How did you come up with the idea for The Kaiserine's Champion?
I started in the wrong place and worked backwards! I had written a loosely connected
series of adventures featuring a fairly ubiquitous swordmaster hero (a faceless
composite of every fantasy hero I'd ever read) who rode around the countryside looking
for heroines to rescue and wrongs that needed righted. As these stories grew, I began
to feel the need for a more solid background & setting to interconnect events and to
give the stories more "body". A major rethink, influenced in part by some seriously
negative writing group feedback on a fantasy novel I'd been writing, relocated the
swordmaster stories into a much less generic fantasy milieu. This may sound dumb,
but for the first time, I asked myself what I like to read. And then I started writing it.
The swordmaster stories received extensive rework, then my novel outlines got shifted
into the same milieu, and everything looked much stronger as a result. I thought that
was that, but my ubiquitous hero kept waking me up in the middle of the night to
demand an "origin" story explaining how he came to be the greatest swordsman in the
realm, possessed of paranormal reflexes and an almost superhuman strength. It didn't
take me long to realize an obvious supernatural source of such traits. Or to realize that
Manfred's greatest conflict would revolve around his wishing to remain human, when
everyone else wishes him to become vampyre (I prefer the
subliminal-connection-with-Hell spelling, but each to their own). Thus The Kaiserine's
Champion took shape, with the physical dangers Manfred faces in the Arena taking
second place to the deadly struggle going on in the background between the
Kaiserine's Secret Police and the vampyres.
Tell us more about your vampires? They are actually the villains, although the hero is
sort of a vampire. How did you come up with the idea for such creatures?
