Book Rec - Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion

I don't tend to read YA. I don't seek it out unless specifically pushed to, because most of the themes explored don't really interest me. When I do read books that are classified as YA, it's usually because my daughter has told me to.

We saw the movie for Warm Bodies on DVD when it came out, but she didn't read the book until this past spring. Then, she thrust it into my hands and said, "Read this!" I didn't want to. We'd already seen the movie. I don't like zombie books. So I stalled.

I wish I hadn't. I haven't been this surprised by a book in a long time.

First of all, it's not YA. I don't care what anyone wants to classify it as. People who are trying to qualify it as a romance or a zombie book are missing the whole point of it, too. It's about the search of who we are and the lengths we'll go to retain the status quo because the whole world is too scary to deal with otherwise. Wrapped up in a tidy zombie package.

But let's get back to that. For those who aren't familiar with the story, it's about R, a zombie who lives at the airport. He's having a bit of an existential crisis, wondering who he was, what they're doing as he and the other zombies make a pseudo life for themselves at the airport. The Boneys, the skeletal zombies who seem to run things, make up families by pushing men and women together, then giving them children to complete the unit. R is a part of this but not, choosing to live inside a plane that he's filled with mementos he's scavenged from the nearby city. 

On an eating run, they corner a group of young people and he eats one of the men, a young guy named Perry. Since they get their victim's memories when they eat the brains, R starts experiencing Perry's life, as well as gaining a new fixation on Perry's girlfriend Julie who is also part of the group. R defends Julie, then smears her with his own blood to mask her scent to take her back to the airport to keep. But for what purpose, he doesn't know, and more, once she's there, they both start looking at the other person differently.

The book has been labeled a Romeo and Juliet/zombie mash-up, which in all honesty it is. The naming conventions (R=Romeo, Julie=Juliet, Perry=Paris, and their friends have the same correlations) are the strongest, but that's where the comparisons fall apart for me. Some people have focused on the romance between Julie and R, but that didn't strike me as nearly as central to the story as R's discovery of himself. He spends over half the book either talking to himself, experiencing Perry's memories, or interacting with a dream Perry inside him. This is about R's journey, not the fact that love somehow "fixes" him.

Plotting is not its strong suit. If you lay it out, not a whole lot happens. But what makes it transcend its stifling labels is the author's voice. Simply put, this might be one of the most beautifully written YA-classified stories that I've ever read. His voice is poetic and visceral, and I caught myself over and over again either gasping or sighing over his prose. It's wrapped in the zombie package, which means there's gore and violence, so if that bothers you, you might not enjoy it as much. I don't mind, so it worked for me.

But it's passages like this that sucked me in early: I dream my necrotic cells shrugging off their lethargy, inflating and lighting up like Christmas deep in my dark core. Am I inventing all this like the beer buzz? A placebo? An optimistic illusion? Either way, I feel the flatline of my existence disrupting, forming heartbeat hills and valleys. 

And this... if these staggering refugees want to help, if they think they see something bigger than a boy chasing a girl, then they can help, and we'll see what happens when we say yes while this rigor mortis world screams no.

There's so many more, I could go on for hours.

If you want to read this because you love romance or zombie books, you might be disappointed. But if you're interested in falling for a zombie in his search to be something other than what he is, I can't recommend this highly enough.

Embracing Our Garden

We've made food changes in our household. To our friends, they seem pretty drastic. In some ways, they are. I certainly didn't see it coming. But health issues have reared their ugly heads, and when that happens, you do what you have to do.

My household has gone vegan. Mostly.

What that means is six days a week, we don't consume animal products or anything processed. No salt, either. Our big meal is always a salad, and water consumption has gone through the roof. Right now, I just can't do it every day, so I'm reserving Sunday as a day that's more omnivorous, but plain eating is still the priority.

So far, it's not going too badly.

Breakfasts are the hardest for me. I can't eat oatmeal every day, and smoothies do absolutely zero to fill me up, so I've had to work at finding alternatives. The first thing that's worked is this antioxidant-rich breakfast bar, which I was more than a little shocked I enjoyed. It's incredibly filling, too. I need that. Since I'm at home most of the day, it's too easy to snack on something I probably shouldn't.

Planning is the key. There are certain foods I have to work into our diet on a regular basis, and I'm the kind of person who gets bored easily. I want flavor. And I want a variety of them. I've subscribed to a few food blogs that look promising, so as I try things out, I'll be sure to share.

Friday Flash

A few weeks ago, I judged at Siobhan Muir's #ThursThreads contest and realized how much I'd missed writing flash fiction. I joined in the following week, which means I now have three different snippets of brand new story ideas. I love this way of inspiration.

The first had to be centered around the military in some way, so I went futuristic.

*_*_*

One of these days, she’s going to get caught. The password she steals on a weekly basis from Central will fail. The sentry will change his routine. The commander will finally decide the relics are better off destroyed.

But as she slips beneath the imaging sensors that line the corridor, Right Lieutenant Nika Kivale doesn’t think about what can go wrong. Her thoughts focus beneath the compound, in a room her peers don’t realize exists, a space of shame her leaders refuse to acknowledge. She stops to disable the heat arrays beyond the next door, then counts to twenty before thumbing the release to open it.

From there, it’s only a single staircase before she’s inside the archives. The hardest part about standing amidst the relics is not deciding what to save, but ignoring the guilt that threatens to immobilize her from acting at all. These are the last remains of those who were lost to the war, lost to peace, kept here without thought to the families who mourn for them, simply because they were the enemy’s fallen and not her side’s own.

