Waking
up Dead
End of Days Love
Book One
Emma Shortt
Emma Shortt
Genre: Horror romance
Publisher: Entangled Select
Date of Publication: 22 October 2013
ISBN: 9781622660353
ASIN: B00BMKRLXG
Number of pages: 372
Word Count: 104,000
Cover Artist: TK Designs
Book Description:
You
know your life has hit rock bottom when you’re living off cooked
rats and showering once every few months—if you’re lucky. But for
Jackson Hart things are about to get a whole lot worse. When her best
friend, Tye, disappears hunting for food, kick-ass Jackson’s ‘head
south to safety’ plan looks like it’s dead before it’s even
begun. But then she meets ex-mechanic Luke Granger, who takes her to
his bunker, feeds her with non-rat based food, and offers her
protection against the zombie hordes—not that she needs it. She
knows how to use a machete and isn’t afraid to.
Jackson
was tempted to stay in the city with her rescuer. Food, shampoo and
the possibility of finally getting laid, what more could she ask for?
But the flesh eaters are getting smarter and the bunker is
compromised, so Jackson and Luke have no choice but to make the
journey south.
Luke
and Jackson team up to find other humans in a road-trip romance for
the ages. They travel for thousands of miles with zombies shadowing
their every move. They must utilize every resource at their
disposal…and then some. On the way, they discover that even if
flesh eating zombies are knocking down their door, there’s always
time for sex and even love.
The
Challenge of Writing Zombie Fiction with a Difference
Guest
Post
Emma
Shortt
I’d like to rewind
time by two years, to the fall of 2011. At that time zombies were
just becoming ‘hot’ again. AMC’s The Walking Dead was in its
first season (in the UK at least) and a number of books such as Mira
Grant’s Feed and Amanda Hocking’s Hollowland were riding high in
the charts. Readers and television viewers alike were happily soaking
up anything, and everything, even slightly zombie related.
It was during this
time that I sat down to write my own zombie themed book, Waking
up Dead. I should give a little context here and say that I am
not a huge zombie fan. Hell, it would not be a stretch to say that I
have a bit of a phobia of them! I hate watching shows with them in or
reading books, but I am horribly compelled to do so, and then spend
ages regretting it. In fact, I wrote Waking up Dead as an attempt to
master my phobia. I thought that if I wrote zombies as vile as I
could make them, then had a heroine that could kick their ass so bad,
it would make me feel better about any possible impeding zombie
apocalypse (I know, I know, there is no ‘impending’ anything, but
bear with me here). So Waking up Dead was a bit of a personal
exorcism for me, and because of that it never occurred to me that I
would have to make it different to any of the other books that were
out, or might come out in the future.
Before I started
writing Waking up Dead I’d watched some zombie movies such
as Dawn of the Dead and I am Legend. I’d also read a few purely
horrific zombie books, but I hadn’t yet heard of, or seen, The
Walking Dead, or read any of the more light hearted zombie books. So
I sat down to write Waking up Dead in a bit of a bubble. From the
moment I began typing I did not allow myself to read or watch
anything that involved zombies, as I did not want to be influenced by
anything or accidently copy it. I had no comparator for ‘different’,
all I had was my own desire to rid myself of my phobia and to create
a book that people would want to read.
As it happened, the
fact that I was a romance writer meant that Waking up Dead was always
going to be different to anything else on the market. A budding
romance in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, with a hero and heroine
battling not just the zombies but themselves? Check one on the
‘different’ list. Add in the phobia and my desire to make my
zombies the worst EVER, meaning plot twists even I didn’t
see coming... Check two.
I guess what I’m
trying to say is that for me there was never really a challenge to
make my zombie book different. I wrote what I wanted to write,
and what (perhaps more importantly) I wanted to read, and thought
about the market only after the fact. I think this is a very
important point for any budding writer. Yes, it’s important to try
and create a book that will sell (assuming you want it to be
published), but a book should always be about what you want to
write, not what the market demands.
Waking up Dead was
written two years ago now, and the market has changed rapidly in that
time. Luckily for me zombies are still ‘in’, but they could just
have easily been ‘out’. So a book needs to stand on its own
merits in terms of the storyline and the quality of the writing, not
just what is fashionable right now. One of the first reviews that
came out for Waking up Dead said, I’ve never really read
anything like this. I smiled as I read those words, because my
job was done, and I never planned it or thought about it, but
happenstance made it so.
Zombies, romance,
and an ever changing market. It’s not really about making it
‘different’, it’s about creating something that readers will
love regardless.
Emma x
About the Author:
As a kid Emma wanted to be
an astronaut, or maybe Captain Janeway. Because she didn't really
think her career choices through very well she ended up in an
everyday geek job, crunching numbers and sighing over syntax. It
seemed a long way from the stars, and in an effort to escape Emma
decided to get serious about her other passion. Writing.
Several years later and
Emma has yet to walk on the moon or sit in the Captain's chair, but
she is still writing. She scribbles stories in all sorts of genres,
contemporary, paranormal, post-apocalyptic, historical, sci-fi...if
she hasn't tried it yet she will before long. The only common theme
is the romance. A hopeless romantic, everything Emma writes has a
love story in there somewhere.
She lives on the west
coast of England with her very Greek husband and teenage kiddos.
Apart from all things geek reading is her main hobby and she likes
nothing better than getting home from a hard day at work and curling
up with a book, though sometimes she gets home and writes one
instead.
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