Cat Johnson Braves Doll Lil’s Word Association Challenge!

To celebrate the release of Once Burned, NY Times bestselling author Jeaniene Frost made appearances in just a few lucky bookstores for the week after her newest book hit the shelves. Paperback Dolls’ own Elvie was lucky enough to be able to attend Ms. Frost’s appearance at Barnes & Noble in Cary, NC on July 1, where instead of reading an excerpt from her work, Ms. Frost gave a brief talk and then answered reader questions for a solid 45 minutes! It was a ton of fun, and Elvie is thrilled to be able to share today all the great information she learned about Once Burned, the Night Huntress world and its other characters, Ms. Frost’s writing process, and the author herself. Enjoy!

JF: Hi, thanks for coming! I am just having my newest novel released, the first in the Night Prince series. There will be at least two novels in that series, possibly three. It might end up being a trilogy; I’m not 100% sure yet, but it’s leaning toward that direction.

I do get some of my ideas from dreams. Not all of them – I’ve had to discard quite a few, actually. But, I’ve had very good dreams ever since I was a child, and I do remember most of them, and when I was little, I used to make little unfinished stories out of them. Right around the time that I was about to turn 30 and having my early midlife crisis – “Wow, I had wanted to be an author since I was 12 and had never even seriously attempted to write a book” – I had a dream about a half-vampire woman arguing with a full vampire man about why she had left him years before. In the dream, I knew she hadn’t wanted to leave him and she still loved him, but felt it could never work, and I also knew that he had been looking for her and was absolutely not going to walk away. Trying to answer the questions to myself of who those people were, how they had gotten to that point in their lives, and a half-vampire and a vampire to begin with was what eventually led to my first novel, Halfway to the Grave.

Once Burned is funny because when I started writing about vampires, I swore I would never touch the Dracula man, because I just felt I had nothing to add to it. And while I had grown up on Dracula movies, like a lot of people – and I usually did want him to win in the end over Van Helsing; I could never understand why that angry inspector just wouldn’t leave him alone and let him be with his girl! – I had no desire to write about the character of Vlad, Dracula. And it was halfway through my third book where I was writing a scene where my hero and heroine and another vampire were all trying to plot to to figure out how to get away from the evil, vengeful wife of one of the vampires and my hero suddenly listens and says, “Oh, the bloody showhound is here.” And right then, I knew that Vlad was going to pop onto the page, ready or not as far as I was concerned. And I’m still not ready.

I’m an organic writer, mostly, so I hadn’t planned to put him there, but he just popped into my mind, kind of surprisingly formed; very scornful of the term Dracula, and really antagonistic toward my hero! And I wrote the scene out, and thought, well, I’ll just write it for fun and then I’ll take him out of it. And I could not take him out of the scene because all of the sudden, I could not take the character out of my head. And then I told myself that he’ll just pop up in this one book, just for fun, and that’ll be that. And I’ve had historical figures pop up before for fun that just kind of go away. But Vlad turned up again in the fourth book, and then the fifth book, and then the seventh book, and then I gave up and gave him his own series. So that just goes to show that if you say “I’m never going to…” well, you might.

Q: Will there be any more books with Cat and Bones?

JF: Cat and Bones number seven comes out in Winter 2013, which I know, I know, it seems like a long time, but the very next book that comes out after Once Burned is the sequel, which is Twice Tempted. That comes out in March 2013. So right after that then you’ll have Winter 2013, and my publisher calls it Winter, which means they haven’t decided if they want it to be November, December, or January yet. So as soon as I know more, I’ll put it on my website, but right now all I can get out of them is “winter.” But there will be more.

Q: Is Ian going to get his own book?

JF: I am going to get an Ian tip jar for every time I get that question; I am going to start a savings fund, and I will be able to buy an Ian car in no time! Um… maaaybe. He’s still not ready to be thrust into a lead role yet because he just will not stop…um, being generous with his affections, and a bit less than noble with some of his actions and other manners. So, until he is at least to the point where something can smack him upside the head and get him to confront his issues  behind all of this behavior… Because, you know, his life is really pretty empty, and he uses all these things to fill it, and he knows they’re meaningless, and every once in a while that will pop through in the books. I think it was in First Drop of Crimson where he said to Spade, “You know, you’re one of the few people I actually care about and I would risk my life for.” He doesn’t have a lot of people that he would, and so I hope he gets to the point where I can put him in a lead role. He’ll always be Ian; he’s never going to all of the sudden be an angel, but I hope I can get him to the point where he can at least be Ian, but where he’s not…IAN.

