Take Five and Meet Author Jill James

Today we welcome Jill James and get to hear about her Zombie Book 

that is also a romance. Can't wait to hear how she does it.

Welcome to An Indie Adventure, Jill.  Tell us, what inspired you to write your book Love in the Time of Zombies?

Thanks for having me as your guest today, L.A.

 I’ve always enjoyed zombie movies. Somehow the idea of surviving the end of the world as we know it is empowering. Then I found a book online with terrible reviews because the author dared to have sex in a zombie apocalypse book and the main character was a woman! I had to read that book. Rhiannon Frater sucked me into her world of zombies, tough women, and survival at all costs. I knew I wanted to write a book that was as much a romance novel as it was a zombie book.

How do you use setting to further your story?

Love in the Time of Zombies is set in my hometown of Brentwood, California. I wanted to show a town that was just bouncing back after the Great Recession and didn’t get a chance because the apocalypse happened. We sit in a valley, surrounded by dry hills in the summer, golden brown in color, just waited for a match to set the whole area on fire. When I started the story my town was in the midst of getting many improvements to roads and stores, so I left the town half-repaired for the course of the tale. In a zombie apocalypse our world would remain frozen in a state of perpetual undoneness. 

How do you construct your characters?

My characters come to me in dreams. Like a movie in my head, the story plays out and I write it down. Emily Gray came to me as an uber-rich city girl who discovers herself when the zombies rose.  Her voice just echoed in my head, “The zombies took my mother and my father. They took my husband, Carl, too. Not that he was any great loss.” I had to know why her husband wasn’t a great loss. LOL

How is your main character completely different than you?

Emily is definitely a much better shot than me. And she definitely would survive the zombie apocalypse way longer than me. She is who I would want to be, who I would hope to be if push came to shove in the end of the world.

Tell us something about yourself we might not expect!

I started my working career as an accountant. Don’t know what I was thinking. hahahaha I was so glad to put that behind me and to be able to tell stories for a living.

Give us a brief summary of Love in the Time of Zombies: 

Emily Gray goes from pampered trophy wife to the ultimate survivor of the zombie apocalypse. Seth Ripley is a man of simple needs; a job, a roof, his mother’s safety. When the dead rise, the living have to fight for every daily need. In this turmoil survival should be enough, but what is survival without love?

Buy Links:

ARe | Amazon  | B&N | Google Books | iTunes | Kobo

Bio:

Jill James didn’t start out wanting to be a writer. She wanted to be an astronaut, president of the United States, a doctor, and a lawyer. Life happened and along the way she discovered she could be all those things, between the pages of the books she wrote.

She lives in Northern California with her husband who is the inspiration behind all her romance novel heroes. 

Find Jill:

Twitter | Facebook | Email |  Website