Interview With Anita E. Viljoen!

From the publisher:
Feeders is set in brooding, yet beautiful British Columbia, where Sir Robert McKay's coven of vampires is known for their benevolence. Instead of hunting humans, they believe in humans voluntarily “donating” their blood. The humans they seek—called Feeders—have a rare blood disorder that enables them to regenerate their blood quickly when first drained. Feeders then need frequent draining to survive. After a woman is attacked by a rogue vampire and left bleeding and broken on the roadside, she becomes a feeder. Thus begins this runaway thriller/romance that has a real bite to it.

Available though my website: www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/feeders.html
Or at www.amazon.com or www.barnesandnoble.com using the ISBN # 978-1-60911-754-2
Retail Price $18.50
It will be available on Ebook, Kindle, Nook and other portable electronic devised shortly.

LORELEI: I welcome first-time author Anita E. Viljoen to my blog. I'm excited to have you as my very first author interview to my site!

Anita: Thank you Lorelei for having me over, it’s a honour.

LORELEI: Tell us a little bit about yourself, where you live, and any little interesting tidbits about you that you'd like to share.

Anita: I was born and raised in Pretoria, South Africa. I have always been interested in the arts, I started ballet at the age of four, painted in various mediums and love to embroider (Candle wicking). I met my husband at the young age of sixteen, married at twenty and fourteen years ago we decided to immigrate to Canada and now make Maple Ridge, beautiful British Columbia our home with our two children and dogs.

LORELEI: I want to say right away when I discovered what you'd written, it sounded very interesting to me, and thought this was really a different idea for a vampire novel. Explain to our audience what this blood disorder—polysythemia versa--is, and how you discovered it?

Anita: I had a nagging question in the back of my mind until one early one morning I woke up with the urge to finally answer it – What if humans can have too much blood? So I got up and decided to Google it and Polysythemia versa came up. Although I tweaked it a bit in my novel, it’s a very real but unknown disorder. Simply put its when our bone marrow overproduces too much blood for the body to handle. To treat this, bloodletting is often done by doctors to prevent the worst case scenario - death. The sad thing about it is, very little research has been done on this and only the families that have a member with this disorder knows about it. The blood that is tapped cannot be used for blood banks either, because it may be contaminated. On the flip side of that, what if they do decided to do so – would they solve the blood shortage? Scary thought....

LORELEI: Yes, it is. Awesome cover! Did you have any say in what it would look like? Or were you pleasantly surprised?

Anita: Thank you, at least I can take credit for the idea but not on the design itself. My publishers art’s department put my vision into reality. The reason I went for the Feeders dripping into the cup, was because in my novel the modern vampires don’t feed directly off their feeders as they did centuries ago. However there are a few evil vamps that still do....

LORELEI: When did you become interested in vampires?

Anita: As I love to read, read and read some more and I always go for folklore, legends and historical mysteries with the odd romance. However, the vampire intrigued me the most. Every culture in the world has some kind of vampire roaming into their mythology.

LORELEI: When did you realize you wanted to become a writer? What got you excited about writing, who, or what, inspired you?

Anita: I know this sounds crazy, but I didn’t chose to write this story, this story chose me.. I am dyslectic and grammar or spelling is certainly not my strong point, so writing never interested me. Over time and a healthy imagination, this story took shape, night after night, I would wake up, as if still in a dream and write down whatever came to me. I wrote the ideas down like a diary and thank goodness for spell check, the events and characters took shape and in time I realized I had over 300 pages in my laptop. The adrenaline pumped, the creative juice flowed and as I wrote, I fell in love with it....and haven’t looked back.

LORELEI: What's it like to finally have a book out there?

Anita: Surreal – if this is a dream, don’t under any circumstances wake me up!!

LORELEI: What does your family think? Have they read it? How was their reaction?

Anita: At first they thought I was going through some sort of mid life crises, but supported me all the way. The kids are too young to read it as it has quite a few sensual “adult” bits. My husband, well let’s put it this way, he’s a realist and so fantasy is not his cup of tea. LOL. However, friends that have read it, thoroughly enjoyed it and inspired me to have it published.

LORELEI: What's on tap, now that you have your first book out? When, and where is your first book signing?

Anita: Now that my book is out the hard work of marketing begins. I’m working with local and national book store to securing my first book signing date.

LORELEI: What are you working on now? Anything interesting? Will there be a sequel?

Anita: I’m working on two simultaneously, if you can believe this, and they coming together quite nicely. One is a sequel to Feeders called Hybrid.

LORELEI: Very cool! I wish you the best of luck with Feeders!