Someone asked if I decided to write a book about vampires after reading Twilight. And if you’ve read Sucks to Be Me or the first chapter excerpt, you might have noticed there’s a reference to Stephenie Meyer in there. 
Well, I actually wrote this book in 2005 before Twilight came out in October of that year. The first draft obviously didn’t mention Stephenie Meyer back then, since it was before anyone had even heard of Edward and Bella and the Cullens and Jacob. The reference at that point was actually to Anne Rice. But by the time I sold the book and was working on the revisions with my editor, Twilight was huge and my editor brought up the good point that Anne Rice was really more of an adult author and would most teens have heard of her nowadays? So we decided to change the reference to Stephenie Meyer instead. I hope she doesn’t mind (not even sure if she knows, honestly), since it was definitely meant as a mark of respect regarding her place in pop culture.
Now, as for why I decided to write a book about vampires…in a way, I really didn’t. I was even working on another book at the time. But I’d recently read this YA vampire book (that I won’t name) that had all these references to Dracula (which I’ve studied like a bazillion times) and it got so much stuff wrong. I was annoyed. And late one night the first line of STBM came in my head and I got up and wrote it down. And then wrote up the first couple of paragraphs. And then I went to bed.
I figured that was it, but when I got up the next day, I had more of Mina in my head and (in the immortal words of John Lee Hooker) it had to come out. I still haven’t finished the other fantasy I was working on, but maybe I’ll work on it after the sequel to STBM is done. So that’s the long and short of it, more or less.