Author Interview with Margo Bond Collins!!!

AW: Tell us about yourself…
In my other life, I’m a college professor; I teach English courses online. I live in Texas with my
husband and our daughter and a number of thoroughly silly animals. Waking Up Dead is my first
published novel. My second novel, Legally Undead, is an urban fantasy forthcoming in 2014
from World Weaver Press. I got the offers to publish the two novels in the same month. That was
officially the best month of my life!

AW: What genre do you write?
I write paranormal mysteries, urban fantasy, and romance. Waking Up Dead is a paranormal
mystery. My second novel, Legally Undead, is an urban fantasy forthcoming in 2014 from
World Weaver Press.

AW: What attracted you to writing a paranormal mystery?
I read tons of urban fantasy and love just about any kind of fiction with a paranormal element;
there was never any doubt that what I wrote would have a supernatural slant. But I didn’t know
that Waking Up Dead was going to be a mystery until I had written the first few chapters—I tend
to start with a character and then see what happens.

AW: Tell us about your book….
In Waking Up Dead, when Dallas resident Callie Taylor died young, she expected to go to
Heaven, or maybe Hell. Instead, when she met her fate early thanks to a creep with a knife and a
mommy complex, she ended up in Alabama. Now she's witnessed another murder, and she's not
about to let this one go. She's determined to help solve it before an innocent man goes to prison.
And to answer the biggest question of all: why the hell did she wake up in Alabama?

AW: What was your inspiration for this book?
I wrote Waking Up Dead when I lived in Alabama for a few years. I remember driving to work
one morning (I’m a college professor in my other life) and seeing just a wisp of fog move across
the statue in the middle of the town square. The statue was of some Civil War figure, and thought
that it looked oddly ghostly. In between teaching classes that day, I started writing Callie’s story.

AW: Do you have a favorite character and why that one?
I tend to love most of my characters—even the horrible ones, just for being so perfectly
terrible. The feisty grandmother Maw-Maw in Waking Up Dead is actually largely based on a
combination of my own grandmother and great-grandmother--the only real difference is that
they were white and from Texas rather than black and from Alabama. Otherwise, she talks like
them and acts like them. It's my great-grandmother's voice I hear in my head when I write her
dialogue, my grandmother's movements I see when I picture her walking around. Physically, I
imagine her looking a bit like Ruby Dee in the television movie version of The Stand. But her
attitude? That's straight from my own family!

AW: Did you find anything particularly difficult in writing this book?
Figuring out the plot. About halfway through I realized that I was going to need to solve the
mystery before the characters did! So at that point I decided where I was headed, generally—but
the characters took me where I needed to go.

AW: What project(s) are you currently working on?
Piles of projects! I’m currently doing a round of edits to Legally Undead, the first of the
Vampirarchy urban fantasy series coming out from World Weaver Press in 2014. I’m working
on the sequels to Waking Up Dead and Legally Undead. I’m working on a contemporary
romance novel. I’m editing a number of academic projects, too—mostly collections of essays
about science fiction and fantasy televisions series like Farscape, The Vampire Diaries, and
Supernatural.

AW: Do you have any advice for writers out there?
The very best advice I ever got was just this: keep writing new things. Always have a work in
progress. Finish writing a piece, do a quick edit, and submit it somewhere for publication. Then
move on to the next project. Don’t wait to hear back—that way lies madness! If it’s rejected (and
often it will be; that’s the nature of writing for publication), don’t let it get you down. Just send it
out again and go back to your work in progress.

AW: Where can we find you?
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/author/margobondcollins
Email: MargoBondCollins@gmail.com
Website: http://www.MargoBondCollins.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MargoBondCollin @MargoBondCollin
Google+: https://plus.google.com/116484555448104519902
Goodreads Author Page: http://www.goodreads.com/vampirarchy
Facebook Author Page: https://www.facebook.com/MargoBondCollins
Facebook Novel Page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Waking-Up-Dead/502076076537575
Tumblr: http://vampirarchybooks.tumblr.com/
Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/mbondcollins/

AW: And of course we have to know, where can we find your book? (your website, publisher,
amazon, etc)
Buy Waking Up Dead on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Waking-Up-Dead-ebook/dp/
B00FOXWLM8/
Be sure to add Waking Up Dead to your Goodreads bookshelves: http://www.goodreads.com/
book/show/18428064-waking-up-dead

Watch the Book Trailers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j_TmvpxxBw
http://youtu.be/KUBg83s4BOU