Take Five With Author Michele Drier

It is my pleasure to bring you Michele Drier and her book SNAP: All That Jazz and read on to find out who she'd most want to be as a film character!!  

I totally agree with her.

Welcome to An Indie Adventure, Michele. Tell us, what inspired you to write your book, SNAP: All That Jazz?

I’m writing a paranormal romance series, The Kandesky Vampire Chronicles, and suddenly these two secondary characters demanded that I tell their story. Nik and Jazz have been sidekicks in the other SNAP books and fell in love in Book Seven, SNAP: White Nights. Their relationship is rocky and they needed to explain themselves—and understand each other. A relationship between a four-hundred-year-old Hungarian vampire and a 21^st century L.A. young woman isn’t easy.

What were your experiences as a child that contributed to you becoming a writer?

Reading and being read to. My grandmother read to me almost every night. She was an Edwardian and had been educated at boarding schools on both the East and West coasts and as an adult, wrote some poetry and belonged to a literary society in San Francisco. Both she and my mother loved to tell stories and I grew up telling myself stories in my head.

Do day-to-day life experiences influence your stories?

One of the themes in my books—both the paranormal romances and my mysteries—is the relationship between men and women. I’m fascinated at our language differences and how little we really understand each other. I’ve used this in spades in the Kandesky Chronicles. Not only are the male vampires falling in love with contemporary women, but there are huge gaps in their backgrounds and experiences. The vampires are all several-hundred-year-old Europeans who live a mannered, uber-rich lifestyle...the Baron Kandesky lives in a castle. The women they fall in love with are contemporary career women from Southern California.

I also pick up a lot of current news in the books, which are set in Kiev, Ukraine and outside of St. Petersburg, Russia as well as the L.A. area. I ran across a story that Ukraine was putting together a bid to host the Olympics in 2024 and wove it into SNAP: White Nights.

What is the first thing you do when you begin a new book?

Come up with a title! That sounds flip, but I’m a pantser and my titles define the direction the book will be going. SNAP: All That Jazz, was the book where I’d let Jazz and Nik tell their stories and, unlike the other books, is written in third person. I always know where the story will end up, but I’m never sure how we’ll get there. If there’s a freeway from the first to the last page, much of the book takes the off-ramps to lesser-known, more rural roads, exploring the countryside.

If you were a TV, film or book character, apart from one you've created, who would you be?  And why?

Probably Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. She was a glamorous eccentric who designed her own life, papering over her past and the hurts. She was able to create a place where she could live her fantasies, until reality hit her head-on. And of course there was a HEA!

Give us a brief summary of SNAP: All That Jazz :

Nik and Jazz, both employees of Kandesky Enterprises and passionate lovers, are having a tumultuous time. Are their differences too great? She's a contemporary, hip, young career woman working in the fast-changing world of celebrity gossip journalism in Los Angeles. He's a 500-year old vampire living in Kiev, Ukraine and running the Kandesky Munitions factories. She deals with celebs and sun, he deals with terrorists and dark. 
Is their overpowering attraction enough to build a life-long future, or will their relationship fizzle out before Maxie's and Jean-Louis' wedding, dying faster than a Fourth of July sparkler?

When Jazz asks Nik to spend time with her in L.A., a series of disasters challenges both their love and their understanding of who and what they are. When Jazz is kidnapped, Nik questions his ability to take care of her and keep her safe, causing him to pull away.

Buy Links:

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Bio:

Michele Drier was born in Santa Cruz and is a fifth generation Californian. She’s lived and

worked all over the state, calling both Southern and Northern California home.  During her career in journalism—as a reporter and editor at daily newspapers—she won awards for producing investigative series.

SNAP: All That Jazz, Book Eight of The Kandesky Vampire Chronicles, was published June 30, 2014.  The Kandesky Vampire Chronicles paranormal romance series include SNAP: The World Unfolds, SNAP: New Talent, Plague: A Love Story, DANUBE: A Tale of Murder, SNAP: Love for Blood, SNAP: Happily Ever After?, SNAP: White Night and SNAP: All That Jazz.  SNAP: I, Vampire, Book Nine in the Kandesky Vampire Chronicles is scheduled for publication early 2015.

She also writes the Amy Hobbes Newspaper mysteries, Edited for Death and Labeled for Death. A third book, Delta for Death, is coming in 2015.

Find Michele:

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