Fire and Ice: J. L. Murray, Author of Jenny Undead (With INT Giveaway)

Hello, everyone!
It may seem just a bit strange to you that I've invited J. L Murray, an urban fantasy and horror author, to talk about romance, but after reading her latest novel, Jenny Undead, I understood (as I hope you will) that she writes the best kind of romance, already established, strong and unconditional.
I hope you'll enjoy this post and I sincerely hope you'll give Jenny Undead a chance.

But first, here are all the other Fire and Ice posts aroud the blogosphere today:
Tressa@Tressa's Wishful Endings: Sarah M. Eden
Ali@My Guilty Obsession:Faith Sullivan: Heartbeat Series
Candace@Candace's Book Blog: Rosamund Hodge: Cruel Beauty
Ginny@Gin's Book Notes:Tess Thompson

Author: J.L. Murray
Series: The Thirteen, #1
Published: December 31st 2013
Publisher: Hellzapoppin Press
Format: ebook, 281 pages
Buy: Amazon

In a world ravaged by disease and chaos, Jenny has a secret. She and her brother were part of a gruesome experiment conducted ten years earlier in an attempt to stop the zombie apocalypse. If the rumors are true, her mother was the hated pathologist who released the disease in the first place, leading to the destruction of government, civilization, and life as we know it.

Despite the constant terror of the undead, Jenny is as happy as a post-apocalyptic girl can be. She has friends, she's good with a knife, and she has Declan Munro by her side. But when she hears her brother might still be alive and living with the Underground, a religious group hiding in the now-defunct subway, Jenny jumps at the chance to find him. She infiltrates the group to right the wrong she caused when she ran away, leaving him in that lab.

When she finds him, though, Casey is not at all what she expected. He's been turned. And the impossible happens when Jenny is bitten. She and Casey are dead, but they're not like any other rotters. Their minds are still intact. And there are others: Thirteen children survived the mysterious experiments, and it’s up to Jenny to find them and bring an end to the plague. But not everyone wants the chaos to end.

Between battling her hunger for living flesh and the all-encompassing rage that goes with it, and the realization that a killer is stalking both the living and the undead, Jenny has her hands full. Coming between a dead girl and the people she loves is a big mistake. Because if you can count on one thing, it's this:

You wouldn't like her angry.

When I was in college, I took a poetry-writing class. I've forgotten virtually everything I learned in the class, except this: When writing about love, you never say the word “love.” I'm not sure why, but I loved that idea.

Fast forward a decade or so, and I was writing my first full-length novel, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. I decided I was never going to be one of those writers. You know, the kind that write about love. Romance, to me, was a death sentence. If I wrote romance, I thought, I would never be taken seriously as a writer.

But as I wrote more books, it became glaringly obvious to me that something was missing from my writing. I was three books into my Niki Slobodian series and the thing that I heard most from fans was, “When is Niki going to find love? When is she going to be happy?”

My knee-jerk reaction to these questions was to be irritated. Love wasn't the point of the books, the characters were. But the more I thought about it, the more I understood that it was because of the character that love mattered to the readers. Love was part of life. It drives people in real life, it would only make sense that it would matter to fictional characters as well. That's when I realized that writing about love and romance wasn't selling out, it was adding another dimension to the story.

My most recent book is entitled Jenny Undead. It is the first book in The Thirteen series. I decided to try something very different with Jenny. Instead of grappling with finding love, not finding love, or fighting the inclination to love, the book starts out with Jenny already being madly in love. It's a zombie book, but it's really a love story. It's dark and gritty, but there is an intense undercurrent of passion throughout the book. It's one of the first books I've written where I didn't try to fight the already-established connection between two characters. Jenny and Deck love each other and everyone knows it, fictional and otherwise.

The thing is, readers have responded to Jenny Undead in a way I had not anticipated. I expected some complaints about the cursing (there's a lot), some squeamish reactions about the level of violence (it's excessive), maybe even some comments about how they feel uncomfortable with the fact that Declan could actually still be interested in Jenny after she becomes a “rotter.” I have heard none of those things. What I have heard is readers responding to the dark flavor of love in the book. People email me and contact me through my Facebook page to ask when they are going to see more of Jenny and Declan. What's going to happen to them? Why can't I just leave them alone and let them be happy for a minute?

I'm not a romance writer by trade. My books are actually pretty dark and intense. But shying away from love does a disservice to the characters and to the story. If a character is in love, then it needs to be written that way. Because, though the characters may be fictional, they need to feel real. Their hate needs to feel like your hate, their guilt your guilt, and their love needs to be felt deep inside the reader's guts.

But to return to my original analogy. When writing poetry about love, you should never write the word “love.” When writing books about love, it's fairly similar. You don't just say it's love, you have to earn that feeling in your readers. They need to decide it's love based on how you make them feel, how much you make them yearn for two people to be together. Jenny and Declan loved each other beyond death, and blurred the lines of who the real monster was. That's the thing about love, though. You see the person inside the monster, you find yourself loving the monster, and before you know it, you're doing monstrous things to protect them. It's love. No one ever said it wasn't messy.

About the author:

J.L. Murray grew up in Northwestern Montana in a rural logging and mill town. Like most writers, she started writing at a very young age. She overcame great odds before returning to college and rediscovering her love of writing.

J.L. lives in Hawaii where she now writes full-time, with help from her husband, the writer and editor John Q. Murray, and two sons. She writes the Niki Slobodian series, and is currently working on several standalone dark fantasy novels. She can be reached through her blog,http://jlmurraywrites.blogspot.com or her Facebook fan page athttps://www.facebook.com/jlmurraywriter.

GIVEAWAY TIIIIME!
I'm giving away two digital copies of Jenny Undead, gifted from Amazon. Please enter the Rafflecopter below and keep your fingers crossed. Good luck, everyone!

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