Courtesy photo
Jim Zimmerman is the author of “Love or Lust”
Pam Dudding
Contributing writer
When one thinks about reading a love story, most believe it will be a woman who sits down to engross herself in that book. Jim Zimmerman has turned the tables of the “women’s generation” and written a book for men to read as well. He titled it, “Love or Lust.”
“Love or Lust is about an 18-year-old male who has just graduated from high school and is about to go to college. He is inexperienced with women and was the nerd in school,” Zimmerman explained. “It is about the next five years of his life and the situations that a young man can find himself in until he meets the girl that he immediately falls in love with and knows that he wants her to be the mother of his children. It has a moral aspect to it because he has been raised in the church and every time he has been with a woman, he feels guilty about it the next day.”
Zimmerman grew up in Craig County until the second grade, when his father’s work with the federal government had them move. However, he returned in the ninth grade and graduated from New Castle High School in 1965.
“I worked after school for Gordon and Helen Carper at their Mick or Mack store on Main Street in New Castle, until I was drafted into the Army,” Zimmerman shared. “Two years in the Army and served as a military policeman at the Presidio of San Francisco, San Francisco, California. I also attended the University of San Francisco and Virginia Western Community College.”
Zimmerman then worked 27 years for Appalachian Power Company in the accounting department before taking early retirement in the late 1990s.
He and his wife Martha moved to Florida in 2021. However, they lived on Meadow Creek from 1970 till they sold and moved to Florida.
“I retired at the age of 49 and had plenty of time on my hands, I had read a couple of my wife’s romance novels and all of them were written from a woman’s perspective,” Zimmerman shared. “I thought, well, I would write one from the man’s side of the subject of Love. That is what my book ‘Love or Lust’ is about.”
Zimmerman said that he just sat down at his computer and decided to write.
“The words just seem to come to me, and I typed them as fast as I could think them up!” he added. “Thank goodness for Mrs. Garrett’s typing class at New Castle High School.”
He has already started on his next books, and they are surprisingly to take place in Craig County and are murder mysteries.
“Maybe I’ll put my hometown on the map if they sell well,” he said with a smile.
The first murder mystery, The Back Road Mysteries-Book I, is titled “THE CHURCH” and is currently with his publisher where it is being put into book form but will not be out for a few months.
Zimmerman shared that he is excited to be one of the vendors at the upcoming Fall Festival in New Castle. He will be set up in front of his brother’s home, at the end of Main Street, below Katie’s Grooming.
“My book “Love or Lust” will be the only one I will have there for sale and signing,” Zimmerman said. “I have also found out that in the USA my book is online sales, and anyone can go to my ISBN number 9781398499362 and go to wherever they want to purchase it. It is even on eBay.”