Clare Willis

Clare spent much of her childhood in Berkeley, California, but she also lived in Italy and England (her father is British and she holds dual citizenship) and travelled around the world before she was five. As an adult she lived in Los Angeles and Massachusetts, but always came home to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives now with her husband and two sons. While her family is at school and work, Clare writes with her two dogs at her feet: a cockapoo named Mocha and a terrier mix shelter puppy called Riley. Clare's first literary success came early, when her play, The Stepsisters, (a retelling of the Cinderella story) was performed by her fourth grade class at Parents' Night. During college at UC Santa Cruz she took creative writing classes, but succumbed to the convincing argument that she needed a "real job" to fall back on and added an elementary education minor. She taught for several years, earned two masters degrees in education, and worked in educational research and curriculum development. But the lure of writing never went away. After she married and had her first child, Clare became a stay-at-home mom, and found story ideas coming to her during the quiet hours when the baby was asleep. She wrote four books and numerous short stories. Several of her short stories were published, but it took ten years and many rejections before her first book (literally her first) was picked up by Kensington Press and she was signed to a two-book contract. Clare has loved the paranormal world, especially vampires, since she read "Interview with a Vampire" in 1976. By using vampires as a metaphor for the struggle between good and evil in the world and in each individual, Anne created an irresistible paradigm that writers could work in, seemingly forever. It also made a great metaphor for forbidden lust, and as any parent knows, once something is forbidden it becomes irresistible...