began with the stories her father told her about the vampire when she was a child. The family moved from the U.S. to Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1972, while her father was teaching for a year at a local university. During that year, the family traveled across Europe. According to Kostova, "It was the formative experience of my childhood."Jeff Guinn, "Tapping a vein", Fort Worth Star-Telegram (24 July 2005). Access World News (subscription required). Retrieved 10 May 2009. She "was fascinated by [her father's Dracula stories] because they were ... from history in a way, even though they weren't about real history, but I heard them in these beautiful historic places." Kostova's interest in books and libraries began early as well. Her mother, a librarian, frequently took her and her sisters to the public library – they were each allowed to check out 30 books and had a special shelf for their library books. She listened to recordings of Balkan folk music as a child and became interested in the tradition. Later, she sang in and directed a Slavic chorus while an undergraduate at Yale University. She and some friends traveled to Eastern Europe in 1989, specifically Bulgaria and Bosnia, to study local musical customs. The recordings they made will be deposited in the Library of Congress. While Kostova was in Europe, the Berlin Wall collapsed, heralding the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, events which shaped her understanding of history. Composition and publication Five years later, in 1994, when Kostova was hiking in the Appalachian Mountains with her husband, she had a flashback to those storytelling moments with her father and asked herself "what if the father were spinning his Dracula tales to his entranced daughter and Dracula were listening in? What if Dracula were still alive?" She immediately scratched out seven pages of notes into her writer's notebook. Two days later, she started work on the novel. At the time she was teaching English as a second language, creative writing and composition classes at universities in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, entered the writing program at the University of Michigan and finished the book as she was obtaining her Master of Fine Arts degree.Robyn Dorei, "Death becomes her", The Sun-Herald (11 September 2005). Access World News (subscription required). Retrieved 7 May 2009. Kostova did extensive research about Eastern Europe and Vlad Țepeș. She found a vampire-killing