Author Spotlight: Elizabeth Kolodziej

This week, Elizabeth Kolodziej, author of Vampyre Kisses is stopping by for a visit.

Elizabeth J Kolodziej, a young fiction writer originally from Torrance, California, is a smart and original thinker who has researched the origins of vampires, werewolves, and witches for many years. She writes her books from the knowledge she has gained while trying to be as original and inspiring as possible. Her books encompass both true folklore facts along with innovative ideas motivated by the great writers around her. This is the first book in Elizabeth's Vampyre Kisses series.

Welcome, Elizabeth, please tell us a little bit about your book Vampyre Kisses.
Well, Vampyre Kisses is a story about a young woman, Faith, who meets a sexy Irish vampire, Trent. Soon after this, Faith is told that she is a witch. The last witch in the world. Then I introduce the werewolf royalty and the master vampire. Gems are stolen that are important to both races and therefore they must work together to get them back. While all of this happens Faith is trying to gain more power through learning about all of the elements and trying to keep the slayers from killing her and her friends.

This is a love story about Faith, the last witch on Earth; and Trent, a 400-year-old Irish Vampire. How did you come up with such interesting characters? What inspired you?
I have always loved witches. Ever since I was little I wanted to fly and have fireballs come out of my hands. Then there are vampires, whose immortality and romance-ism attracts lots of young girls. So, from a young age, I was constantly reading books that either had witches or vampires in them.

Then one day when I was around the age of 18 I started writing this story. Actually, what is a fun fact is that Faith’s name when I began the story was Alex. I always liked names for girls that could be mistaken for a guy’s name. Anyways, when I was younger and read those stories I used to put myself into the story and fantasize what it would be like and how the story would end up if I were in it.

When I began Vampyre Kisses I think I started Faith out as being me but what happens is that these characters become their own individuals and they start talking to you. When Faith started talking, I started listening. The same thing goes for Trent. He started out as what my dream guy would be like, but then he ended up as someone more. He became his own person too.

When it comes to what inspires me there are actually many different things. Certain books inspire me. I’ll think, "Well that sounds neat, but what if this happens," and I will make something new happen all together. Then there are movies that do the same thing for me.

For example, I was trying to write out the synopsis for Vampyre Kisses and I just couldn’t get it flowing. I let it go and started watching Push, with Dakota Fanning, and all of a sudden in the middle of the movie the idea for the synopsis came to me.

But what inspires me a lot more is the people around me. I am a big people watcher and I get ideas for what characters should look like or gestures they might make by watching others. Family, friends, strangers, it doesn’t matter. I even take some of their personality traits and try them out on some of my characters.

Mostly, though, I have one particular friend of mine that is into writing like I am. We have known each other for years now and there is some sort of connection between the two of us. No matter the problem I am having he will talk it out with me and offer ideas or act out a scene and I will get inspired all over again.

Reviews for Vampyre Kisses comment on how skillfully you blended fact and fiction. How did you research your book?
From a very young age my parents were always supportive about my brother and I reading. We would make trips to the bookstore all the time. Well, due to my mother I found my interest in the supernatural. So I would get books on folklore or books that taught you how to use magic. For example, Dancing With Dragons by DJ Conway. I have tons of her books.

So when I started writing my book I wanted to include what is real (or folklore) and what is my own. So I just read whatever books I could find about vampires, witches, and werewolves. It is even much easier with the Internet being as vast as it is now.

I will say this though; researching werewolf history and folklore stories is not easy. There is much more information out there about vampires.

Also, I was very lucky. I wanted my book to end with them being in Ireland but I had never been there. I had just finished college though and my parents offered to send me out there for a month. Being able to really be in the place you are writing about is important.

I think research is just about reading everything you can on your subject along with having real life experiences. What I find so funny, is that I didn’t think of blending fact and fiction as being my hook but everyone seems to like that best about my book!