Q: What was the last inspiration that you just jotted down somewhere?

JF: Gosh, that’s a rough one. I keep a notepad by my laptop when I write, and I think the last thing I just jotted down was a name that just stuck with me, and I decided that I wanted to name a character after it, or something like that. And sometimes I’ll just get a little snippet of scene idea that I want to put, or a snarky comment, or something, and I’ll just jot that down, but I’ve learned to keep a notepad by the laptop because I don’t… I actually like writing those things down, physically writing them, and not just making a note in the computer. I don’t know why. It’s probably because I’m…older. Yeah. We’ll call it old school and pretend it’s cool.

Q: Will there be any payback for the demon bone incident in First Drop of Crimson?

JF: Well, I don’t want to spoiler anyone, but there’s a good reason for Ian to cut off his friend’s girlfriend’s leg – that’s all I’ll say. But it grew back! Her man does not know he did that. It might pop up in a future book, or it might be just something that happens off-page. If I can’t find a logical way to work it into a story where it’s a little side thing, yet still kind of makes sense, then I won’t just throw it in there, but that would be a fun thing to put in if I can find a place for it. Otherwise, you’ll just have to use your imagination.

Q: Vlad seems to have really kept his temper in this book. We saw his power, but we didn’t really get to see his temper. I didn’t expect him to be so level-headed. Are we going to get to see more?

JF: It’s so hard to answer without spoilering! You will see some…emotional violence in the next book. Not just with Vlad, but on Leila’s part, as well. So, yeah, things happen. At the end of Once Burned, you get the idea that there’s some things simmering that might come to a boil? Well, they’re gonna boil.

Q: If you were single, who would date from the characters in your books?

JF: I don’t know! It would feel like incest! They’re in my head, you know? They’re in my head all the time. I would feel too close to them. Now, if you ask me another author’s character, who would I date, well, I could answer that.

Where do I start?? Let’s see… Eric, from Sookie’s series; Barrons, if he wasn’t in one of his homicidal moods; Curran, from Kate Daniels’ series. Gosh, who else? Without sounding like a total tramp – I could go on and on! The Lords of the Underworld? Yes, any and all! Except Doubt – he’s the one that thinks the nasty things, right? Yeah, my self-esteem could not handle that. I mean, God bless her, she put up with it, but I’d be like, “Oh, no you didn’t!” Kresley Cole’s Lothaire…yeah. There’d just be a whole list; I’d just be the character tramp of all time. But, yeah. You guys can pick which one of my men; I can’t.

Q: In Once Burned, the character Marty’s past seems very mysterious. He doesn’t seem to belong to anyone’s line or anything. Are we going to find out more about him?

JF: The character that she’s mentioned in Once Burned, Marty – he doesn’t know who made him. It was someone who just attacked him and changed him and just left. So Marty has no idea who that vampire is, and whether or not they’re even still alive. All Marty would be able to give is a kind of a vague description, and that it was a male. So that may or may not come into play in the future books. It’s something that’s deliberately open; if I get a strike of inspiration I might add to it, or it might just be one of those things that you just don’t know. So I haven’t entirely decided yet. But I really liked Marty’s character, and I liked him especially more once I started watching Game of Thrones, which I started once I turned in Once Burned, and then I was like, Tyrion rocks!! I was happy to see a strong dwarf in a role. It was great. I was glad that I didn’t see Game of Thrones first, though, or I might have named him Tarty with a T, or something, as an homage.

Q: Are you going to do any more demon and angel books?

JF: I had done a story in the Haunted By Your Touch anthology. It will actually come out as an individual e-novella later in November. It was called “Night’s Darkest Embrace,” and it was a deviation from my vampire world. It had demons, partial demons, and fallen angels. Basically, in our world but where they exist in a dimension right outside our own. I got to play with my inner D- physicist writing that story, using the idea of string theory and M theory, and that there are different dimensions all around us that we just can’t see. That was a fun story to write; I liked that world, but I’m contracted for about the next three years writing vampires, so if I did write it again, it would take a while. But I did love that world and I’d love to do something again with it.

Q: Can Cat make her own vampires?

