It’s 58 degrees Fahrenheit at 1:36 p.m. The cycle of drizzle/rain has started again. My throat is sore from post-nasal drip. Some hot decaf chai tea and a nap would be perfect right now. But first....
Is it hot where you are? Call the Ice Witch! She'll cool your jets.
What a month. Seems like a year ago already since I did that last temp gig hustling fuel additives at King Sooper’s gas stations from South Academy Boulevard to the corner of North Union and Briargate Parkway. The Fourth was a curiously subdued affair, but I enjoyed having my grown daughter over to visit. I finally shouldered off the rewrite of Grace Among the Dead to Severed Press on the 7th, wrote the jacket copy on the 13th, and anticipated one more read-through. No, the publisher was done waiting on my slow ass (and who could blame them?) and my second novel hit Kindle on the 17th, with the paperback available on the 28th. The first chapter to Book 3, The Wrong Kind of Dead, went into production on the 23rd. I’ve got so much bad craziness going on those eight pages I’ve had to take a break before moving on. That, and I landed another temp gig. I’m not yet in a position to turn these things down. At least I’m indoors this time. Sometime around the 26th I got an email from the proprietor of Luzifer Verlag. The German translation of Bleeding Kansas is done, and the book is set to drop in the ancestral homeland on 23 October. It already has its own page at the (German) Amazon.de site. I write all this, not to boast, but to remind myself the month wasn’t a total wash. It feels that way, especially when the weather is unnatural, you’re feeling a little sick, you’re tired, and that third book still isn’t writing itself.
I couldn’t let the night go without a peek at the back cover of my paperback. I’m proud of the copy. There were two more paragraphs that got cropped, but this works out better. There’s a lot going on with Grace Among the Dead, but there’s no need to give it all away. It’s good to leave room for surprises. A monster truck does get involved at some time during the conflict. A monster truck and the kind of accessory monster trucks are known for. I can say no more. Except that you really need to buy this. In Kindle or paperback:
Now with two exploding heads on the cover. Bleeding Kansas has one because it’s the first in the series, get it?
It’s safe to say we’ve endured the last of our 90-degree Fahrenheit days for 2014. I can also say I’ve seen the eeriest weather ever today: all-day rain in Colorado Springs. When I drove to Marietta, South Carolina, last year, my host apologized for all the rain we had during my short visit. He seemed incredulous when I told him he had nothing to apologize for, that I’d missed such peaceful, quiet days where the rain falls softly, but steadily all day and into the night. Such dark, gray tranquility feels unnatural back in Colorado. On the other hand, any year in which we’re not exploding into flames is a good one here in the land of 300 Days of Sunshine. I’ll take it.
The view northeast from my driveway 13 months ago as the Black Forest Fire set about destroying some 500 homes. The year before, the Waldo Canyon Fire laid its stench across us on the hot days so that we couldn’t open our windows at night. This is seriously inconveniencing when you don’t have air conditioning.
It’s a little better than the last time. I managed to get the Severed Press logo in there., but for reasons known only to the developers of Photoshop, it’s stuck in the lower center of the image. I couldn’t resize it, either. Just another couple of after-action notes I’ll need to follow up on. On the bright side, I’ve got a mess of these brutal little pull quotes from Grace Among the Dead. This one really paints a picture:
I wanted to put “from the author of BLEEDING KANSAS” in there but the design seemed busy enough. At least it’s better than the one before it. Here’s hoping the next one surpasses this.
I’ve been slowly building Chapter 1 of my third book from outline, and what’s coming off my fingertips still surprises me. It’s true, structure really does unleash the creativity. The Wrong Kind of Dead is going to be layered with all kinds of deep, dark goodness. The downside of that is I already should be done with Chapter 1. This is taking longer than I’d like. Gotta pick up the pace! Summer’s almost gone.
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A layer of clouds has settled in, trapping the heat. Tonight must be race night on Woodmen Road, because I can hear the engines roar along those wide six lanes between the hospital on the high ridge to the east and the shopping center a couple of terraces down from me. It doesn’t bother us when we sleep. I rather like knowing there’s some kind of life going on out there while I quietly drink my beer and contemplate the best way to wrap Chapter 1.
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Crickets now. Back to work. I should be doing something to promote my books, but you know what? Let’s give it a rest. I think I covered it all pretty well in the last post. For the time being. Tonight, I drink beer, and push my way to the end of Chapter 1 of Book 3. Ah, summertime.