There is also a whole other mystical universe in Vampyre Kisses. Where did that come from? How much of that was from your imagination?
The universe in my book comes from my imagination, sort of. You see; it goes back to those fantasies I use to have when I was younger. It was like I would pick and choose different things from books that I liked and I would fantasize about a world like that.

For instance, I was always interested in the Greek Gods, no matter what religion I would look into, like the Norse Gods, the Greek always seemed to be my favorite. So those were the Gods I wanted in my own story. Like this, I would pick and choose certain abilities for my vampires to have that I read about. I wanted to be traditional so I kept the fact that they couldn’t go out in the daytime. However, I added my own spin to it by making them able to walk under the sun for the first 10 years of their life after being changed. That was purely my idea.

What it comes down to is what I grew up knowing and liking and then adding my own twist or new things to the mix. That is how I came up with the universe in Vampyre Kisses.

Do you have any plans for a sequel with Faith and Trent?
Oh yes! What I have heard from my readers so far is that they want to find out more about the werewolves. Well, before people started telling me that I already had the sequel in mind that would revolve more about the werewolves than vampires. Mostly because I introduced a new kind of thing with werewolves in my book and a lot more explanation needs to be done.

The first book is just an introduction to the main characters. A little tease to say this is who they are and what they can do. The second book is going to take it further.

Hopefully it will be done by the end of this year and it will be out and published by the middle of next year just like the first one was. And don’t worry … I even have a third one in mind!

Is there anything else that you would like to tell our readers?
The reason that I wrote my book and wanted to publish it is because I wanted to inspire people. So many authors, friends, family, and movie stars have inspired me. I wanted to do the same thing for someone else. Even if it is only one other person. I really hope I can do that.

Also, if there is something wrong with my book or something you don’t understand tell me. It is possible that I can explain what it is in the next book. I love getting feedback about my book no matter if it is negative or positive. But I prefer the positive. :0)
Where to buy the book:

http://www.amazon.com/Vampyre-Kisses-Elizabeth-J-Kolodziej/dp/1609116054/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1281034044&sr=8-1


Links:

http://www.vampyrekisses.com/

http://www.facebook.com/kweenkitten

http://www.twitter.com/ejkolodziej

Living for a Writing

Back when my hair was naturally blond and my idea of dieting was only three scoops of chocolate ice cream drowning in hot fudge sauce instead of four, I went through a stage where I wanted to be an actress.

 I was pretty, had been in quite a few plays, and thought I had some potential to go professional at some point. Toward the end of this period, I confided to my acting coach that I dreamed of playing Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, to which she responded with a hearty—and cruel—laugh. “You have a lot of living to do before you can ever play Blanche DuBois, dear.”

 My translation: “Don’t give up your day job, child. You ain’t got the talent.”

 So I went back to the school paper and never set foot on the stage again except when they called “Author! Author!” for a murder mystery I had written.

At that stage of my life I was a naïve teenager living at home with my mother. I didn’t drink and I didn’t smoke. The character I had dreamed of portraying on the stage was an aging alcoholic Southern belle who lived in a state of perpetual panic about her fading beauty. Her life was completely at the other end of the spectrum from mine. How could I even begin to comprehend the depths of this character in order to portray her convincingly?

 I came to realize the source of that coach’s laughter recently when the opportunity presented itself for me to take a gun class. I jumped at the chance for a couple of reasons:

1. I thought it would be fun, and it was;
2. As the author of murder mysteries in which my main characters regularly carry and shoot guns, I believed it would be good research to find out about these weapons.

On the last night, the instructor took the class to the range for us to shoot a variety of guns on the range. When he placed the loaded 32 caliber semi-automatic in my hand, I had a feeling that I didn’t expect: Fear.

 I looked down at this thing in my hand and thought: I could kill someone with this.

The weapon wasn’t as heavy as I had expected, but it sure looked scary to me. I went up to the range and when the instructor called out, “Threat!” (He didn’t call out “Fire” because we were to shoot at our leisure, not on command.) I pulled the trigger and emptied the gun of six rounds.

