Author Mario Acevedo writes novels with titles that just grab your attention. His previous titles include “The Nymphos of Rocky Flats,” “The Undead Kama-Sutra” and now Acevado is hitting bookstores again with his fourth novel, “Jailbait Zombie.”
“Zombie” is the fourth in Acevado’s on-going series about vampire private detective, Felix Gomez and it seeks to expand the universe he’s created that is chock full of aliens and vampires.
After I had finished writing the third book, I realized that I should start introducing different kinds of supernatural characters, other than the aliens and vampires from those books,” Acevado told Tor.com “Then I thought, You’ve got to have zombies, so I wrote ‘Jailbait Zombie’. And then, after this book, I thought what other supernatural creatures can I use? And the one that is really powerful is the werewolf. I may have to rethink why he (Felix) turned into a wolf instead of a bat or a zebra or whatever.”
And while the previous novels in the series have been successful for Acevado, he insists that he’s not an overnight success in the publishing world. He said he was bitten by the writing bug early in life during a class assignment in the sixth grade.
“Our English teacher gave us this assignment where we had to write a book in teams of two. This was back in the ’60s, when ‘Star Trek’ was on. We were just captivated by the series, and (my partner and I) decided to write a ‘Star Trek’ story,” he said. When the teacher asked for our book, we didn’t have it all. So we pulled out this big thick notebook, and we had designed the ship; we had the crew members and their uniforms; we had maps of the universe. It just got away from us, but we hadn’t finished the story. She ended up giving us an A anyway.”
“What this incident did was it started an idea in my head that kept evolving and evolving. Then (in college), finally I took a class in technical report writing which inspired me,” he continued. “In 1985 I bought my first computer, a Tandy 80, and I decided, I’m going to write a novel; I’m going to do it. I got about 100 pages into it, and I got stuck and realized that there was more to it than that.”
Acavedo said it took him 19 more years to find the right story and the right time for it to hit the market. He debuted a few years ago with “The Nymphos of Rocky Flats” which introduced the world to vampire Felix Gomez.
“I was working at Rocky Flats and somebody said, “You need to write a book about Rocky Flats,” he said. “So I said, “Okay, I’ll write a book about an outbreak of nymphomania at Rocky Flats.”And the woman I was talking to said, “Too late. That’s already happened. She started giving these examples of people getting caught having sex in conference rooms and in the protected area and secured areas within Rocky Flats. The place was famous for hanky-panky, at least that’s what I heard.”
““Okay,” I said. “How about a story about a vampire detective investigating an outbreak of nymphomania at Rocky Flats?” And she said, “Well, I don’t think that’s happened.”,” he added. “So that’s the premise for the story, and I just ran with it.”
Now, four books later, Acevado says the time has come to expand the universe a bit and branch out the world of Felix Gomez. And Acevado says he is working to keep the series fresh and interesting.
“One of the difficult things about writing books in a series is keeping each new one fresh,” he said. “So Felix moves around, and that’s why I have been introducing different supernatural beings. This one had zombies. The next one will have werewolves, and then who knows?”
Purchase a copy of “Jailbait Zombies.”
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