JF: I’ve actually deliberately not answered that yet because she is a full vampire now, but she’s not a normal vampire. So, that’s something where it could work, or it might not work out at all, and if she makes a vampire, will they have any similarity to her, or would they just be a normal vampire? All those questions are deliberately unanswered as of now. But good question!

Q: How did you come up with the idea for the mythology about the origins of vampires that is in your books, with Cain and everything?

JF: Well, at the time, I was trying to think of a way to tie into it where I could have a creationist and an evolutionary background for the vampires, much as people do, you know? So, the evolutionary part is easy; you just say that vampires are a random genetic mutation and then they began to create more of their own kind. When I was looking into the creationist part, I went back to the Bible and was trying to find a story in it that I thought I might be able to add a fictional paranormal twist to, and I came to the mark of Cain, which is actually very vague. There are a bunch of theories about what it is; some people say it was a mark on his forehead; there’s different thoughts behind what that mark was, that everyone would immediately know and he would be unable to be killed, and I just thought it was something that was left open enough to where I could say it was his transition into becoming a vampire. But of course, since no one can get along with religion, ghouls say that no no no! he was was a ghoul, and there’s the two sides arguing over that.

Q: How many more Cat & Bones books are there going to be?

JF: Originally, the plan was for nine, and then I wrote that really long novella in The Bite Before Christmas, which was originally going to make its way into a Cat and Bones book, and now I’m not entirely sure if I have enough. I know what I have to write with them; I know how their series is going to end, and I’ve known for years. I’m not entirely sure if it will fit into three books, now, though, because that was a really big-sized chunk. But since I am mostly an organic writer, I know what I’m going to write, but I don’t know all the minutiae. I can’t tell you what chapter five in that book is going to be, but I can tell you the beginning, the middle, and the end. It’s just all the other stuff that gets filled in. So there would be at least eight, and it depends. If I can fit everything that I want to do into eight, it’ll stop at eight, because I’m not going to write a ninth book just to throw something onto the page and call it a book. But, what I think will fit into two books might take three books to do. But right now I can tell you there will be at least eight, because I know what I have to put will absolutely fill two books. It may or may not fill the third; I’m not entirely sure. And I really won’t know until I’m done with the seventh.

Q: Once you’re done with Cat and Bones and Vlad, are you going to write more in the Night Huntress world, or will you do something completely unrelated?

JF: I’m not sure. I have ideas unrelated to the Night Huntress World, and they might really start to come to the forefront of my mind, or I might have another character rearing their head in my mind and saying, “I’m getting a book!” and kind of forcing me to write it. When I say a character demands a book, it’s where I can’t stop thinking about a particular character, thinking about more into their past, and that sort of thing, and it’s almost like the more I think about it, the more I discover more details about the character, and then if I discover enough, and also the person that I think that they are supposed to be with, then I want to write a book about them.  But sometimes a character will just float around in the back of my mind and be, well, secretive, I guess you could say, and I don’t have a story to focus around them. So I don’t just say, “I’m going write a book about ‘blah’ and then think up a plot about that. I have to have something in my mind already before I want to write a book about another character. So I’m not being coy when I say I don’t know which one it’ll be; it literally depends on who is yelling the loudest in my head at the time.

Q: What’s your very favorite book?

JF: I can’t narrow things down. You’ve probably noticed that I’ve been unable to give a simple yes or no answer to anything thus far. You ask me my favorite book it’s even worse, and if you ask me my favorite movie, it’s all the same. I can tell you that, on my website, under ‘Links’ there’s a list of my favorite authors. There’s about two dozen authors – and that was me narrowing it down, by the way, in a painstaking process – that I really enjoy, but that’s not every author I’ve ever enjoyed. I’ve been reading since I was 12, so there’s a lot of different books that I’ve really liked, but for the sake of trying to be somewhat succinct, I’ve narrowed it down to only about two dozen favorite authors. But I love the paranormal genre. I want to say I read exclusively, but I guess about 90% of what I read has some supernatural or paranormal element, whether it’s romance, or horror, or urban fantasy, or mystery, almost all of it is going to have an element of that otherworldly bit, because I apparently just don’t like ‘normal.’

Q: What was your favorite book to write?