Frequently Asked Questions About GRACE AMONG THE DEAD
You Frequently Forgot to Remember to Ask
Grace Among the Dead is Book 2 in The Saga of the Dead Silencer, but written in such a way that it can stand on its own. There are references throughout Grace to what happened in Bleeding Kansas, and though it would help to read that book first, it’s not absolutely necessary. The idea here is if you like Grace Among the Dead, you’ll want to read the book that came before it, because I can tell a tale of the zombie apocalypse like no one’s business, and you like that. Demand, meet Supply.
You will be hard-pressed to find a more professionally written tale of the zombie apocalypse. This is not Guns and Ammo porn with two-legged targets (although I’d really like that police-issue Remington 700 with the bipod and scope to shoot Mountain Dew cans with). You can read passages aloud from Grace Among the Dead and not feel like you’re making fun of the developmentally disabled.
I cross the little bridge over the creek and nearly hit three ghouls stumbling over to check out the commotion. One of them used to be a little girl, judging by what’s left of the dress hanging on her scabbed-over bones.
You don’t often see undead children, but when you do, it’s a mess. Not having a lot of mass and meat to begin with, they’re usually thoroughly gnawed over when they’re not (as is most often the case) pulled apart entirely.
The two used-to-be young men reach out towards my open window high on the truck, moaning through their dried scab-beards in frustration. The little girl-thing, though, she’s all business. She’s zeroed in on the screams and small-arms fire of the feast ahead.
A mile away at the main road and the gunfire is loud enough to wake the dead. Here they come, one here, three there, pushing through the littered, overgrown fields, limping up the highway, homing in on the sounds of desperate, frightened food.
Grace Among the Dead is a book written by a guy who’s read books, and has a good idea of what they should look like. It’s from Severed Press, a small, indie publisher, but I don’t own the company. Someone else thought they could make money from my story. If that’s not an endorsement, I don’t know what is. So let’s roll out our Call to Action here, in case you haven’t already been clicking on the links I’ve put in with mentions of the title. This is Grace Among the Dead, Book 2 in The Saga of the Dead Silencer:
For those for whom it is never dark nor edgy enough, this is the controversial first edition of Bleeding Kansas, with more snark, more dark, and a questionable death in Chapter 9 that I was asked to remove by the publisher due to reader complaints. It’s only available in paperback, but it’s a neat study in creative editing when read alongside the second edition.
Only $9.49 in paperback, with one available used!
Controversial, yet rated half a star higher than the second edition, and with more reviews!
As yet another cool, wet week gives way to the relentless July sun, I begin writing the third and last novel in my zombie apocalypse series. I would have started it on Thursday but I got caught up in the surprise release of my second book. I tried to get busy with promotion but came up mostly flat. Looking at my blog posts for last week, I’ve had trouble writing, period. It’s like something got broken over the last couple of weeks. And here I am griping that I didn’t get to do a final read on Grace Among the Dead. Enjoy your Sunday. I’ve got to make one and one-half pages into a full chapter by bedtime. The living dead at this point in the saga have been hibernating over the frigid Colorado winter and have awoken crazy hungry. They will fling themselves to pieces coming at you. And then another visitor appears, and in Chapter 2 he will present a message of hope—and a warning. For Derek and Agnes and Elyssa and Brother Christopher and the whole merry crew, The Wrong Kind of Dead will be a worlds-shattering experience. All of human civilization will hang in the balance of the final conflict. And that’s all I can say about it other than I’m excited to be back in the post-apocalyptic world of Derek Samuel Grace. The “saga” in my series title will no longer be ironic by the time I’m done.
You like your zombie fiction dark, with possibilities for redemption? I have likable characters this time — unlike mean old Bleeding Kansas — but a few get killed. It's a tale of love and redemption, the living dead and a monster truck. Grace Among the Dead turns the zompocalypse freak up to 11 and breaks off the knob. Check it out!
Why wait another week? Forget the final read-through; I’ll be tweaking everything when it comes time to package the omnibus edition. Today’s headline was supposed to be about production starting on Book 3, The Wrong Kind of Dead. Then I found myself added to the Google circle of another post-apocalypse writer, whose interests focus on survival in a world without technology. These interests have “cross-pocalypse” applications, and are of especial utility for those real-life apocalypses as they may occur. These items deserve posts of their own. For right now, let’s jump and shout for the release of Grace Among the Dead on Kindle. It’s been a long year’s writing and an even longer four weeks post-production.