 No one was as surprised as I was when I hit the center of the target with almost every shot. I was good!

 As I examined the target and all the holes that I had put in it, I looked down at the gun in my hand and felt a sense of power: I could kill someone with this.

Since I write murder mysteries, it goes without saying that people get killed in my books. Detectives with guns go after the bad guys, and bad guys with guns go after the good guys. Even though most murder mystery authors don’t really carry badges and guns and shoot real bullets at real bad guys (but many have), it doesn’t hurt to get out there and take a short walk in their shoes, even if only for play, in order to bring something authentic to the page.

By the time the instructor upgraded me to a 9 millimeter semi-automatic, I was able to put myself in the mind of Archie Monday when a murder suspect attempts to intimidate her in It’s Murder, My Son. As I aimed at the target with the same weapon I had her use, I envisioned the suspect in my sites. I was now present in the scene in a way I hadn’t been before.

I don’t think my acting coach meant that I had to become a lush in order to play Blanche DuBois. She probably meant that I should stay out after midnight at least one night in order to have something to draw on. Even the most talented actor with the vastest imagination can’t put himself in the character of a cat if he’s never even seen one. How can you write about a broken heart if your heart has never been broken? You can’t just imagine how it feels.

Many writers, I’m included, are introverts. They are most content when they’re home alone writing away on an intoxicating wave of imagination. But eventually that wave will come in. Imagination can take a writer only so far. Without some basis of reality to stand on they’re going to sink to the bottom.

That reality comes from getting out of the writer’s studio and collecting a stockpile of life experiences to store away and feed the imagination, even if only to draw upon it at a later time in another project further down the road.

So, put away that laptop. Brush your teeth. Take a gun class! Go bungee jumping or sky diving (that’s another blog post for a later time!). Go out into the world and do some living—then write about it!

Kill Me Please

Most writers, like me, are die-hard introverts. We are most content when we are home alone with our imagination, laptop, and dog or cat or goldfish or whatever it is that keeps us company without making too many demands.

I don’t get cabin fever. This past February, I cursed when the snow plow came through three days after the blizzard. It was so unfair. My friend Jill who lives in the “flatlands” as I call the valley below our mountain got to stay snowed in for two more days. She does get cabin fever.

Yet, there is a danger to giving into your solitary ways when you are a writer. Inspiration comes from being “out there”. How else can you come up with interesting characters or story lines? You can’t count on anyone worthy of being put in your next masterpiece crossing your path while sitting in your recliner in your bathrobe and slippers. Agatha Christie based Hercule Poirot on a gentleman she saw at a café. Sherlock Holmes was based on one of Sir Conan Doyle’s college professors.

Don’t assume that being called a character is an insult. I am often asked to be put in my books. It seems to be a toss-up between wanting to be the innocent accused, or the suspect that the reader hopes did it so they will go to jail, or the actual killer.

Only once, a young man asked after one of my speaking engagements if he could be a murder victim. Never before, and never since, has anyone requested to be the victim--unless you want to count the request to be killed off coming from one’s behavior.

Have you ever seen someone incredibly ill dressed and thought, “Do they ever look in the mirror?” Well, sometimes I will meet someone and wonder, “Do they have any idea of how their behavior looks to others?”

Through my years of people watching, I have met some people who seem to beg, “Kill me! Please!” They aren’t asking the neighborhood psychopath to take an ax to them, but they do seem to be begging the local mystery writer to make them the subject of a fictional murder investigation.

Recently, in my quest for inspiration, I got out of bed, kicked off my fluffy slippers, brushed my teeth, put on my bra, and went off to census training for the United States government. (If I can get paid for people watching, so much the better.) Here I was in a large room with twenty-five other adults all awaiting the opportunity to learn how to go door to door to count people…and to meet characters.

