Author Lauren Kate says that she has always wanted to visit the country.

MANILA, Philippines — Angels are the new vampires.

Or at least, that’s what it looked like when fans and bibliophiles alike came out in droves to meet Lauren Kate, the New York Times bestselling author of the young adult (YA) novels “Fallen” and “Torment”.

Brought to the country by National Bookstore for a couple of meet-and-greet events and autograph signings, Kate says that travelling to the country was an opportunity that she couldn’t pass up.

“They sent me an e-mail with the subject line ‘Do you want to go to the Philippines’ with about 20 question marks. I was just so stunned and excited about the opportunity,” says the 28-year-old author. “I’ve been getting messages and e-mails from fans in the Philippines for a long time and I never thought I’d get to meet them, so it’s really neat.”

This opportunity has come by Kate’s way on the strength of her two novels, “Fallen” and “Torment”, which chronicle the troubled relationship between teenager Lucinda “Luce” Price and her fallen angel boyfriend, Daniel Grigori. Both novels have been extremely successful, with “Fallen” spending more than six months on the New York Times Bestseller List, and “Torment” debuting at number one when released last September.

And while Kate claims that she never expected her books to be New York Times bestsellers, she does admit to feeling that there was something special in the tale of Luce and Daniel.

“When I sold it to the publishers, they said that it was going to be big, it was going to be great, but I tried not to think about that too much,” she recalls. “When it came out and it was doing pretty well, I got to go on tour and do book signings. It continues to blow my mind.”

Big reader
The fact that she is a published author – and a bestselling one at that – is something that would have blown the mind of a teenage
Lauren Kate. Kate says that while she and her family were big readers, the possibility of becoming a writer was something that she didn’t think was possible.

“My family is made of big readers, but nobody’s really literary or even artistic. My family was surprised that I wanted to do this. I’ve always wanted to do this for a very long time. It was just something that I always wanted to do but never something I thought I could,” she says.

Kate, however, would persevere, making up stories and dabbling in other forms of writing as a young girl.

“I always wrote little stories. I just came up with stories and wrote plays and came up with musicals. It was always a part of the way that I processed the world,” she says. “Then as I got older I got more serious about fiction. By the time I was in high school, I was writing longer stories and fiction, beginning to study it more.”

She would take that interest all the way to college, majoring in Creative Writing and pursuing a master’s degree in Fiction Writing afterward. She even worked for a time at a publishing house before finally getting her debut novel, “The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove” published.

“Natalie Hargrove”, with its tale of high school betrayal and deceit, was something that Kate says emerged from her own experiences
in high school, describing it as “‘Macbeth’, told from Lady Macbeth’s point of view, and set in an American high school.”

“‘The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove’, is a lot more autobiographical
because the setting is based on the high school that I went to in Texas. It’s a very competitive, sports-heavy, football-heavy environment, and the idea of a Prom King and Queen is the highlight of the entire year, the focus of the entire social strata,” she explains.

Of angels and mortals
On the other hand, the idea for “Fallen” — the book that would catapult her towards a bigger audience — was something that she stumbled upon almost by accident.

“When I started to write ‘Fallen’, I was working on a different novel. I was backed up against the wall with what I wanted to do with it. While working on that novel, I came across this line in Genesis about a group of angels who looked down on heaven, saw mortal women, thought they were beautiful, loved them, and eventually lost their place in heaven because of that love,” she recalls.

From there, Kate says that the story just began to grow and grow.
“It seemed to open up a plot that could get really big beyond just being a love story. It’s a really compelling love story if you think about who this woman is who can attract an angel’s attention, who she is that draws him down from this place and makes him sacrifice all this stuff,” she says.

Kate would then find herself immersed in angel lore, building up the world with which to set her story.

“I had to do history and research about Angelology and dig into this whole mythological world, and I liked the breadth of that,” she says. “I wasn’t interested in angels before that. My whole life is angels now. I’m really fascinated with them.”

All that research has spawned the four book “Fallen” series, with “Fallen” and Torment” already out. The next two books in the series, “Passion” and “Rapture”, are set to come out in 2011 and 2012, respectively.

But even more exciting for Kate fans, the series itself has been taken up by Disney for a film adaptation!

Explosion of angel books
Kate’s books aren’t the only books out in the market dealing with the myth and lore surrounding angels. Cassandra Clare’s “The Mortal Instruments” and “The Infernal Devices” series; Becca Fitzpatrick’s “Hush, Hush” and “Crescendo”; and even 18-year-old Alexandra Adornetto’s “Halo” all deal with these heavenly beings.

As a publishing industry veteran herself, Kate says that this explosion of “angel books” isn’t so much a resurgence as a response to the cultural zeitgeist.

“I don’t think that there’s a resurgence of books being written about angels. I think it’s a resurgence of books being selected for publication and promotion because it’s in the ethos,” she explains.
“There’s  something about it, something in our collective consciousness, that is drawn to a dark romance. I think when we can sort of fix it on one element, right now it’s on angels, which is wonderful.”

Kate says that she doesn’t see any of these books as competition, saying that the current explosion is a win-win situation for publishers and readers.

“I’d love to read other angel books that are out there right now. Readers enjoy it and it’s great for them, you finish one book and you can pick up another one while you’re waiting for the next book in your favorite series to come out. You can read a new book in a different
series,” she says.

Kate says that she already has another series in mind, aimed once again at the young adult audience. YA, she confirms, is where she’s staying for the moment, but she isn’t discounting a move to a different audience altogether.

“I have a new series concept that I’m working on that I’m excited about. It’s a new teen series that will be several books,” she says. “I’m very comfortable in YA, but that doesn’t mean I’m not doing other things in the future, including younger books.”

For readers who also long to one day come up with their own bestselling work, Kate has this advice to give.

“The best advice that I can give is to finish, because it’s very easy to begin a story with a great idea, and it’s really hard 10 pages in when you’ve run out of a little bit of steam, and somebody wants to see a movie and you put it down and you never go back to it again,” she ends. “Some people are always working on that novel. Knowing that you can finish a book, whether or not it ever gets published, is a big step towards something that could be a real book.”