Everyone who’s ever watched a James Bond movie, or read a Clive Cussler novel—or any story where the bad guys are instituting a plan to destroy the earth, raise your hand.Okay, good. Now…think about what might have happened if 007 or Dirk Pitt or whoever wouldn’t have foiled the bad guys with their plot to take over/destroy/achieve complete power over the world.
Not pretty, huh?
Well, that’s where my new paranormal romance series starts…sort of.
(Yes, I said romance. Not the most romantic or optimistic setting, huh?)
But the Envy Chronicles actually starts fifty years after the earth is devastated. Maybe some bad guys were involved, maybe they weren’t--maybe it was nature going crazy (not!). Or maybe the bad guys didn’t realize just how bad it was going to be when all hell broke loose, and maybe they’re all dead, now, too…but regardless, that’s what happened. Earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados, windstorms, and who knows what else.
So in the series, people have tried to rebuild civilization as much as they can, and have begun to live in pockets of communities sort of like towns in the Old West. The largest settlement is in Envy (aka, New Vegas, or N. V.), which is now sitting on the Pacific Ocean.
Enter the Awakening Heroes: five men who were somehow suspended in time in a Sedona cave during the last fifty years. They awaken to find that everything is gone.
The world is eerily silent, empty, and overgrown. It’s not a wasteland like in Planet of the Apes or Mad Max and the Thunderdome. Mother Nature, as one of the guys puts it, is a real ball-buster, and now that all but a fraction of the human race is gone, she’s taken over.
As the five men (Elliott, Simon, Quent, Wyatt and Fence) begin to try and rebuild their lives and find out what happened, they also learn that some of them have emerged from the cave with paranormal abilities. And some of them haven’t. To tell you who and what would give away more than I want to at this point, though. But suffice to say it’s not like the X-Men.
The first book, Beyond the Night, is about Dr. Elliott Drake and the woman he meets when she barrels into an abandoned Main Street on a horse to save a group of teen-agers from a zombie attack. She’s brave and smart and a control freak. What’s not to love?They go on a mission to find a friend of hers who’s missing and run into zombies, immortal humans called (so creatively) Strangers, and huge-ass snakes. They even take a trip to the mall…or what’s left of it.
These books are hugely different from my other series, The Gardella Vampire Chronicles (written as Colleen Gleason), but in some ways, there are great similarities. Writing a post-apocalyptic world is not so different from writing a historical one: there are many of the same limitations in communication, infrastructure, and society.
These books are first and foremost romances, with a solid hero and heroine and a happy ending at the end of each book…although, like Suzanne Brockmann and Eloisa James (two of my favorites), I’ve included over-arching plots that tie the books together and introduce other potential heroes and heroines.
The second book, Embrace the Night Eternal (Simon’s book), will be out on February 9.
And the third, Abandon the Night (Quent’s book), is coming March 9.
There are sneak peeks on my website (JossWareBooks.com).
I’m giving away a signed copy of Beyond the Night here today. It goes on sale on Tuesday, January 12. To enter to win, please make a comment about what you’d miss most if you woke up and found yourself in a post-apocalyptic world.
And…I’ll be hanging around, ready to answer any questions you might have about the series! Thanks to Andrea, Buffie, PJ, and Gannon for having me here today!
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