BLOG TOUR & GIVEAWAY: Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I know of) by F.J.R. Titchenell

F.J.R. Titchenell pays us a visit today as she travels along the Blog Tour for her new novel, Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (that I know of).

If you have not already gotten your copy of this amazing book, you are in for a treat.  Inside you will mortal danger salted with a humor that draws you ever deeper into the story and its characters.

Visually gripping for both its locations and characters, the pictures the words created in my mind still linger—creating a few questions.

Do you write with images in your mind of what is happening?

FJR: Of course. I'm admittedly not the most visual-minded of people. The words themselves are a lot easier for me. I thrive on dialogue and internal monologue, have to remind myself to slow down and describe the surroundings, and when I get inspired, it's almost always words bouncing around my head waiting to get out, not an image waiting to be made into words, but even I have to be able to picture what I'm writing about. If I can't see it, the reader won't see it, and the story loses vital sensory engagement. Or worse, the reader will see it, filling in the blanks as well as possible, and discover that the choreography unconsciously contradicts itself because I wasn't paying attention.

The non-stop action in Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (that I know of) stretches across California to New York City. How did you choose or research each setting or step along the way?

FJR: I chose most of the locations based on my familiarity with them and how logically they fit along the most likely route our heroes would take. I followed their progress chapter by chapter on Google maps to make sure everything made sense, though I have been busted by readers for getting some details wrong on places I didn't know firsthand, specifically Tulsa Zoo. Sorry! I needed a good sized zoo to come up in that part of the trip, and there's only so much you can figure out from brochures and aerial shots!

How do you feel about road trips? Did you draw from your own experiences to make the trip so realistic?

FJR: Love them under the right circumstances, and yes, definitely. My husband and I took a cross country road trip in college that was easily a life highlight so far, and the Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know of) road trip follows our route fairly closely, so I have been to most of the places Cassie goes, except obviously Tulsa Zoo. Also some of the New York locations. I've only driven across a small corner of New York City so far. Matt and I got to see a lot more, though, without a rescue mission hanging over us, and we went further than New York, all the way up to Maine. It's something I'd recommend to anyone who has the opportunity.

Each character’s attire or appearance is distinctive. How did you use this to further the story?

FJR: I'm not really a fashion type, but I do love costumes. Back when I was studying theater, I always felt closer to characters once I got to dress up as them. I think I do the same thing with dressing up some of the Zombie Slayer characters. Do you ever look back at what you wore in high school and wonder what you were thinking? Well this bunch has no parents or school dress code or budget keeping them from taking that to extremes. We get to see a lot of how they see themselves worn almost literally on their sleeves, and we get to see how they grow out of it or don't. It's one of my favorite extensions of writing visually in Zombie Slayer.

Can you share a scene that is memorable to you?

FJR: Well, some favorites are naturally the funereal vandalism at the music institute and the battle of the Costco, but the one scene that started it all, the one everything else grew out of, is the moment when Cassie sees the first zombie sit up and she thinks about all the romantic things she should be thinking about at that moment, about conquering death and the like, and then she bashes its brains in because she's a geek who's already nursing a healthy fear of zombies before they start existing in her world. 

Thanks, Fiona!

Now, here is a taste of what you will discover inside this book.

The world is Cassie Fremont’s playground. Her face is on the cover of every newspaper, she has no homework, no curfew, and no credit limit, and she spends her days traveling the country with her friends, including a boy who would flirt with death just to turn her head. Life is just about perfect—except that those newspaper headlines are about her bludgeoning her crush to death with a paintball gun, she has to fight ravenous walking corpses every time she steps outside, and one of her friends is still missing, trapped somewhere in the distant, practically impassable wreckage of Manhattan. Still, Cassie’s an optimist. More prone to hysterical laughter than hysterical tears, she’d rather fight a corpse than be one, and she won’t leave a friend stranded when she can simply take her road trip to impossible new places to find her, even if getting there means admitting to that boy that she might just love him, too. Skillfully blending effective horror with unexpected humor, this diary-format novel is a fast-paced and heartwarming read.

Where can you find this book? Click below:

AMAZON   BARNES & NOBLE   BOOKS-A-MILLION   INDIEBOUND   INDIGO

Meet the author!

F.J.R. TITCHENELL is an author of Young Adult, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and Horror fiction. She graduated with a B.A in English from California State University, Los Angeles, in 2009 at the age of nineteen, and she currently lives in San Gabriel, California, with her husband and fellow author, Matt Carter, and their pet king snake, Mica.

The "F" is for Fiona, and on the rare occasions when she can be pried away from her keyboard, her kindle, and the pages of her latest favorite book, Fi can usually be found over-analyzing the inner workings of various TV Sci-Fi universes or testing out some intriguing new recipe, usually chocolate-related.

You can find her at the following links:

WEBSITE   FACEBOOK   TWITTER   GOODREADS

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