Guest Author: Jennifer L. Armentrout

March 09, 2019

My guest today is a #1 New York Times, USA Today and International Bestselling Author who writes New Adult, Young Adult, Adult, Paranormal, Science Fiction, Fantasy and Contemporary romance and loves to hang out with her husband and their Jack Russell Terrier, Loki. (If there’s a zombie movie involved, all the better!!)

She’s the owner of the ApollyCon and The Origin Event which brings over a hundred authors and many readers together annually and she’ll be making some appearances at the Booklovers Convention in New Orleans in May.

It’s my privilege to welcome Jennifer L. Armentrout to the blog today, all the way from Charles Town, West Virginia.

Jennifer, welcome! Can you tell us whether your upcoming release has posed any particular challenges for you?

My upcoming release STORM AND FURY was one of the hardest books I've written, because the main character shares the same degenerative eye disease retinitis pigmentosa as I do, so it not only made the book more personal to me than any other book but also presented the challenge of communicating what it was like to have this disease so that readers could understand.

I’ve read that you do a lot of educating people about the varying stages of blindness and it’s been a passion since your diagnosis in early 2015. I am sure STORM AND FURY will further assist in that understanding. I’m looking forward to reading it.

WICKED was optioned by Passionflix and was to have started production by the end of 2018. How's that going and do you get to visit the set or have any additional input?

Right now I believe it's slated to begin production in 2019, so I'm excited to see where it goes from here. Whenever you have film/TV rights acquired, there's always that waiting game that has a 50/50 chance of ever making it to production. I try not to get too excited or really think about it until I get the call with the production dates. That hasn't happened yet, so we shall see!

Fingers crossed!!

You're off to RARE PARIS to sign on April 6th. Have you been to Paris before? What are you looking forward to seeing/doing while you're in Paris and not at the book signing?

I've never been to France, so I'm excited to be there. I'm a bit of a history nerd so I hope I get to see some of the historical sites, especially the catacombs and some of the older cemeteries. I would love to visit Oradour-sur-Glan and the coast of Normandy, although I know they aren't particularly close to Paris. I think it would be a very moving and humbling experience to walk the same paths where so many people either gave their lives or had their lives taken. I think it's important to remember.

I’m sure you’ll love Paris. My husband and I took our three children to visit the catacombs and were surprised we were searched as we left because people try to ‘souvenir’ bones. Erk! We also visited the coast of Normandy, the memorials and exhibits and it is a profoundly moving experience. I hope you get there.

After STAY WITH ME, J. Lynn was no longer used as your pen name for adult and New Adult books. What prompted that decision?

There were a couple of reasons, but readers knew that J. Lynn and Jennifer L. Armentrout were the same person. J. Lynn is just my first name and middle name, so it became almost pointless to keep the pen name when publishers were using it with my real name in larger font on the book covers, LOL. But, many of my foreign markets still use the two names and a lot of the readers there don't realize we're one in the same.

Can you tell us more about your next release?

My next release is STORM AND FURY which releases on June 11, 2019 (MY BIRTHDAY), and as stated above, it was a personal, challenging book to write. It is what they call upper YA contemporary fantasy. Lots of action and romance. I wanted to create a character who had a vision disability and have her still be kick ass and a fighter. How Trinity is with her disease is a lot like me and how I came to process and accept the knowledge I was losing my vision and there wasn't anything anyone could do, and as the series progresses, her feelings toward it are like layers of an onion being peeled away.