My training class was a virtual garden of characters ripe for the picking. There was the mom wanting to earn enough money to take her children to Disney World; the wife hoping to make enough money to pay her husband’s medical bills, the dog trainer who was short on funds, and the elderly couple wanting to make enough money to drive across country in their RV this summer.

Let’s not forget the mystery writer in search of inspiration.

Add to this mix an executive recently retired from a position that had two hundred employees working under her. I know this because she broadcast it several times over the course of the week. She was also the recipient of numerous awards for excellence. She said that it was important that everyone, including the instructor, know this information. Why? Her awards were real evidence of how truly far beneath her we all were.

By the end of the first day, it became clear that I had found a potential murder victim.

An hour into the training, The Executive balked at the one hour allotted for lunch during the eight-hour day. “I find that unacceptable. It violates my employment agreement.” The Executive wanted the thirty minute lunch that she had agreed to and to leave a half hour earlier, even if it was inconvenient for the other twenty-five people in the room. Since none of us ever had two hundred men working under us, our lunch plans didn’t matter.

By the end of the week, I had a room filled with readers waiting in line to buy the book I write in which the murder victim is The Award Winning Executive.

It was during The Great Lunch Negotiations that the mother trying to get to Disney World turned to me. “There’s a reason I’m a stay-at-home mom.” Like the Disney Mom, I work at home alone for a reason. Maybe it’s because my mother drilled manners into my psyche that I have never mixed well with corporate America. I actually care about the other people in the room.

I don’t actually lift a whole character and put them into a book. Rather, I will pick up looks, styles, or traits to use. I will also store away situations that I have encountered to use in a plotline.

For example, the one home I visited for the census in which the wife screamed at me about how she refused to take part. Okay, I said. But when I turned to leave she called me back. Maybe her husband will answer my questions. After bellowing for her husband, she resumed yelling at me. It seemed to take an eternity for her husband to come to the door while she continued screaming about how she was not going to participate in the census. When I once again offered to leave, she told me to wait because her husband was coming. After he arrived, she went to get a beer while he answered my questions between comments about how nosy the government is.

It was during this interview that I put together a plotline in which a couple is murdered by a door-to-door sales rep pushed over the edge by…

After all my years of people watching, I have yet to answer this question: When characters like these end up between the covers of a book, do they actually see themselves the way the writer saw them?

In a Setting Far, Far Away Only in My Mind, Or--

What’s a writer to do when she wants to humiliate someone but they won’t go along willingly?

During my writing career, I have discovered that people are both thrilled and anxious about the prospect of ending up in a book involving murder and mayhem. After meeting me, some have to wonder, “How does she see me in one of her books? A detective? A suspect? Oh, my heavens, certainly not a corpse!”

The Joshua Thornton mysteries are set in Chester, West Virginia; the small town where I had grown up. In A Small Case of Murder, Joshua’s parents discover a dead body in the barn on my brother’s farm. Mark has fun telling people that actually no dead body was ever found on his farm. When researching A Reunion to Die For, I took a tour of the county prosecutor’s office. Hancock County’s prosecuting attorney thinks it’s a kick having a fictional counterpart.

However, while writing the Mac Faraday mysteries, I learned that when it strikes too close to home, some people would rather the author take her murder elsewhere.

My sister-in-law had asked me to set a murder mystery in her home town, a sweet summer place in Wisconsin called Pelican Lake. At the time, I was working on a storyline that wasn’t a good fit for Joshua Thornton. So I went to work on a new series set on a lake in a resort town modeled after Pelican Lake.

I had completed the first draft of It’s Murder, My Son in time for a visit from my sister-in-law. Excited about a murder set in her town at her request, she asked for all the details. When I mentioned that the murder victim was killed in her house, I was surprised to see horror in her eyes. Since her home and property had a unique design and layout, anyone knowing her could easily tell that the murder took place in her home.

For the sake of family harmony, I decided to do a re-write.