JF: Oh, yeah…there’s not an easy answer to that, either. I’m fickle. It’s whatever I am writing at the time. So right now, I would say Vlad and Leila #2 because that’s what I’m writing right now. After that, I’m back to writing Cat and Bones #7, so I’ll say that’s the favorite. And it’s the same with who is my favorite character. I have no loyalty. It’s just whoever is getting the most of my attention at the time.

Q: A lot of authors that write romance have also starting writing YA. Have you been approached to do something like that?

JF: It’s been broached to me, and also a couple of years ago, I started what I guess you would call a YA horror story. That’s basically what they classified it as when they were like, this is too dark! So that’s something that is still in my mind. It’s loosely in the same world as the novella that was mentioned before, with the demons and the fallen angels and that sort of thing, but it was basically like a horror, and at the time, people weren’t really interested in it. They told me if I wanted to change it and make it much brighter and happier, then they’d be interested, and I said no! This is the story, and you either like it as it is, with the darkness, or no thank you. So that’s how we left it. It made me kind of sad; maybe one day I’ll finish it and do something with it, or maybe not. But unless there’s another idea that I have, that I’m really passionate about and that I want to write it, and it happens to have a YA protagonist… It’s not something I’m going to do just to break into the market. I’ve got to be excited and in love with it to the point of mild obsession with the story to invest all the time and energy it takes to write a book about it.

Q: What are you reading right now? Not an ARC, or a pre-copy, but something that we could read?

JF: Not an ARC or a pre-copy? That just ruled out three books right there! Well, then…what did I just finish, maybe? That’s unfair! Because it was this adult book called The Arrivals by Melissa Marr, and it comes out next year, and it was really good! Alright, now I’m trying to think, what have I read recently…okay, I can tell you what I read recently that I really liked! The Taken, by Vicki Pettersson, and that just came out! (NB: It was released on June 12, 2012 – ) So that’s good, and it’s got – they’re not fallen angels, but there’s angel mythology. It’s not quite the white fluffy beings with the harps, or whatever; it’s actually really, really interesting. Great worldbuilding, and Vicki’s writing the next one, so that’s very good.

Q: Are you exclusive to a genre of movies the way you are with books?

JF: I’m more open in movies. I will go outside the genre. I didn’t get to see Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and I’m dying to see it – no one tell me anything! And I also didn’t get to see Magic Mike, which I want to see for obvious reasons – I feel like there’s a strong story behind it that I need to discover…to advance my mind!

Q: Why was Once Burned written from Leila’s point of view, rather than a split point of view with Leila and Vlad?

JF: When I have a story, one of the first things I do, besides try and figure out everything I can about the characters in advance, is to decide how best to tell it. With Cat and Bones, it was first person because I wanted the readers to be in some ways as ignorant as Cat was about the vampires. I mean, when the novel starts out, she has a preconceived idea about them, and it’s only as you get deeper into the book and she gets deeper into the vampire world that you learn that pretty much everything she thought was wrong. But that was a discovery that readers made alongside with her, and I thought that that was best revealed in that manner, instead of having Cat’s point of view, and then you meet Bones and then you already know everything about the world because you’re in Bones’ head, and you already know how he feels about her right away because you’re in his head, and so that takes away a lot of the aspect of discovery. Some stories absolutely need that, though. First Drop of Crimson was a spin-off that I did, and it’s split point of view between the hero and the heroine because that story could not have been told through only one character’s lens. You needed to have Spade and all of his background information and what he had in his head going on, as well as Denise, for that story to be complete. And that was the same with Eternal Kiss of Darkness with Mencheres and Kira.

But with Vlad’s series, the story that I had to tell, once I sat back and really thought about it, was, in my mind, best told through the discovery of Leila’s point of view. Readers already have a little bit of background on Vlad. They know he’s not just going to start killing her and puppies and kittens for fun, you know? He has his reasons. But the other aspects of his life, and how things are going to go with him and how he treats a woman he’s interested in – readers have not had that experience before in the other books, and so you get pieces of Vlad as Leila gets them, even with a little bit of background knowledge of him in the other series. Also, Leila knew about vampires, but she wasn’t really in the vampire world, just kind of on the fringe of it, so you get a different look at the vampire world through her perspective, as well. And you get a different look at the other characters. Like when she first meets Cat and Bones, she kind of dismissively thinks of them as Ken and Barbie Vampire, because that’s what they look like to her. You know, just this perfect little couple, and of course, readers know that there’s so much baggage behind that, but to her, they’re just all shiny and pretty and things that she just doesn’t have. So it shows a different perspective than just dropping readers straight into Vlad’s head, as well, and having all of these questions be answered. Sometimes that needs it, and sometimes I think that would ruin the story. With Once Burned, I thought it would be of detriment to the story. And you’re free to disagree!

