Reston Place follows a widower whose search for companionship in a retirement community leads him and his allies into a supernatural mystery that tests their courage, friendships, and understanding of life’s remaining years. What inspired the setup of your story?

Someone once advised, “Write about what you know or experience.” My wife and I live in a Continuing Care Retirement Community. Unlike Reston Place, our community has single-family home options, and our house backs up to a wonderful wetlands nature preserve. Like Reston Place, the community is full of accomplished, friendly, caring people who can still meet life’s challenges. Also unlike Reston Place, we’ve had no vampire activity—to date. One reviewer remarked that she wished Emmaline, Phil, Lamar, and Lily lived in her community. In many ways, they do. I’ve wanted to write a vampire story for a while, and I wanted it to focus on characters, not the violence of the story. Hopefully, more people who read Reston Place will also wish our four vampire slayers lived in their community as well. If someone finishes the book without warm feelings for them, it would be a disappointment.

How did you develop the partnership between Phil and Emmaline, particularly the balance between their professional expertise, personal vulnerabilities, and growing friendship?

One of the main ideas for the book was to have four seniors who each bring something different to the table in terms of former professional expertise, but share one common trait: an instinctive and moral compulsion to stand up to an evil that threatens their friends and community despite the dangers they would face. They aren’t fearless, aren’t particularly strong, aren’t confident in their investigations. They’re real people, elderly people, facing an unreal threat. They’re driven by a need to do what’s right. Over the course of several days as Phil and Emmaline confront a seemingly impossible evil, they also find themselves enjoying each other’s company, sharing memories of life before Reston, and developing a friendship that is becoming something deeper by the end of their confrontation with Dorian. It’s meant to be a slow, natural progression of two people becoming comfortable with one another as they face the remaining years of their lives and decide that they may want to spend those years together.

Phil’s grief over Annie remains present as he forms new relationships. How did you approach portraying love and companionship after profound loss?

Both Phil and Annie understand that their growing feelings for one another aren’t a betrayal of their deceased spouses, but a natural response to their loneliness when the day ends. They talk about their love for their spouses, but decide to see if maybe they can make a life together. They don’t forget the past when they decide to live in the future. Those feelings aren’t rushed and, hopefully, seem more real when they’re expressed.

The novel explores aging, independence, and the value of remaining time. What questions about society’s treatment of older adults were you hoping to raise?

Well, it does answer the question on the cover. More importantly, you’re never too old to live and do the right thing. The book does explore society’s reactions to the elderly; e.g., they’re convinced that telling anyone a vampire is killing hospice patients would be ignored as either dementia or hallucinations of some sort. Importantly, Reston Place is a great place to live—pre-vampire. Older people are described swimming, playing tennis, enjoying dinners with one another, settling in on a balcony with a glass of wine. Forget the elderly, who doesn’t enjoy those things? The value of time is a running thread. The vampire’s victims are all hospice patients with little time left (no spoiler). Phil emphasizes that however much time they have, it’s their time and nobody or nothing gets to decide when to end their lives except them. Our vampire, however, feels society cruelly prolongs their lives and suffering. Is he right? Even Phil wrestles with that question. I know my answer, but it’s not in the book.

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