WELCOME, CHRISTINE VERSTRAETE!

What my friend Chris doesn’t know about Camille: She writes light, reads dark!

My new bedtime reading!

Why Write About… Zombies?

By Christine (C.A.) Verstraete

Thanks to Camille, who is brave enough to let me grace the pages of her blog here and there.

Now Camille is a terrific writer who writes fun, light, cozy mysteries which I adore and LOVE to read. So why in the world would she want me to come here today and write about something as awful as … zombies?

Well, I admit being a mystery buff first. Camille and I got to know each other way back in the early days of her publishing her first miniatures mystery since we both are miniatures collectors. Later, I happened to write a kid’s mystery, Searching for a Starry Night, A Miniature Art Mystery, which features the search for a missing mini replica of Van Gogh’s Starry Night (hence the book title), and which she featured on her blog.

I’ve always been a horror fan, and loved Stephen King, Dean Koontz and others. Along the way I started writing some horror-tinged short stories and finally found something that inspired me enough to write a book—zombies.

Yes, they’re disgusting, awful, horrid—you name it. I started watching The Walking Dead and admit, even I cringed or turned away sometimes at how ghastly these monsters were. They’re like every nightmare rolled up in one. The show is fascinating, though, for both the human drama, the zombies and the fear factor involved—you never know what may be around the next corner.

So an idea came, but I naturally didn’t follow the typical route. Instead,  in GIRL Z: My Life as a Teenage Zombie, I thought of a story about a 16-year-old girl who turns… part-zombie. No brain eating here, though she is on a kind of gross restricted diet. (You’ll never look at a certain white meat the same way again.)

About GIRL Z: My Life as a Teenage Zombie:

Life can suck when you’re sixteen. It can suck even worse when you’re not-quite-dead.

Sixteen-year-old Rebecca Herrera Hayes faces every teenager’s biggest nightmares: bad skin, bad hair, and worse . . . turning into one of the living dead.

Becca’s life changes forever when her cousin Spence comes back to their small Wisconsin town carrying a deadly secret—he’s becoming a zombie, a fate he shares with her through an accidental scratch.

The Z infection, however, has mutated, affecting younger persons like her, or those treated early enough, differently. Now she must cope with weird physical changes and habits no girl wants to be noticed for.

But time is running out… Most of all, she needs to find something, anything, to stop this deadly transformation before it is forever too late…

Links:

Amazon US, print and Kindle: http://tinyurl.com/mwjn6v3

Amazon UK: http://tinyurl.com/ctyd9dz

B&N: http://tinyurl.com/d889gzn

I wanted to write a book with some humor, bad puns and have it told from the zombie (or part-zombie’s) point-of-view. Having the main character Becca only part Z answered the problem of having her go Uggghhh through the whole book. Bo-ring. ha!

The main part was having fun with it. It wasn’t until later that I learned that zombie books are a genre all to themselves, and can be pretty gore-entrenched, violent and have a lot of military action. Not my thing so much, even though you have to have some zombie killing. Writing the gory parts, I admit, was fun. Call mine gore and zombie lite I guess.

Now I’m hooked. I’m working on some more adventures for Becca and am almost finished with a completely different book with another different take on zombies, this time in a historical setting.

The main thing is I’m enjoying it. After all, if you don’t enjoy what you’re writing, then why bother, right? But what I really learned was, who’d think horror could be so much fun?