On Tuesday, we showed you the cover of mother-daughter team P.C. and Kristin Cast’s sixth book, Tempted, in the best-selling House of Night series. P.C. and Kristin also chatted with Shelf Life about how they work together as a team. And for more with P.C., pick up this week’s issue of EW, on stands now.

EW: It’s very interesting the whole mother/daughter dynamic and working together and working on this series together, so tell me a little bit about the mother/daughter working relationship.

PCC and KC: We get this question all the time.

KC: I confer as an editor, almost. She will write the first draft, and I will go back in and fill in the parts that she hasn’t, like the descriptions, or similes and metaphors, or the the plot references. I do a lot of those. But if there’s a word that I can tell one of the teenagers wouldn’t use, I’ll change that and use the comment bubbles and put notes all throughout it, and she goes back and reads it and rewrites it…and then we send it in.

PCC: People are always like, “So how has this changed this relationship?” It surprised us when we first started getting the questions, because we have always been so close that it’s very easy. It’s very easy between the two of us, because we had been communicating well for, I mean, she’s 22 ½.

KC: Actually, the only thing that’s different now in our relationship now versus before we started the series together is that when we travel, we get to go to cooler places. But we have always been really close. It’s just been the two of us for pretty much 22 years, so nothing has really changed. We still have an excellent relationship, and I love working with her.

PCC: We’ve been communicating really well and easily about everything for 22 years. People are like, “The sex parts, isn’t that kind of awkward?”

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For this week’s cover package about vampires (on stands today!), we chatted with writer Neil Gaiman about how vamps have changed through the years, what they stand for and why they should go away. For more on vampires, including our picks for the top 20 greatest vampires of all time, pick up this week’s issue of EW.

EW: How have vampires gone from being monsters to anti-heroes? For example, in contemporary pop culture, we’ve seen vamps make that move from horror flick fear agents to misunderstood social outcasts.

NG: I think mostly what it has to do with is what vampires get to represent. Dracula was a great novel of sexual seduction, full of repeated sexual seduction and rape and sex. So it makes complete sense that your solid Victorian vampires were fundamentally evil. And you can have that nice big stake hammered through them as a way of putting them to rest. After that, I think the next big, huge, cultural, “somebody’s just written a vampire story” is probably Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. Steve basically wanted to do Dracula again, only in a small town in Maine. At that point you got vampires still sort of representing the “other.” Then Anne Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire, which as a teenager I thought was a rather drippy book. I have to say as a teenager who loved vampire fiction and wanted vampire fiction, I thought they all sort of sat around being miserable.

But I think then the thing that changed everything and that gave vampire fiction a new lease on life and death was AIDS, because you hit the early ‘80s, and suddenly you have something in the blood that is an exchange of blood that kills and is altogether fundamentally about sex. And vampirism essentially came out of the closet as a metaphor for the act of love that kills. Stephen King once said, using the Erica Jung quote, that vampirism is the ultimate zipless f—. And then a sort of continuous transmutation, you had Lost Boys, which is essentially vampirism as wish fulfillment. Finally, of course there’s Sesame Street, which I think may well have created the sympathetic vampire for the world in Count. READ FULL STORY »