I don’t have a copy of the back cover yet, but this is the text I wrote for it Sunday. The first graf serves double-duty as the logline:
A TALE OF LOVE AND REDEMPTION, THE LIVING DEAD AND A MONSTER TRUCK
Derek Grace returned from his Kansas adventure too late for his teenage children. Losing himself in booze, books, pills, and the occasional killing spree among the undead, a stowaway and her fatal secret flush the Dead Silencer out of hiding and back into a busy post-apocalypse in progress, where he must decide whether life is worth living when he’s already lost everything that matters.
Grace is taken in by the leadership of Abundant Life, a former Colorado Springs megachurch that has established a settlement of survivors in the shelter of a high wooded ridge to the north of the city. Another outsider, Isaiah Sparks has corrupted the church with “necessary” brutality in his capacity as Deacon of Security. Younger, stronger, smarter, he’s determined to run the settlement his way behind the scenes. Grace is Abundant Life’s best hope to return the settlement to its benevolent beginnings —and he knows he’s outmatched.
Yet two women, a young, blonde ditz and a widowed, PTSD-haunted veteran, come to Grace with good news. Agnes speaks in terms of “force multipliers,” and the one she has in mind had better be good, because a rogue deacon is the least of their worries. The living dead who rule the world at large are changing. Becoming more aggressive. Smarter. More than one man with a 20-inch African cane-cutter can hope to handle.
BLOGGIN’ OR SLOGGIN’? Too many black-and-white graphics in a row. That’s what the blog was looking like. It still looks like that. I was going to take down one of these offending posts, then I figured, nah, it’s better than dead air. It’s a violation of Law 30 of Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power, but I think it’s not a bad thing to show that I have to bang my head against the wall from time to time to make things happen. From time to time, that is. Time’s up.
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MY ZOMBIE JACKET The jacket copy for Grace Among the Dead turned out mighty fine. So fine, that when the editor cut off the bottom grafs for the logline, he had a decent logline. Somehow, I had built my three-graf jacket copy in a classic journalism story pyramid. I don’t think I wrote that well when I worked city desk for the Imperial Beach Times. I’m still waiting on the final read-through. Sometimes I wonder if we’re going to do that, or if Severed Press says, never mind, we’ve waited too long already, and just puts it out there. Any minute now....
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YOU CAN CHECK IN ANY TIME YOU LIKE, BUT — IT’S NOT A GOOD IDEA While I’m checking my Gmail, I decided to follow up on notifications for the various authors’ groups I made the mistake of joining in LinkedIn. Joining LinkedIn itself wasn’t something I wanted to do again. I’d joined years ago when I naively believed I had a chance a getting a normal person’s job. All it got me was abuse from temp agencies. It turns out I’m too old, and have too little “experience” in a job market in which entry level jobs now require two years of experience. (No, I’m trying to be funny. HR departments put this forehead-slapping-stupid stuff up in their notices and dare us poor desperate peasants to laugh.) So I quit LinkedIn. Except you never quite quit LinkedIn. That is to say, you can take your profile down, but you’re still getting requests by e-mail via LinkedIn from people wanting to join your network. Attempts to resolve this proved futile. So I made a new profile. Look up Lawrence Roy Aiken and if you don’t creep me out too hard, we’ll connect. This time around, I made the mistake of joining some author’s groups. God, all these poor, supplicating little things. Watch the language! Be positive, keep it upbeat, you’re not desperate, you’re Searching for Opportunities! Let me tell you something, boys and girls. If you play by those rules, you’re playing like a slave. And slaves deserve every bit of the abuse they allow themselves to suffer. So, if you’re one of those poor, cringing souls from one of the many authors and book marketing groups, and you’re horrified by what you read here — I’ve earned this attitude. I came into my dream job because my back was against the wall. Moving from one “opportunity” to another, head down, pretending pride in the most abject obsequiousness, was just inviting insults upon very real injury. I will write the way I want to write. I will talk how I want to talk. I’m in my 50s. I could drop of a heart attack at any time. Or cancer. I decided a few years back that if I’m going to live, if I’m bothering getting up in the morning, I’m doing it for me. Not to please some empty-headed little HR manager. Not to live live a chump, changing this and that and acting such-and-such a way for people who have already made up their minds about my “place;” they just get off on watching a grown man squirm. I have half a mind to ditch these weak little groups and pages. All this timid talk, not one nugget of useful information. Not one soul I have anything in common with, except we’ve all written books. Of course, I’m the only zombie author I know on LinkedIn. Maybe I’ll figure a way to leverage that. I’ll give it another two weeks. Grace Among the Dead will be out by then, and we’ll see what these and those just-as-bad Facebook groups do for me. One way or another, I expect some changes to be made in my social media profiles. It’s the natural order of things.
