Hula hoops, Zombies, Music Legends...See what's in the mind of Lux Zakari

My guest today is Lux Zakari, talking a bit about her book Finale, and giving us a few fun facts about her life.

 

1. Your new book, Finale, deals with some pretty serious issues. Does your main character, Olivia, get a chance to have fun?

The problem with Olivia is that she spent her entire life having fun. She grew up in L.A. as the daughter of a record company exec and was a songwriter, so she got to mingle with the rich and famous and do all sorts of rich and famous things. Olivia always felt that she had to preserve her glamorous image at any cost, closing herself off to any “ridiculous” opportunities threatening that, including her secret relationship with music legend Jonathan Levant. However, now she has all this responsibility heaped upon her when Jonathan dies suddenly and leaves his children in her care sans explanation. It’s the first time in her life where she’s had to step up and be accountable for not only herself but for three other people depending on her. Needless to say, the dog days are over. There is no more fun to be had!

2. You have two full-length books out now. Have you given any thought to making either of them a series?

I have been asked if Coercion will have a sequel, a thought I occasionally toy with, but currently I don’t have the inspiration on what would make the protagonists get together. All that the characters went through – that’s hard to forgive and forget. As for Finale, it would be hard to crank out a second book, considering it opens with one of the characters being quite dead! On that note, maybe I could write a sequel called Finale—With Zombies! where Jonathan Levant comes back from the dead and torments Olivia with his decaying but still undeniably hot bod and they force her psychic friend Ione de Claire to research ways to restore his humanness. GASP! I would be parodying myself! This is genius. I wish I could hug my own brain right now.

And what you just witnessed was a Lux Zakari thought, rolling live without a filter. This is how most of my stories are born.

3. If Finale were made into a movie, who do you see playing Olivia, or any of the other parts?

I think about this sort of thing all the time! I haven’t even finished casting Coercion: The Movie yet. I am very open to suggestions for either story though. I am also not averse to picturing Henry Cavill starring in pretty much everything I write. He is deliciousness and that is just one hundred percent fact.

4. Tell us about hula hooping! How did you come to enter the contests you almost won?

The contests are not as glamorous as they might sound! One took place in high school during some senior week activities and another took place in college at a dorm’s annual barbeque. I tied both times—the first with a girl from the White Team, and then with a flipping third grader.

My thing is I’m an endurance hooper. One time a disbelieving friend said he’d pay me twenty bucks if I could hula hoop non-stop for a half hour, and I was on the clock at my job at the time. It was the most awesome, most memorable twenty dollars I ever earned.

These days, I use a hoop custom-made by a friend, who titled it “SVH Power Play” knowing my intense love-hate for the Sweet Valley High series. She taught me a few tricks as well; I’m no expert, but I can spin and walk while hooping with proficiency and do this cool rodeo-type move with the hoop over my head. Hooping is such great exercise; it’s so fun and effortless. Lately, I’ve been hooping while watching “Community” and “Flight of the Conchords.”

5. I read that you were waiting for your passport to arrive. Do you have it yet? Where have you been and where do you want to go?

I have my passport now and got to use it this year when a friend and I jet-setted off to Puerta Vallarta for scuba diving and tequila tasting and general Mexican adventure antics. Next, we hope to go Australia and give surfing a try. We are very adventurous when we’re together!

6. Will you provide an excerpt from Finale?

Of course!

                                                            
By 1985, Jonathan Levant was a god.

No one—sans me, apparently—even likened him to his former Golden Boy days. They didn’t recognize him as such a decade later. When people learned he used to do choreographed dance routines to Beach Boys covers in flared one-piece pantsuits, their eyes bugged out of their heads and they gaped, black holes where their mouths used to be. “Him? No, it couldn’t be.”

Jonathan had undergone a complete reinvention. No longer sweet and sunny, he was dark, dangerous, a bit of a freak, actually. His outfits—edgy reinventions of what was trendy in the Victorian age—were so out of date they were back in style. He popularized ridiculously tall top hats paired with spats, leather pants, black eyeliner and a codpiece. He’d become so bizarre that girls and boys alike adored him for being different, and those who scoffed were secretly fascinated by him. He’d been the scene’s most sought-after bachelor, rumored to have been about town with several high-profile movers and shakers. Then he surprised everyone by marrying Sierra, an Asian fetish model, last Halloween night. The tabloids couldn’t believe their good luck. The new couple had given every rag headlines for the next six months.

It wasn’t just his new look or lifestyle causing such a stir. It was his sound. Honestly? I was more attracted to him than ever.

But I’d been down that road, and no matter what he did or how he looked or what he said, I was convinced I knew the truth, the real Jonathan Levant. I vowed to not let myself forget that.

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Buy link for Finale: http://www.whiskeycreekpress.com/torrid/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2&products_id=601&zenid=6682f72a0e56c6d5ef87b6d88e427d51

luxzakari@gmail.com

www.luxzakari.com