She wouldn’t want her mother to never have closure. Stealing what she can to return to parents who weren’t as lucky as hers is the least she can do.

One of these days, she’s going to get caught.

But as she slinks back to her quarters to prepare the package to send off in the morning, she knows…today is not that day.

*_*_*

I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is the opener of a novel. I'm going to expand it to flesh out the actual breaking in and what she's doing, but this is an excellent way of introducing Nika and showing just who she is as a person. I imagine it's going to have something to do with something she steals and sends out that is going to come back and bite her in the ass somehow. The specifics of finding that out intrigue me. A lot.

And with that, I'm signing off for the week. I have fun plans for tomorrow. I'm going into San Francisco with my daughter, her BFF, and BFF's mom (who happens to be a very close friend) to go to Modcloth's pop-up shop. The girls have homecoming in September, so we're hoping to find dresses for them. It'll be a girlie day out, which I don't get enough of. Plus, my daughter is only home for three more years before going to college, so I want to milk that for all it's worth.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

TBT: Walk Among Us

My idea journal has been chock full of dark ideas lately, which makes me nostalgic for one of my early novellas. It was part of a collection about priests I did with Pepper Espinoza called A Calling of Souls. We each wrote a novella, and then wrote one together as Jamie Craig. Pepper's was a fantasy about a young man who'd given up going into the priesthood, our Jamie title was about an English priest questioning his faith, and mine is a paranormal about an ex-priest who sees demons.

As an artist in New York City, Calvin Shumacher finally has the life he’s always wanted. In fact, only one thing can get him to come back to Illinois—his father’s funeral. All he wants is to bury his dad and hightail it back to New York, but a sniper at the graveyard puts those plans on indefinite hold.

So does Matthew Soto. The gorgeous gunman who speaks of monsters wearing human faces. And predicts there won’t be a body for police to find.

Calvin doesn’t know what to think when Matthew claims he didn’t do anything wrong. All he knows is that this man’s haunted eyes seem to pierce right into his soul.

But as each of Matthew’s assertions comes true, Calvin slowly realizes this killer could be the only thing standing between him and an unspeakable evil…

Even though it's been six years since I wrote this, the tale sticks with me. These men are both incredibly lonely, and I found Calvin's head a familiar place to reside for a while. He's an artist and views the world as such, filtering things by color and shape. Most writers I know do the same, except with words and phrases.

To read an excerpt and for purchase information, check it out at Samhain!

Savage Estate by Vivien Dean

The second of my new releases over the past couple months was a shapeshifter novel that was a part of the first SuperPax at Amber Allure. It's called Savage Estate:

For his twenty-fifth birthday, Alec Savage gets the gift of a lifetime—the chance to meet his father for the very first time. What he finds upon his arrival in Washington, DC, however, is a smashed window, an empty house, and a scrawled note with only his name and a phone number on it. Panicked, he dials the number and talks to an uncle he never knew he had, one who insists Alec is in danger if he stays in the house. That’s when everything starts to get really weird.

Within minutes, he’s teleported all the way to nowhere Montana, in the company of the most gorgeous guy he’s ever seen, hearing about how he’s the latest mage in the Savage line. Alec doesn’t want to believe Rowan Bouchard, but it’s hard to argue with the reality of his new snowbound location or the confirmation from the uncle who greets him. He even thinks staying on the estate while they hunt for his father won’t be so bad if he has Rowan as eye candy.

Except Rowan is more than that. He’s a shifter, the most beautiful black panther Alec could imagine. And according to his Uncle Martin, he’s now Alec’s familiar, too...

For an excerpt and purchase information, check it out at Amber Allure!

Unison by Vivien Dean

I've had two releases in my hiatus, both at Amber Allure. The first was a short story time travel, about the dreamer in all of us.

Freddie Valek is a dreamer. He dreams about the fantastic as a means to escape, about finding the perfect man, about anything his imagination can conjure. When he falls asleep after work one day and finds himself in pre-Civil War Louisiana, he can’t say that he’s surprised. The only part of the dream that shocks him is that it’s taken him ten years to have a dream about the history of his most prized possession—a water-logged portrait of a man named Ezekiel.

All he knows about Ezekiel is what the woman who gave it to him said. That Ezekiel was the son of a plantation owner and a slave. That nobody ever found out what happened to him. Freddie’s dream thrusts him into the parents’ lives and their demands that he’s been brought to them to find their runaway son, a mission he is more than happy to accept.

But the closer Freddie gets to finding Ezekiel, the more he’s convinced that none of this is actually a dream...

I might be in a minority, but time travel is one of my favorite genres. I love the possibilities of what if, the chance of starting over in a land unknown. It's hard to write it as a short story because of the mechanics that are usually involved, so I focused on Freddie and his needs, the fact that he's a dreamer who just desperately wants to believe in the best of people..

For an excerpt and purchase information, head on over to Amber Allure!

Coming back

Wow, my mini-break lasted a lot longer than I anticipated. We had end of school stuff, then traveling for the kids' camp, then my visit to NC to see my sister, then more traveling for the kids, then back to school. We are just now starting week three of the new school year, and my life is resembling normal more and more every day.

Which meant I no longer had a reason to be lazy and ignore the blog anymore.

That's the problem with taking breaks. The longer it stretches, the harder it gets to actually consider it a temporary thing.

So I'm back, though I'll be rolling into it a little slowly until I get up to speed.

Translation: Today's about waving to all of you out there to remind you I'm alive.