di Fabrizio Valenza.

Thank you for answering some questions for the public of Fantasy Planet, which, for a long time has been attracted by the events of your characters, especially those fromThe Southern Vampire Mysteries series.
Let’s start with the usual question.

1) Who’s Charlaine Harris and when did your passion for fantasy literature begin?

I am a very ordinary middle-aged woman with a  great imagination. I’ve always loved the fantastic, and I think we all like to believe there’s more beyond our mundane world.

2) How did you understand that you wanted to try to be a writer? What difficulties did you face to change a passion into a job?

I’ve always wanted to be a writer since I learned to read. It seemed to be the greatest thing in the world, to be able to write books. My biggest problem was learning the self-discipline necessary to write a whole book. I got published fairly easily, which is kind of maddening for other people, I know.

3) Where do you find the inspiration forThe southern vampire mysteries series? How much reality and how much fantasy do you put in your stories.

I try to anchor all my characters in a world we can recognize to give them a little reality. Of course, most of it’s fantasy.

4) The invention of the True Blood and the following vampires’ coming out is amazing, how did you get it?

I had to think of a way to make the vampires ostensibly non-threatening, so they could claim they were a put-upon minority. I reasoned there had to be another food source, and I came up with synthetic blood.

5) How much do you owe the long literary vampire history and how much do you think to be innovative with regard to the Gothic genre?

Of course I’ve kept some of the traditions of vampire lore, but some things I think of are strictly my own. That makes it fun for me.

6) Which one of your character do you feel closer or maybe looks like you?

None of them look like me, but since all of them came from my head, there’s a part of me in each character.

7) When you have an idea for a new novel, how do you proceed to get to the end of the first drawing up?

Sometimes the idea I have is not from the ending or beginning of the book, but from somewhere in the middle, which leads to a lot of thought as I figure out how the book must begin to get to that point.

8 ) I guess you also have a quite rigorous daily writing schedule: how many hours do you write and when?

I write from 8 to noon, then from 1 to three or four, most days. Those are my best days.

9) I just want to ask you an advice for those aspirant writers who are demotivated because they keep on failing in publishing their novels, what would you tell them?

That’s tough, because I think after a while you maybe should turn to doing something else. But if you’re absolutely convinced you were born to be a writer, at least try another genre and see if that is more successful, if you have been turned down over and over.

Thank you for your kind willingness, Charlaine. I wish you a bright present and an even brighter future.

Thanks!