Hello dears, to WattVampire's darklings and to Coffee Community's caffeinated bunch!

We have a special treat for you per se ... a Coffee Community Interview!

Today we will be featuring our prize to MiloTamm , the Winner of the Vampire's Cafe contest.

This challenge was held during the month of October of 2016 for our Halloween contest in collaboration with the WattVampires Community.

The theme for the contest was to associate a short story with a cup of coffee with a dangerous to a mild vampire at hand.

Thus, we thought it would be best to start this interview right in a coffee café near the setup of where Copper Coloured Coffee took place.

So without further ado, let's get right to it, shall we?

~~
C.C: Hello Milo! Thank you for taking your time to do this interview with the Coffee Community.

Milo: Hello! (Virtually shakes C.C.'s hands )

C.C: The team sees that you bought yourself a drink. (Gulps! ) Is that what we think it is?

Milo: A copper coloured coffee? Absolutely not! (Smirking) That would be revolting. It's a frothy Irish coffee!

C.C: (Takes a fresh breath of relief)
Oh, thank goodness. Sorry, we thought we'd be interviewing a real vampire author.

Milo: I'll assure you I am not!
(Is a bit irritated, & is about to show his fangs, but keeps it within)
So, can we please get on with the interview?

C.C: Oh, yes of course! (Fidgeting through papers) Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

Milo: Well, again ... my name is Milo. I am not great at talking about myself. I talk a lot, actually too much ... but about ... pretty much anything else except myself. But for this C.C. interview, I will make an exception.

I started writing fiction because I missed writing in general. When I was a student I adored pulling an all-nighter under a dim desk laptop with a dozen mugs of coffee and pounding on my keyboard until the sun rose and the essay was complete.

I graduated and started work in the real world. I had never imagined how dull the real world was and the mental drudgery of life as a wage-slave chained to a desk. I found solace in writing. Eventually, as the monotony of the real world threatened to take over, I slipped almost entirely into a fictional world of my own creation. Now I function in a corporate world of raging egos and other people's money, but with my mind secretly lost in my next story.

C.C: Wow! And we're sure everyone has a "story" waiting to be told!

Milo: Exactly!

C.C: Moving on, can you tell us about your cover and how it came about? Do you imagine that the lady drinking that cup is your female vampiress, Marianne?

Milo: I spent ages on Photoshop creating the perfect cozy café background, but when uploading it, the image was so large that all of my work was cropped out. Thus, it just focused on the woman with the coffee cup. I figured that since the story is about her; it works better this way then. So, yes the lady drinking the cup is Marianne. If you look closely you can see her eyes glowing and she has long white nails. But apart from that, she appears deceptively pretty and normal.

C.C: Okay.

(Still believing Milo is a vampire in disguise & the keyword for proof was 'deceptively'.)

C.C: Your story Copper Coloured Coffee was surely a delight! It was rather interesting to learn about a female vampire putting a spell on such a young victim. How did you come up with the idea of having the foolish Justin fall into the hands of 'cougar-like' seductress of Marianne? Was it to teach him a lesson?

Milo: It was actually an amalgamation of all the writing prompts in the contest briefing that gave me the idea. I wanted to turn the idea of a swaggering brooding male vampire effortlessly seducing young female victims on its head and create something different.

C.C: Yes, it was quite different and we loved your idea!

Milo: Of course, now as I was saying ... vampires are predatory, but they are also parasitic and gruesome. They have to hide from the world, so they can't be gorgeous high school kids. They are only attractive as a weapon to lure their unsuspecting victim!

Now as for the story, I loved the idea of the cocky Justin getting his comeuppance. There is a part of Marianne's dialogue about consuming the vigour of young men that focus on their view of their place in the world.

Young men believe the world should be grateful for their presence. They have so much assurance of their self-worth, and I would know for I am one!

So, you are right, it was to teach him a lesson, to punish his self-aggrandizement.

C.C: Such strong words dear author. Are we talking about yourself here?

Milo: No comment to that! An author keeps his secrets to himself! Now, can we move on, I have places to go, you know?

C.C: (Sensing some annoyance coming) Very well sir. What genre do you typically write? What draws you to them?

Milo: I have written a couple of short stories, but only one novel = which is also about vampires.

What draws me to vampire fiction is the possibilities of witnessing first hand all of the changes in human history.

If a person could live through – the Stone Age, through the rise of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the World Wars, through modern time, the Internet, and onward in the future; they would be so wise to be cultured, along with having excellent stories to share.

