by Jay Wilburn
Armand Rosamilia is a masterful writer with a voice that carries him through zombies, horror, crime thrillers, Young Adult, and more. He has a number of great collaborations with other authors. He has written both fiction and nonfiction. There is something for every reader in Rosamilia’s catalog of work and once you find something you love, you’ll love everything else he writes, too. Dying Days is his 9 book signature series which is complete and ready to be read from exciting beginning to satisfying end. His latest offering is something a little different from the Dying Days universe of zombies. Rosamilia’s Dying Days: Family Ties – A Zombie YA Novella stands out even among the other excellent Dying Days stories. This novella, viewing the Dying Days zombies from a younger perspective, is beautifully written and has a great accessible story with characters you have to care about. It is worth every penny and delivers on every page.
This novella was one of Armand Rosamilia’s offerings on Patreon. His patrons get to follow along chapter by chapter as he rough drafts a novel. He chose Dying Days: Family Ties for this honor for a couple of reasons. First, he admits he wasn’t sure he could actually write a YA story to the quality he wanted to deliver for fans. He wanted to test it on Patreon first and see if the readers there responded favorably to it, which they did. Second, he had just completed the “Necromance” run on Patreon and was looking for the next book to do a chapter a month for subscribers. He thought it was a good book to experiment with and let that group of “inside access/ behind the scenes” fans see it first.
In the beginning, writing Dying Days: Family Ties was very challenging because he’s been writing about the Dying Days zombies for so many years. They were set a certain way in his head, he explained, and he knew it wouldn’t work exactly that way for a YA story. He had to take it easy when introducing zombies and attacks and pull back on the visceral nature of the universe without losing the heart of the Dying Days series. Maybe not so much on paper, he said, but in his head, he had to make a transition. After half a dozen chapters, he felt he got into the groove and could separate these zombies from the original series versions, even though they’re all technically in the same world. It was using the kid’s perspective to see them in a new way for a new audience.
The best way for us to see a new Dying Days Young Adult novel from Rosamilia would be for this story to do well with fans. I want to see it, so get on it, readers! He doesn’t foresee, in the near future, writing a YA story in any other genre, even in horror.
Rosamilia recently released A View From My Seat which is a book about the Jumbo Shrimp minor league baseball team in Jacksonville, Florida. Not only are sales great, which I’m excited to see, but the support from the team as well as management has been amazing. Bigger than he’d ever thought it would be, he told me. He’s been on the news, interviewed in the paper, and on several sports podcasts as well. He had a successful book signing on April 28, 2018 during a game with 10,000 plus fans in attendance. The team sells them in their souvenir shop and on their website, too. And for him, it’s not only a recap of the 2017 Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp baseball season, but a lot of his personal baseball stories and experiences up from the time he was little. It is a great book for baseball fans or Rosamilia fans. I loved it.
There are a lot of great things coming from Rosamilia for readers and fans. Once Dying Days: Family Ties was completed, he began writing Plan C, a supernatural thriller novel with tie-ins to the Green River Blend and the Dirty Deeds series. You can see the early draft chapters as he finishes them just by becoming a patron on his Patreon page. You can join for as little as a dollar a month right now. No one provides the kind of quality and content on Patreon that Armand Rosamilia does. Also, he’ll be releasing the very last Dying Days book in November, conveniently in time for the Winter of Zombie tour, I hope. It will be called Dying Days: Compendium and include everything not included in all the other releases. Shorts, guest posts, some notes, interviews, etc. This is something I’m going to be sure not to miss.
I hope I have made the case for Armand Rosamilia. Check out Dying Days: Family Ties – A Zombie YA Novella or any of the other works linked above. If you want to know more about Rosamilia and his work, check out this “Case For” post from a previous tour. Grab up Family Ties and start reading now!
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