Vampire fiction, outside of Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula, is something I am fascinated by but am admittedly not very familiar with. Thus it has been very exciting over the past several months to ‘meet’ Colleen Gleason via the wonder of the world wide web. Colleen writes vampire fiction and her first novel, The Rest Falls Away, will be coming to a bookstore near you this January. Colleen Gleason has given me a wonderful opportunity: a chance to badger her with interview questions and the opportunity to give away a copy of The Rest Falls Away. Colleen was gracious enough to answer my questions and I hope you’ll enjoy her responses as much as I do. And with that introduction, heeeeere’s Colleen!:
As a child I do not remember having any strong attachment to the story of Alice and her adventures in Wonderland. I am not sure that I was aware of it on any level outside of the Disney version. I do recall, however, a fascination with the idea of a hole in the ground leading to other realms. I remember having daydreams about this idea frequently. Thus I have had a kinship to Alice for years before ever becoming enamored of her story. It wasn’t until Neil Gaiman released the novel Neverwhere that I really started paying attention to Alice in Wonderland and how the ideas in that book are often replicated in other stories. I finally picked up the story when the book The Annotated Alice was published. This book, with its insight into Lewis Carroll’s brilliant use of language and the plethora of Victorian error inside jokes, etc., made my fascination for the stories grow. And the computer game American McGee’s Alice cemented Alice and her cohorts as one of my favorite literary characters. In fact, I have an homage to that world on one wall in my work office:
Since I am feeling pretty confident about my reading I decided to go ahead and add one more challenge to my list: Booklogged’s Winter Classics Challenge. The rules are very simple:
One of my recent birthday gifts from my friend Pat was the book Grayson by Lynne Cox. It is the story of an event that happened to the award winning author of Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer approximately 30 years previously when she was 17. The story details a routine morning swim off the coast of California that turned into an exciting and potentially dangerous adventure when the author discovered that she was being followed back to shore by a baby gray whale. The whale had been separated from its mother and the bulk of the story revolves around Lynne Cox’s attempt to stay with the whale and help it be reunited with its mother.
