Welcome Skyla Dawn Cameron to our Blog Tour This Week!

I asked fellow kitty-afficianado Skyla a non-cat related question recently:

You get to go back in time to talk to anyone you want about your latest book. Who do you go to, what do you ask them and what do you think they will tell you?

She had a very interesting repsonse. One that evoked so many images for me I have to read this book. Here's what she had to say:

I thought and thought and thought about this excellent question...and drew a blank. There are people from the past I’d love to talk to, but not about my books—more than likely about theirs. But then I don’t particularly live in reality most of the time, so why do I have to pick a “real” person from the past?



I’d go back just over three hundred years to speak to a seventeen year old Romanian girl named Ana, recently betrayed, killed, and turned into a vampire who, many years later, would be known as Zara Lain—the main character of my current series that begins with Bloodlines (and continued with Hunter this past August, with Lineage coming in February and Exhumed later next year). After awakening early and cannonballing pretty far on the crazy spectrum, she ended up locked in her maker’s basement in the hopes of her getting her back to sanity. Or, at the very least, to keep her from randomly slaughtering innocents for awhile.


I want to go to that basement, before she breaks out and kills a bunch of humans, when she’s angry and hurt and out of her freakin’ mind—and I’d tell her about her life now. True, she’s in the middle of conspiracies and secret societies and the apocalypse and several attempts on her life, which may sound like it all sucks. But I’d go into that basement—with her firmly secured to a chair or something, and maybe a big ol’ set of bars between us, and me armed with a stake and a flamethrower—sit down, set the books out before me, and tell her, “You’re going to be okay.


“Your heart is broken, but it will heal. Your identity is shattered, but you will build a new one. You’ve been betrayed, you will have your bloody revenge, and it won’t fix you, but building and growing and changing will repair some of the damage. You’ll make mistakes, and even when you think you’ve learned from them, you’ll make them again because that’s what everyone does. And that’s okay. You’ll learn to trust again—have faith in people, even some humans. You’ll be in love—maddening, schoolgirl-sighing-dreamily, will-probably-turn-angsty love. You’ll gain a sense of humour about injustices you’ve suffered. You will always get back up when knocked down. You are worth saving, even if you are unable to accept it. You will continue to be betrayed, you will continue to be hurt, and your heart might break again, but you will survive anything and everything, always.


“Ana is dead, but Zara lives on. And she’ll never let you down.”

Actually, I’d tell a whole lot of people that if I could.


I imagine Ana would respond with lots of incoherent ramblings, screaming, and general threats I won’t understand because she doesn’t speak English. But I would have to hope, somewhere, she’d remember it.


Then I’d ask Ana for some details about early eighteenth century Romania because history is not my forte and I keep getting stuck having to write flashback scenes. Ugh.


Thank you for having me, Regan!


About the Author: Award-winning author Skyla Dawn Cameron has been writing approximately forever. Her early storytelling days were spent acting out strange horror/fairy tales with the help of her many dolls, and little has changed except that she now keeps those stories on paper. She signed her first book contract at age twenty-one for River, a unique werewolf tale, which was released to critical and reader praise alike and won her the 2007 EPPIE Award for Best Fantasy. She now has multiple series on the go to keep her busy, which is great for her attention deficit disorder.


Skyla lives in Southern Ontario where she dabbles in art, is an avid gamer, and watches Buffy reruns. She’s naturally brunette, occasionally a redhead, and will probably go blonde again soon. If she ever becomes a grown-up, she wants to run her own pub, as well as become world dictator.


You can find her online at www.skyladawncameron.com, www.twitter.com/skyladawn, www.facebook.com/skyladawncameron


About Bloodlines: If you’re in her way, it sucks to be you.


After three hundred years of unlife, vampire Zara Lain has seemingly done it all, and she's now making a living as a successful thief-turned-assassin. Her newest assignment seems simple enough--kill the aging leader of the O'Connor Coven and his only heir, and she'll have another ten million in the bank.


But in the dangerous world of the supernatural, few things are ever “simple.”


When a massive assault decimates the continent's population of powerful witches and warlocks, and its orchestrator has vampires being hunted down and captured, Zara realizes the tables have turned and now she'll be playing the hero. Forced to join with a smart-mouthed fellow vampire, a demonologist who's also a fan of hers, a recently widowed—and frequently brooding—warlock, and her best friend's mom, Zara's grudgingly willing to do what she can to save the day.


If only people would stop ruining all her outfits.

Catch excerpts, fan art, the series in chronological order, free stories, and more at www.zaralain.com.