOOD lighter in tone than my other vampire fiction, and I hope readers get a few giggles from it. CHILD OF TWILIGHT also contains an incident set at a con, where Roger experiences "fish out of water" discomfort, while his half-brother Claude, an actor, feels right at home playing to the fans.

With Crimson Dreams, From the Dark Places, and Heart’s Desires and Dark Embraces the terror and thrill of vampires, magic, and the dark beasts hidden within humanity is explored. How do you create such varied and unique worlds while exploring humanity’s darkness?

Thanks for the compliment! If I knew how I did it, I would do it consistently and become a best selling author. Seriously, I think what underlies that aspect of my work is the inspiration of authors I enjoyed in my formative years, classic horror writers such as J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, M. R. James, E. F. Benson, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and the major pulp era writers such as Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, H. P. Lovecraft, and Theodore Sturgeon. I read all those classics as a teenager, before I ever saw a horror movie or read any contemporary horror. (Back then, when dinosaurs walked the Earth, libraries didn't stock paperbacks, so I could read more recent authors only by spending my limited pocket money. I started out with collections of the older writers just mentioned and the anthologies in the old "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" series.) These vintage authors infused me with a desire to write about the numinous allure of the supernatural and the paranormal.

How do your short stories New Flame and Night Flight differ from your novels? Is it easier to write about one person/situation compared to multiple plots/themes?

It's easier for me; I'm not much for multiple subplots. CHILD OF TWILIGHT is a major exception to my usual pattern in that respect. My natural word count for fiction usually falls into novella or category length, forms that were very hard to sell until e-publishing became popular. I owe most of my publication opportunities to the flexibility of e-books. "New Flame" and "Night Flight" differ from the novels in their tight focus, concentrating entirely on the hero and heroine with only one or two secondary characters playing peripheral roles. "Night Flight," the much longer of the two, is technically a novella and provides a good example of a piece that couldn't have been published as a stand-alone work by a print publisher. "New Flame" belongs to Ellora's Cave's "Quickie" line of stand-alone short stories and was written specifically for that purpose.

Is writing for anthologies easier than writing novels or just different?

I believe short stories call upon a different set of skills from novels. For me, producing a strong piece of fiction at short story length, bringing a plot to a satisfactory resolution in 5000 words or fewer, is harder than working in the broader scope of a novella or novel. Therefore, in my opinion writing teachers who advise beginners to hone their technique solely with short fiction and set the goal of selling multiple short stories before even attempting a novel are mistaken. True, it's good to work in the short form, even if it doesn't come naturally, because its rigorous demands develop important skills. But if the novel is your natural form and length, don't torture yourself trying to become a short story writer. Some people can do both equally well, while others are better at one or the other. I started with short stories as a teenage aspiring writer, but in recent years the only short pieces I've written have been targeted at particular anthologies rather than produced "on spec."

Is there a difference between literature and mainstream fiction?

Well, I would call it more of a dichotomy between "literature" and “popular fiction.” Most literary fiction is mainstream, but not all. Toni Morrison's BELOVED, for instance, is a Southern Gothic ghost story, but you'll never find it shelved with horror; the bookstores put it in "Fiction and Literature." And there are certainly mainstream (i.e., straight realism) novels that are popular rather than "literary." I believe the distinction in its current form is a relatively recent development. Shakespeare wrote his plays to appeal to the "groundlings" who paid the theater's bills. Charles Dickens and the other great Victorian authors we study in English courses survived to become "classics" because they were popular with readers in their own day. Also, genres other than "realism" weren't disdained in the same way they are now. Dickens, Hawthorne, and Henry James wrote supernatural as well as realistic fiction. Poe, who was respected in Europe (more than in his own country) as one of the great American writers of his day, of course specialized in horror and mystery stories. Today we do have a sharp distinction between "literary" and "popular" fiction. I think the principal difference, aside from critical reverence for one and disdain for the other, is that popular fiction requires a well-plotted story, whereas literary fiction can get along without a strong plot, often relying for its appeal on character studies, writing technique, and narrative experimentation. Genre fiction often has those qualities, too, but to appeal to its intended audience, it must have a good story above all. For the most lucid explanation of what popular fiction needs that I've ever read, go to Marion Zimmer Bradley's essay at this link: http://mzbworks.home.att.net/why.htm. Then go to that site's home page and check out her article on advice for beginning writers.

Who do you think is the greatest literary personality ever?

Good grief, there are so many to choose from. I'll go with the obvious and say Shakespeare. I read all the plays as a teenager, partly for fun and partly to say I'd done it, and loved some of them, such as ROMEO AND JULIET, from which I memorized large chunks of the balcony scene for the pleasure of the poetry. I was also very taken with the sensuality of the poem "Venus and Adonis."

