Immortal Gifts follows a centuries-old Jewish vampire on the run from an antisemite trying to make him permanently dead, who falls in love with a mortal woman in the twenty-first century. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

The original concept was a one-time challenge with my writing group: “The vampire has a wife. Set the story in the last five years.” Several people submitted wildly different stories. Mine turned into Immortal Gifts.

I’m a Pantser, and it’s a normal part of my process to reread what I’ve written and extract subtext. Early on, I started to feel that the character was Jewish. That was interesting, so I went with it.

A lot of Abraham’s early biographical details (date and place of birth and desire to study at an academy that does not allow Jews) came from the life of Jewish composer Louis Lewandowski. Obviously, Abraham is not Lewandowski! But Lewandowski ended up being the first Jewish student at the Berlin Academy. Lewandowski was admitted as a favor to his friend, Felix Mendelssohn. Abraham, not having a Mendelssohn, lied.

Abraham is not the typical vampire often found in paranormal books; he offers readers a human perspective on supernatural beings and explores how immortality affects who they are. What were some of the emotional and moral guidelines you followed when developing your characters?

I was primarily interested in the concept of immortality in choosing vampires. It’s true that my vampires have the no-food and sunlight issues, but that was primarily so the reader wouldn’t immediately say “Immortality? Sign me up!” 🙂

Aside from that, I wanted my vampires to be very grounded in reality. Vampires are always people—that’s one of the things that makes them fun to me—but I wanted them to be very much the person they always were. If someone is a good person, eternal life in itself won’t change that. If someone is a bad person, immortality won’t change that, either. In other words: it’s your choices and actions, not the length of your life, that determines your moral alignment.

Early on the question of consent started coming up. Turning someone without asking permission first is, at the very least, a faux pas. When is it justified? Is it okay to turn someone without their consent to save their life if they haven’t offered an opinion? When is it okay to make someone’s medical decisions for them? Because that’s what it is in my book: a miracle cure for almost any ailment that also has significant drawbacks.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

Mortality. Grief. Consent. Resilience in the face of oppression.

At one point I was describing the book to my sister and told her, “Don’t be afraid of the vampires. Vampires are our friends. You know what’s not our friends? The natural processes by which our loved ones get sick and die. Those are horrifying.” (Our parents are both dead, by the way.)

Will there be a follow-up novel to this story? If so, what aspects of the story will the next book cover?

I’m working on the second book, and we’re still talking about mortality (and gifts). We did leave off with a couple of characters in uncertain situations and had a reveal about a third.

A lot of Immortal Gifts was written during the pandemic and has a lot of pandemic-feeling isolation. The second book is shaping up to be more… sociable.

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