Twice Tempted is going to be Leila’s point of view again, unless she touches something and you get dropped into someone else’s point of view through her psychic gift, which did happen once or twice in Once Burned, as well. So Twice Tempted is still going to be Leila’s point of view, aside from the psychic glimpses that she gets. As far as the third book… If the story I would have to tell in the third book would require that extra point of view, I have no problem adding it. I don’t feel any loyalty to that point of view just because I started in it. It really does depend on the story.

Q: How steep is the challenge of writing Vlad?

JF: He is a tough nut to crack! He might be the most difficult character I have had to write because he is so unyielding when it comes to certain things and he is so stubborn, and oh, I just want to reach through the page and just shake him! Of course, he would kill me then, but.. He’s difficult, when it comes to that. And he’s going to have his number called on it, because Leila is not the type of woman that’s going to sit back and put up with that ‘I don’t do love’ for very much longer, so there’s going to be issues. So Vlad is going to have to come face to face with his supposed position and be forced to deal with that. Which is fun for me, in some ways, aside from wanting to shake him, because no one has ever really told Vlad ‘That’s not good enough; do better.’ His reaction to that is, in my evil author way, you know, fun!

Q: Are Vlad and Bones ever going to get along?

JF: I don’t ever see them going out together to share a pint of blood, if that’s what you mean. I don’t see them actively trying to kill each other again in the near future, but it’s like having two unneutered Rottweilers in a room together, okay? You all know what’s going to happen eventually. There’s gonna be a problem. Bones and Vlad are very similar in a lot of ways, and because of that, they do not mix well. Cat is somewhat of a bridge, in some circumstances. In Destined For An Early Grave, she wasn’t a bridge, though, she was the one that almost got one of them to end up dead, but right now, with all that being settled, she’s a little bit of a bridge between them, but they’re just never going to really be close. They might get to a point of grudging respect, but again – there’s no bromance that’s gonna happen.

Thank you so much for stopping by the Dollhouse, and we hope you’ve enjoyed reading this Q&A with Jeaniene Frost! Be sure to comment to be entered in our giveaway!

Jeaniene Frost is the New York Times, USA Today, and international bestselling author of the Night Huntress series, the Night Prince series and the Night Huntress World novels. To date, foreign rights for her novels have sold to nineteen different countries. Jeaniene lives in North Carolina with her husband Matthew, who long ago accepted that she rarely cooks and always sleeps in on the weekends. Aside from writing, Jeaniene enjoys reading, poetry, watching movies with her husband, exploring old cemeteries, spelunking and traveling – by car. Airplanes, children, and cook books frighten her.

For information on Jeaniene’s books, reading the first 20% of each book free, book trailers, deleted scenes, creature mythology, and more, please visit: www.jeanienefrost.com

Find Jeaniene Frost: Website | Blog | | |

Doll Elvie is givingaway a signed copy of Once Burned, a Vlad “I like it hot” Bracelet, a Bones “I like it rough” Bracelet, a Mencheres “I like it mindblowing” Bracelet, an Ian “I like it twisted” Bracelet, and a Spade “I like it romantic” Bracelet to ONE lucky international commenter! Wait, but that’s not all! A second winner will receive all 5 bracelets! Good Luck!!

She’s a mortal with dark powers…

After a tragic accident scarred her body and destroyed her dreams, Leila never imagined that the worst was still to come: terrifying powers that let her channel electricity and learn a person’s darkest secrets through a single touch. Leila is doomed to a life of solitude…until creatures of the night kidnap her, forcing her to reach out with a telepathic distress call to the world’s most infamous vampire…

He’s the Prince of Night…

Vlad Tepesh inspired the greatest vampire legend of all—but whatever you do, don’t call him Dracula. Vlad’s ability to control fire makes him one of the most feared vampires in existence, but his enemies have found a new weapon against him—a beautiful mortal with powers to match his own. When Vlad and Leila meet, however, passion ignites between them, threatening to consume them both. It will take everything that they are to stop an enemy intent on bringing them down in flames.

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