As luck would have it, my family had started vacationing at Deep Creek Lake. Like Pelican Lake, this Maryland town is a resort area. It was child’s play to pick up my murder in Pelican Lake and plop it down in Deep Creek Lake, until I asked the local police department to let me portray them as a bunch of idiots.

In It’s Murder, My Son, homicide detective Mac Faraday discovers that his birth mother is the late Robin Spencer, America’s Queen of Mystery, and he is her sole heir. Upon learning that he has a half brother, police officer David O’Callaghan, he moves to Deep Creek Lake to meet him.

Mac is drawn into the murder investigation of his neighbor after Gnarly, his inherited German shepherd, drags home a dismembered head. When he sees that the chief detective is an incompetent, Mac joins David in the investigation. It is the perfect opportunity to get to know his brother better. But, as luck would have it, Mac ends up making David the prime suspect.

While rewriting It’s Murder, My Son, I was surprised when the local police department refused to cooperate in my research. Unlike the Hancock County sheriff (a protagonist) in the Joshua Thornton mysteries, the police in Deep Creek Lake (an antagonist) would only give me a tour of the jail if I brought my toothbrush and planned to stay a while. Their resistance was understandable. Even though I promised disclaimers in my acknowledgements about my work being completely fiction and not based on anyone real, the police department was concern about their image.

So, out of respect for the real law enforcement, I created a fictional resort town resting on the shores of the real Deep Creek Lake and had a blast doing it.

In my previous series, my imagination was fenced in by the boundaries of Chester’s realities. While I was able to move the barn on my brother’s farm, I couldn’t get away with placing a twenty-five story high-rise on Carolina Avenue. Nor could I change the town’s history to fit a storyline.

When a murder mystery is set in a real town, readers expect the writer to be true to the facts. Even with a work of fiction, readers familiar with the area have a hard time forgiving authors when they rewrite their hometown’s history or change the streets. Even if the author had a legitimate reason for making the change, to the reader, it looks like sloppy research. For example, a woman once told me that she had stopped reading a series set in Washington DC when the writer had placed an exit ramp off Rock Creek Parkway that wasn’t there.

When I sat down to create the setting for It’s Murder, My Son, like a bird set free from a cage, my imagination opened its wings and soared. Since this was my town, I had the freedom to do with it as I saw fit.

Thus, Spencer, Maryland, was founded.

Nestled in a corner of Deep Creek Lake, Spencer is named after my protagonist’s ancestors. As the descendent of the town’s founders, the character of Mac Faraday has political influence that he otherwise couldn’t have inherited.

Since my first draft had already been on a lake in Wisconsin, I duplicated that setting in Spencer, but added some of my own touches. Mac Faraday’s cedar and stone home rests at the end of the most expensive piece of real estate on Deep Creek Lake. The peninsula houses a half-dozen lake houses that grow in size and grandeur along the stretch of Spencer Court, which ends at the stone pillars marking the multi-million dollar estate that had been the birthplace and home of one of the world’s most famous authors.

My fictional setting’s affluence is born out of necessity. While this lakeside town is small, it also has its own police department. In order to make that feasible, I had to make Spencer a getaway for the rich and famous.

From the lakeshore, Spencer’s border stretches up and over a mountain, on top of which rests the Spencer Inn, a resort and spa, which is also part of Mac’s inheritance. Ironically, before his windfall, he couldn’t have afforded to eat there.

While it is fun to create a fictional setting, the writer does need to keep hold on the reins. The setting needs to fit with the surrounding area. Readers familiar with Deep Creek Lake would never buy an exclusive resort town like Spencer on their shores if in fact the area was an impoverished swamp. In reality, Deep Creek Lake is a popular vacation spot for people from Washington, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and all the surrounding areas. The million dollar homes in my setting fit right in with the other vacation houses that dot the lake and mountainside.

Writing It’s Murder, My Son was an amazing ride. As a writer, it is exhilarating to let your imagination go free without the reins of reality. Who knows, maybe in Max Faraday’s next adventure, I’ll have him go into a galaxy far, far away—or was that already done?