Thanks so much for having me as a guest at Fresh Fiction. I’m thrilled to be here! For me, knowing where a character hails from is an essential part of figuring out what makes them tick. This background—the place and time—is especially vital for the vampire characters in my new novel, WICKED GAME (Pocket Books, May 13). My vamps are psychologically and culturally stuck in the era in which they were ‘turned,’ making them walking, stalking time capsules (and perfect for their jobs as disc jockeys at WVMP, The Lifeblood of Rock ‘n’ Roll). WICKED GAME’s hero Shane McAllister, for example, was born in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1968. He was just a boy when the steel mills closed, collapsing the city’s economy. Shane’s own family fell into poverty and despair. Growing up poor made him tough and pessimistic, but it also gave him a core of compassion and understanding. The oldest vampire DJ, blues musician Monroe Jefferson, hails from Natchez, Mississippi. He grew up in a place and time governed by Jim Crow laws, which institutionalized racial segregation. Even now, he’s extremely cautious around the heroine of WICKED GAME, since in Monroe’s day in the Deep South, a black man…