Lily Crozier

I was just like lying on the sofa, just kind of lamenting the state of vampire literature and just went, how hard could it possibly be to just have a Beauty and the Beast retelling with Dracula as the protagonist?

And then I sat there and went, huh, how hard could it be?

And so I started writing then, like that day, I started writing Vow of Eternal Night and it's turned into this.

Here it is.

And how hard was it in the end?

Oh, pretty hard.

It wasn't the first book I've written.

I've written all my life.

But it was like the I'd always scrubbed the like last ideas I was working on.

There was the first book I finished.

I'd worked for many, many years just trying to get it right.

And so Valvetone and I was me trying to like really get it done in a shorter time frame, which turned out to be four years and to get a book that I was happy with and to submit to publishers.

Yes, completely.

It still baffles me, but I'm very glad I found it.

So it started out that I've always wanted to have a character named Clara and naming after the Nutcracker.

And from there, I kind of had to sort of sit and think like what geographically makes sense for someone named Clara.

And that was that was.

like the German world.

And then as my, um, as my research kind of progressed as well, like I knew I kind of wanted it around like Germany, Austria, but the, um, a lot of the modern vampire myths from European vampires actually originated in the 17 hundreds around Germany, Austria, and Hungary.

And so it will kind of just felt into place.