"I’ve been reading for as long as I can remember. My earliest memory of reading was on Christmas Eve, when my sister and I were little. We sat on the bottom step in the hallway and she opened a book and started reading to me. I don’t think she actually knew what the words said, as we were so young, but she tried nevertheless. Years later, when my dad moved to Devon, we visited him every weekend and eventually joined the library. I remember taking home my stack of books and losing myself in them. I knew from an early age that I wanted to make people feel how I felt. I wanted to produce something that would allow people to lose themselves in an imaginary world and enjoy adventuring with characters I’d created. I remember writing about a flying pirate ship in primary school and feeling immensely proud of myself. I was always at the computer during my secondary school years, thinking up a plot and trying, without success, to drag the story out and make it long enough to make a book. I never came up with anything thick or stable enough to fill a book, but I had an idea for a vampire book and a character called Peter Harris since I was around fourteen. Then, for my seventeenth birthday I got a laptop for my birthday. However, I didn’t manage to get the WiFi working for months and months, so instead I wrote. I developed my vampire idea, dreamed up new characters and created my own world, where anything I wanted could happen. I didn’t know how I wanted it to end, but somehow I couldn’t stop. I filled page after page with Pete’s thoughts, feelings and adventures, and finally a series of stories formed in my head. I knew that Pete’s story couldn’t be contained in one book, so immediately after I’d finished House of Vampires I started planning for the sequel." – Samantha Rendle