By
Jill James (Guest Blogger)
When
I was a little girl I was terrified of being buried alive. It haunted
my dreams so much that I knew as a little kid that I would be
cremated. Then, you are dead for sure. Once I was old enough to read
The Premature Burial by Edgar
Allen Poe it just emphasized that I had been right all along. You do
not want to be buried alive. The whole zombie genre just reiterates
that. Being a zombie is being seen as dead but you are not. They are
buried, just minus the dirt. Not how I want to go, thank you very
much.
I
get asked a lot why zombies when I write romance novels. I truly
believe there is someone out there for everyone. So I write romances,
but they are set in the zombie apocalypse. If you can find your soul
mate, your other half, amid flesh-eating zombies, ruthless renegades,
and limited supplies of food and water, how hard can it be in the
real world. Get out there. Meet people. Live. That special someone is
out there waiting for you. I believe that. I write it into my
stories. I live each day with my forever love.
I’ve
been fascinated with the zombie genre since Night of the Living Dead
by George Romero. If there is a zombie movie out there, I’ve
probably seen it. My eReader is full of zombie apocalypse books. The
idea intrigues me, that the world as we know it could be gone
overnight. It is closer than ever before. The more electronics we
rely on, the less we know how to do things the old-fashioned way. We
are one EMP away from going back to the pre-Industrial age. Every
time you use your computer or Smart phone for something, think of
what you would do without it. I have family who couldn’t get across
town without a GPS. Friends who are connected to their Smart phones
live an invalid with an IV. We’ve lived without them before. Could
we do so again? What if we were forced to?
In
my zombie apocalypse books, I love seeing if people could not only
survive The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI as the preppers
say) but find time to discover true love, because what is survival
without love? My characters face the end of the world head on. They
band together to face the apocalypse, making friendships and love
relationships.
So,
why zombies? Because I would never survive the very first hours of a
zombie apocalyptic outbreak, so I write kickass heroines that not
only survive, but thrive, and find true love. In Love in the Time of
Zombies, Emily Gray is a rich, San Francisco society matron who finds
her true self in the times of zombies.
Excerpt
from Love in the Time
of Zombies by Jill James
When
we got there, they’d put us through a bunch of tests: agility,
strength, skills, and shooting. I’d scored a hundred at all
distances. No picking apples for this girl, I was a member of the
undead hunting patrol.
Breakfast
out of the way, I cleaned up my section of the roof. Gathering up my
dirty clothes, and believe me, you haven’t seen dirty until you try
to get zombie guts out of your shirt, I took them to my friend,
Michelle, who had laundry duty this month. Michelle Greggs had been
on the wild ride with me out of San Francisco. We’d clung to each
other all night as the horde of undead tried to get to the fresh meat
inside the fortified school bus. Rotted fingers poked between the
welded metal sheets and their moans stayed with us long after the
trip was over. We’d been friends ever since. Shit like that is a
real bonding moment.
She
stopped me with an upraised hand, and then grabbed a pair of surgical
gloves before taking my clothes. We’d all told her countless times
that she couldn’t get the mutated virus from simple contact;
because we pretty much all had the virus, but she continued to use
the gloves. We all have our idiosyncrasies since this all started and
we’d let her have hers.
She
dropped into a curtsy. “And would madam like these pressed and
folded as well?”
I
played along. “Yes and any spots left will come out of your pay.”
I put up my chin and looked down my nose at her. I could have done a
dowager countess proud.
Michelle
laughed. I would play any silly game to get that light, airy sound
from her, even if it were a mockery of my pre-Z life. Or maybe, my
pre-Z life had been a mockery of reality all along.
Unlike
me, my friend had loved her husband with all her heart and had to
kill him when he’d turned. She’d told me the sad story on the bus
with the caveat that she would never mention it again.
“Now,
go kill those skinbags,” she ordered.
“Yes,
ma’am,” I replied, giving her a snappy salute. We all had our
names for the zombies we had to kill. Some used other names to make
it easier. Parents in our group used funny names to make it less
scary for the children. Way back when, before my time, there had been
a late-night local show, Creature Features, and the parents had taken
to calling the zombies Black Lagooners. But for the life of me, I
couldn’t see how anything made what we were going through less
scary. Maybe kids had a defense mechanism I was missing. I was scared
shitless most days.
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About Jill
Jill
James writes contemporary, paranormal, and urban fantasy romance.
When she isn’t writing, she is reading. She lives in Northern
California with her husband who is the inspiration behind all of her
romance novel heroes.
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can
find
Jill
at
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http://www.twitter.com/jill_james
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