SheKnows Interviews Author Richelle Mead

SheKnows: We wanted to start off by talking about Vampire Academy the book (and series) a little bit for our readers who may not be familiar with the story, if you could give us the broad strokes.

Richelle Mead: Vampire Academy, the books are based on this Romanian myth I found that posited the idea that there are actually two kinds of vampires in the world the evil, undead, blood-sucking ones that we think of in popular culture, as well as a race of benevolent, living ones that don't need to kill people to get their blood. So I took that idea and played with it and made this whole society of vampires living among us based on this idea.

The protagonist is a girl who is actually half-vampire who is training to be a bodyguard for one of these good, living vampires because they're always being stalked by the evil ones. So that's kind of the initial world setup there, and what sets up the main plot in the story is that these girls discover there are some threats within their own school that have nothing to do with the evil vampires, there's more danger closer to home than they realize and my protagonist also begins falling for her instructor, which is obviously a problem as a student-teacher relationship. He's a fun character, he's a kind of bada** Russian guy who's trying to teach her to defend her best friend. And from there, things get increasingly complicated.

SK: We're very excited to hear that Vampire Academy is going to be a movie coming out in February of 2014. What is that like as an author, having your book made into a movie? We know Daniel Waters (of Heathers) did the screenplay, but did you have any kind of input? 

RM: I was floored when I found out he was doing it, I had no idea that was in the works until they told me, "look who we got the script by!" I'm a huge, huge fan of his; he's brilliant and he really gets what I'm trying to do. I don't believe in one-dimensional stories, and so the books aren't all action, they aren't all romance, they aren't all comedy, it's just layers within layers. And he really gets that. And so I didn't have input in the first draft of the script, he wrote all that, and I was just really, really pleased with it. I was so surprised, because you never know what you're going to get in Hollywood when books become movies. I was like, "wow, this is amazing!" He got the characters, he got the pieces of the story.

There are changes, of course, it would be impossible when you're dealing with two art forms not to have that happen, but nothing that made me scratch my head and say, "whoa, whoa, what's this?" He was very respectful and true to the source material. I had a few comments; tiny, tiny things that I can't even remember what they were that I mentioned back to him and I think they got incorporated in. They were very open to my input, but I don't know that they needed it! They'd done such a solid job and I was I was really thrilled and surprised by that.

Read the rest of the interview with Richelle, where she talks more about the VA movie and the cast HERE