@ThisIsNoBueno In answer to your question, I love vampires. They are easily my favourite supernatural creature. And over the course of my life, I've read hundreds of vampire stories, both adult and teen-oriented. One of the things that's really bummed me out about a lot of recent teen fiction is that the vampires could easily be interchanged with any other creature or bad boy in many of those stories, so with the BLOOD MAGIC Saga I wanted to tell a story where the vampires were actually vampires and couldn't possibly be anything else. I also really wanted to make bloodsuckers scary and unpredictable again, and bring back that idea that getting involved with monsters often has very dire consequences (even if those monsters are conflicted and misunderstood). The magic part came naturally as I was fleshing out the outline and the backbone of the story - what if two different supernatural entities both used blood as fuel, but in different ways, and then were unexpectedly thrown together. How would that play out? It seemed like it would make for an interesting question to explore, and so I ran with it. It was also something that I hadn't read before, so that excited me even more. The last thing I wanted to do was tell the same story that has been told over and over again; that would have bored me to tears and I would have abandoned this book and series a long time ago if I had.
As far as turning BLEEDER into real book. Right now the plan is for that to happen either late in 2014 or early in 2015. And don't you worry, I'll be screaming from the hills about that when the time comes. :)