Although, none of my vampire stories yet touch on this subject -> Copper Coloured Coffee. That is a vignette of a single encounter, and my full-length novel, The Midnight Cleaning Company is about servants who keep the secret society running, but face rebels who try tear it down at the same time.

C.C: Have you ever experienced writer's block? How did you recover from it, and do you have any tips on how to recover from it?

Milo: I have recently experienced writer's block. The novel I have been writing for over a year now is set on a Native American Reservation. With all of the focus on NODAPL at the moment, I have struggled with such huge concepts that are suddenly applicable to my now all of a sudden – very relevant story. My novel is based on fascinating people I met on and around a Reservation that was suddenly very political and everything I wrote had contemporary connotations instead of being just plucked from my brain.

(On a side note everyone should pay attention to the current events in North Dakota!)

My cure was to write some short stories that do not require all of the extensive research and entire encyclopedias of information that is required to write complex novels.

This would be my advice: to put the work down that is causing you problems. It is disheartening to stare at a blank page and keep dwelling on something that might plague you. Instead, get back to the basics, and tell a simpler story. You don't even have to show it to anyone, but it will remind you that there are still a lot of stories that are worthy to tell, and you have the ability to write them.

Then after you have re-inflated your bruised ego and taken time out of the story that you are struggling with, you can return with a fresh mind. With new ideas and a positive outlook on writing, your problems will soon vanish!

C.C: That's a great answer! So, what other writers have inspired you?

Milo: Writers that have inspired me are: Bernard Cornwell, J.K. Rowling, and Ben Aaronovitch.

Bernard Cromwell's Saxon Series is incredible. The world he paints in his writings is relatable and refreshing, despite the fact that it can be tragically done – an almost undocumented apart- such as from his descriptions of an occasional scribbling of a monk or runes carved onto a gravestone.

JK Rowling's writings on the Harry Potter series were done on a train between London and Edinburgh, where I have sat on for many hours myself.

And finally Ben Aaronovitch's River of London series is a police procedural set in a contemporary, but magical place in London.

C.C: I sense you like creativity in the unknown. *smiles* ... so, what other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer?

Milo: I discovered an amazing writer on Wattpad by accident, and we became friends through my messaging. We then learned that we had striking similarities between our two stories and apologized for this -> due to my own over-compensating and awkward Brutishness.

's novel Carrion & Lace is currently a featured story in the Vampire genre. It is very deserving of this exposure because her series is amazing.

In this story, the Ancient Greeks and Romans used to believe that Genies visited creative people and in return; took over their bodies and created a beautiful work of art, which was beyond the ability of a mortal human. This is the origin of our concept of a genius ... one visited by the Genie of creativity. It is very evident from looking at the work pulled from our brains, that a single (dark and disturbed ) Genie visited us both to inspire our stories.

C.C: (Knew there was something fishy about Milo ... hmm – dark and disturbed )
What is the hardest thing about writing?

Milo: The hardest thing about writing is thinking that you can finish the story right away, and that is a tale worth telling. Also, the commitment to continue this task over a long period of time can be quite overwhelming. It took me two years to write my first novel and it has taken around a year to get halfway through writing the second.

If you believe that it is a story worth telling, then you better tell it well – which means write it correctly, edit and rewrite it again.

C.C: Finally, we'd like to know how you like posting your stories in Wattpad. Do you enjoy the community here? What do you like best about writing on the Wattpad site?

Milo: I think that Wattpad is amazing! I spend a lot of time crammed into the rush hour London Underground trains reading via the mobile app. I spent hours typing up notes I scrawled on loose scraps of paper and notepads over several years to create a full story. I never thought that so many people would read and enjoy my work. It is an honour for just one person to engage with my stories, let alone for dozens and hundreds to vote and comment on my work.

The book clubs I have joined have been fantastic and the whole cultural atmosphere on Wattpad of giving each other's work a chance is so rewarding, both through exposure to my own stories and through finding some real gems to enjoy.

C.C: And thank you, Milo, again for taking the time out of your busy schedule to take part in this interview.

Milo: It is my pleasure, ladies! (Bows, gets up to throw away his plastic cup.) And C.C., I can read your minds ... as said I am not a British vampire ... but a story reader with fangs!

C.C: (Gulps ) and so my friends that concludes our interview. (Gets up and screams !)

His work can be found here. A little humor for all! Thanks again Milo for being a great 'writing actor'for our skit!