How was writing non-fiction about vampires different/similar to your vampire fiction?

The similarity lies in the fact that both spring from my love for the vampire theme. I started collecting vampire fiction and keeping lists of titles in my late teens. When my informal list of books and stories developed into an organized bibliography, the next natural step was to write a study of vampire fiction from its earliest appearance in English literature in the early nineteenth century to the present (which was then about 1970). Nobody had yet published a book-length survey of the history of vampirism in literature. My SHADOW OF A SHADE was a pretty amateurish effort, but I'm still proud that it was the first attempt to do anything of that kind. The good fortune of having my dissertation, SPECTER OR DELUSION, accepted by an academic publisher (UMI Research Press) shortly after I got my PhD. gave me the opportunity to submit my vampire bibliography and the scholarly anthology DRACULA: THE VAMPIRE AND THE CRITICS to them. Since then, I've had a few articles on vampire literature published and have written DIFFERENT BLOOD: THE VAMPIRE AS ALIEN, again a project that grew out of reading and collecting the kind of vampire fiction that fascinates me personally, the vampire as a naturally evolved species (Suzy McKee Charnas's THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY is a prime example of that sub genre). This is also the kind of vampire I write about, with a few exceptions in short story form. Nonfiction, especially academic literary criticism, is of course very different in tone and structure from stories and novels, even when the subject is similar.

Is there anything else you would like to share about your books?

The theme that particularly enthralls me is the exploration of relationships between human and nonhuman characters, and that interest is reflected in most of my fiction.

Are there any other genres you would like to explore?

I'd like to try writing young adult fiction sometime, although the genres would be the same, fantasy and horror. I also wish I could write mysteries. That genre requires great skill in plotting and in concealing facts from the reader without “cheating.”

You’re on the front page of the newspaper. What’s the headline?

Navy Wife Publishes Best-selling Vampire Novel!

Do you have a specific routine before you write? Do you write in one area only or everywhere?

I outline extensively. The first-draft process is very hard for me, and the more pre-writing I do, the more the anxiety of the blank screen is reduced. I practice all sorts of preparations to "trick" myself into writing. Lately I've started using the method in FIRST DRAFT IN 30 DAYS, by Karen Wiesner. I highly recommend it for writers who tend to be "outliners," and I'm sure “seat of the pantsers” could learn from it, too. Aside from outlines, character notes, and brief bits of dialogue, I do all the actual writing at the computer in our home office. There's no way I'd ever go back to the tedium of retyping stuff!

Who/What inspired you to write?

DRACULA. That's the short answer. At age twelve, I was so thrilled with my first reading of Stoker's novel that I sought out and devoured all the horror I could find, soon branching into fantasy and "soft" science fiction. Since the supply in our local library was limited, at thirteen I started writing to fulfill my craving for more stories of the kind I wanted to read, especially those written from viewpoint of the "monster" and/or with sympathetic portrayals of "monstrous" characters. Stories of that type were rare in the 1960s. I yearned for paranormal romance decades before the category was officially invented (although of course some works existed that would be classified thus if they were published nowadays, such as the novel THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR and the plays DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY and BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE). My first completed short story was a romance between a man and a ghost.

Who are some of your favorite authors?

C. S. Lewis, Madeleine L'Engle, Suzy McKee Charnas, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury (his early work), Marion Zimmer Bradley, Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Elizabeth Peters (aka Barbara Michaels), P. N. Elrod, Sharyn McCrumb, Susan Conant, Stephen King, Dean Koontz (his later work, last couple of decades), Spider Robinson, Mercedes Lackey, and quite a few others.

Is there a way other than your website for fans to keep updated?

You can subscribe to my monthly e-mail newsletter, "News from the Crypt," at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/margaretlcartersnewsfromthecrypt. The title is based on the name of my website, Carter's Crypt, which comes from a vampire fiction zine I used to edit, THE VAMPIRE'S CRYPT (information on ordering back issues is on my site). In each newsletter, in addition to notes about new publications and small personal tidbits, I include an excerpt from my fiction and comments on a few books I've read recently.

What final advice would you offer to writers who are seeking publication?

Find a good writers' group or critique partner to give you feedback. It's almost impossible to avoid blind spots in evaluating your own work. Read extensively, both in and out of your chosen field. Establish a writing routine. And never give up!

Finally, any last thoughts.

Embrace the wonders of the imagination. Reading fantasy and horror can be a spiritual experience. At their best, these genres remind us that there is more to the universe than the purely material reality explicable by the laws of physics.

Thank you Margaret for taking the time to answer my questions and give us a glimpse into your life and world. For more information about Margaret L. Carter and her books, visit her website at http://www.margaretlcarter.com/.

Interviewed by: Dena