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Several of you have written in about my Entertainment Weekly interview. You’ve said that I disrespected Anne Rice by saying that I pioneered my genre, not hers. I don’t consider Anne Rice and I writing in the same genre. Yes, we both write books with vampires in them, but I’ve never believed that vampires alone define a series, or a genre. I actually see vampire novels as having divergent sub-genres.

First was Ms. Rice whose big new idea to the vampire novel was to make her vampires much more "human" than the writers that had gone before her, and she gave them a huge dose of angst and melancholy, and made them beautiful though impotent which I always found an interesting choice. INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE came out in 1976 and I, like many writers to come after, would be influenced by this book.

But I have to add that I was also influenced by 1975’s Salem’s Lot by Stephen King. His vampires were as scary and mundane as Ms. Rice’s were otherworldly and esoteric. It was like two sides of the vampire coin. For the sensuality, though no actual sexuality, I was influenced by Ms. Rice, but for bringing vampires into the ordinary world it was Mr. King that intrigued me. It would be more than a decade later before I wrote my own vampire novel, but I know that these two books contributed. I guess no one counts Stephen King in this vampire genre because he only did the one book. So if Ms. Rice is first then . . .

Second is what I consider my genre which is mixed genre, a horror thriller/romance, but that doesn’t really say what I write. The closest description of what I consider my genre is Paranormal Thriller. In both the Meredith Gentry books and the Anita Blake novels I take thriller or mystery, mix it with horror and fantasy elements, then add a strong dose of sensuality, romance, and sex. I’ve yet to hear a single word that described it. There were actually editors asking other writers to give them Hamiltonesque books a few years ago when I was the only bestseller in this genre. I thought I was a little young to be an ’esque, but a lot of writers have made a career out of doing just that. The two things I think I brought first to the vampire novel was that my vampires were out of the coffin as it were and everyone knew they existed. Anita’s world is ours if we woke up tomorrow and had to deal with the monsters of nightmare and fantasy. No one had done that before. The other thing I did first, or that’s what editors and publishers tell me, was raise the stakes on the sexual content.

Oddly, most of the writers who have come after have taken the sexual content but the only one I’m aware of that has outted her vampires in her world as much as I have in mine is Charlaine Harris with Sookie Stakehouse books and the TV series "True Blood".  The first Sookie book was in 2001.

The higher sexual content has been more popular with other writers. Now, notice I don’t claim that I was the first to invent the idea of adding mystery to vampires. That was first done by Lee Killough in 1987. P.N. Elrod would hit the shelves in 1990. Tanya Huff in 1991. I wrote the first Anita Blake short story in 1987. What the heck was happening in the world from late ’80s to early ’90s that we all came up independently with the idea to mix mysteries and vampires? It would be interesting to figure that out.

My first Anita short story got lovely rejection letters but no one wanted it because it mixed genres. Mix-genre didn’t sell back in the late 1980s. I know with this being one of the hottest trends in publishing today it’s hard to believe that, but trust me no one wanted it. GUILTY PLEASURES my first Anita Blake novel would take two years and around two hundred rejections before it would sell to Penguin/Putnam as an Ace paperback original. It would finally see publication in 1993. I didn’t go into hardback until OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY, book nine.

None of these early books have the sensuality that I chose to put in mine, and to my knowledge none of them would add the sexual content that I’ve become known for in both of my series. Notice I consider the Meredith Gentry series to be part of the same sub-genre as Anita, even though there are no vampires on stage in Merry’s world. For me it’s the fantasy/horror/thriller element mixed with the romance and a heavy dose of sex that defines what I do in my two series. If you take the vampire out of this sub-genre and just allow thriller/mystery and horror elements then Mercedes Lackey’s Diana Tregarde books qualify. They came out in 1989. Again, what the heck was happening out there to make this suddenly seem like such a good idea?

Why do I say I pioneered the genre if there were books before? I’ve never said I invented the sub-genre, only that I pioneered it or popularized it. When I was getting all those rejections for the first book they said vampires were dead as a genre, that mixed genre of any kind didn’t sell unless you were Charles de Lint, and he did fantasy mixed with modern day, no vampires to my knowledge. But he’d made a career out of mixing modern day with the fantastic and at that time no one else had. There’d been a few books but no one had carved a successful niche for themselves. None of the early books had reached a wide enough audience to help my book sell, or maybe mine was just too different, either way the genre was too new to even exisit. It was just this new idea that no one wanted.

What I’ve been hearing from writers and editors for years is that my books have helped them sell theirs, or made the editors want to buy things like mine; Hamiltonesque. I mean there were techno-thrillers before Tom Clancy, but his popularity made the genre into the monster it became. Someone has to sell well enough before there’s enough market for other people to jump on the bandwagon. No one blinks in publishing at the idea of mixing vampires and supernatural beings with anything now. It’s all game, though nothing is quite as hot as vampires right now. There’s Stephanie Meyers and her Twilight books and movies. Her first book hit in 2005. I would say that her vampires are more Anne Rice than mine. Would that make her vampires Riceian? Or perhaps Ms. Meyers had created yet another sub-genre for vampires I’ll bet you money that editors are asking for Meyeresque books, or Twilightesque books. Charlaine Harris’s books have led to a hit TV show in "True Blood" and vampires have never been more popular. I wonder if the editor that told me all those years ago that vampire novels were dead and no one wanted to read about them anymore is watching all this with wonder? Nah, she’s jumped on the bandwagon, too. I guarantee you she’s got her own writers doing Riceian, or Hamiltonesque, or Meyeresque, or maybe Harrisian-esque?

That long ago editor should have remembered that the vampire never truly dies. They’re not dead, they’re undead, and apparently you can’t keep a sexy vampire down.