Some readers will ask: Is Zee you?
Good question. Is Zee, the heroine in my YA paranormal novel What Kills Me, a version of me?
While I’ve never been hunted to the death by every vampire in the world, I guess the short answer is: yes and no. All authors mine their own lives and personalities for inspiration.
Zee and I have several things in common:
- We both have scars on our chins. I rode my bicycle into a parked car as a girl, stabbing my chin on a hood ornament. Zee’s scar disappears the moment she becomes a vampire. I’m not so lucky.
- We’ve both gotten totally lost while traveling. Once in Kyoto, Japan, half a dozen police officers had to escort me to my hostel. Zee is not so lucky. A psychotic killer finds her while she is lost in Rome, changing her fate forever.
- We’ve both had cockroaches crawl into our pants. (The bug was trying to get lucky?)
We share a self-deprecating sense of humour and an openness with strangers (which is Zee’s gift as well as her undoing). Our fathers address themselves in the third person and our best friends rescued us from bullies. We both talk when we're nervous (my grade school teacher told my mother that I suffered from "verbal diarrhea").
But in a lot of ways, we are very different. I’m a lot more sarcastic and pessimistic. The coins in my swear jar could buy a car. And I’m definitely not as brave.
Zee has boundless spirit and desperately wants to lead a courageous and adventurous life. Falling into a well of blood and becoming vampire public enemy number one wasn't what she had in mind; but she faces every challenge, every tragedy, every twist and turn with verve.
And she's constantly thinking of others, wishing she could protect them — even if it's from herself.
If vampires were trying to kill me, I'd lock myself in my room and hide under the covers. (Why do people do that — that’s the worst hiding place ever!)
Luckily, Zee isn’t me. She runs and then she fights.
Book jacket blurb, What Kills Me:
An ancient prophecy warns of a girl destined to cause the extinction of the vampire race. So when 17-year-old Axelia falls into a sacred well filled with blood and emerges a vampire, the immortal empire believes she is this legendary destroyer. Hunted by soldiers and mercenaries, Axelia and her reluctant ally, the vampire bladesmith Lucas, must battle to survive.
How will she convince the empire that she is just an innocent teenager-turned bloodsucker and not a creature of destruction? And if she cannot, can a vampire who is afraid of bugs summon the courage to fight a nation of immortals?
About Wynne:
Wynne Channing is a national newspaper reporter and young adult novelist. Wynne loves telling stories and as a journalist, she has interviewed everyone from Daniel Radcliffe and Hugh Jackman to the president of the Maldives and Duchess Sarah Ferguson. The closest she has come to interviewing a vampire is sitting down with True Blood‘s Alexander Skarsgard (he didn’t bite).
She briefly considered calling her debut novel “Well” so then everyone would say: “Well written by Wynne Channing.”
What Kills Me (ASIN: B0089H01VO) is available on Amazon.
It is also available at Smashwords (ISBN: 978-0-9881054-0-9) for Kobo and Nook.
Ways to find Wynne:
GIVE-AWAY
Wynne Channing is giving away 10 copies of her ebook, What Kills Me, today. For your chance to win one, follow her on Twitter (http://twitter.com/wynnechanning) or like her at Facebook (facebook.com/wynnechanning), and send her this message: “Fangtastic Books says @wynnechanning has a page-turner for me!”
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