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Meanwhile, thanks once again to the good people at Pulp Covers, we have another panga sighting:
Man, bad luck gripping the edge of the blade like that! This does not look like it will end well.
His face is blue from holding his breath.
They are that bad.
Pink Floyd is easily the most misunderstood band of the Classic Rock era. They were misunderstood when they were rolling at their peak from 1973 to 1980. Beginning with Dark Side of the Moon, they were largely considered a stoner thing. You dropped a Pink Floyd record onto the turntable and listened with the headphones for all those sound effects going left-to-right-to-left. You laughed at the farting helicopter zipping through your head on “On the Run,” you giggled along with the lunatic in “Brain Damage.” Good times.
Whoa!
For years, it seemed like that one album would define them forever. When Wish You Were Here came out in 1975, it was of momentary interest listening to the thickly muffled sounds of machinery pounding away, but I found the album as a whole the sonic equivalent of watching paint dry. I remember listening to it at a friends’s house on his state-of-the-art stereo, and struggling to keep from passing out. It wasn’t just that famously awful ditchweed we smoked back then. Wish You Were Here needed fewer four-note riffs languishing in ambient synth washes and more farting helicopters. And a roomful of chiming clocks all going off at once. Cash-register noises mixed into a rhythm track. Giggling lunatics.
As a prog-loving, pseudo-intellectual stoner kid, I respected Pink Floyd, but I would never think to own their albums. Nearly everyone else I knew already did and, bless their hearts, they were likely to play them when it was time to “burn one.” (Spark a jay, bowl, etc.) Come to think of it, maybe the reason I never came to properly hate them was I associated them with getting stoned. That, and the wacky sound effects. They were the band with all those trippy noises and old people muttering in between their music. Only this, and nothing more.
And then, in the Last Summer of My Childhood, 1977, my 15-year-old ears beheld something wondrous. It was pure, hate-you-die rage such as I never heard anywhere else, sung in what might as well have been all-caps:
BIG MA-AAN, PIG MA-AAN — HA-HAAAHHHHH, CHARADE, YOU ARE!
He was describing nearly every male authority figure I knew growing up in South Carolina, and on the same radio station that played Starland Vocal Band’s “Afternoon Delight” ad nauseam the summer before. It was a true mix of genres on the radio in the mid-to-late 1970s, though, when you could hear Blue Oyster Cult back-to-back with Neil Diamond, so it wasn’t that big of a surprise.
The surprise was that this was Pink Floyd. There’s the freaky sound effects, okay, grunting pig noises — but that sinister organ! The seething anger of that echo-boxed guitar! Holy shit, did this guy just call someone, “YOU FUCKED-UP OLD HAG, HA-HAAAHHHHH, CHARADE, YOU ARE!” He just described nearly every female authority figure I knew, using language one did not dare use in front of a woman, no matter how much the evil bitch pissed you off. (These were very different times.)
This guy is so angry he sounds like Yoda gone full Dark Side three years before we’ll even meet that syntactically challenged Muppet. It’s a good thing it’s after 10 p.m. and maybe only a few thousand people listen to FM radio in 1977. It’s a better thing that I’m one of those people. I need to hear this:
Pigs (Three Different Ones)
There is passion here, something I’d never heard in Pink Floyd before. You might have heard it in the fade as the bass line runs furiously up and down the fretboard while the guitar screams in rage. Guitarist David Gilmour likely handled all these parts, as he’s credited with the bass on this song, too—and, frankly, Roger Waters, while a decent concept-and-story guy, isn’t known for being a great bass player. As with most concept albums, it’s best to hear the thing in its entirety, but if time is a factor, I’ve got the tracks broken down after this embed:
Animals by Pink Floyd
Full Album
The album is bracketed by halves of one song Roger Waters supposedly wrote for his then-girlfriend. It’s a theme most of us should relate to, i.e., we live in a world of animals, most of them mean and stupid, and while love doesn’t necessarily conquer all, it damn sure makes the barnyard a more tolerable place.
Pigs on the Wing, Part 1
Next up, listen to an anxious acoustic guitar chugging along like a man fleeing for his life, limping, and running out of breath as “Dogs” fades in. Blame that for this post. As I got deeper and deeper into rooting out bad passages from my novel I kept hearing these chords in my head, along with Rick Wright’s spooky keyboard. No groovy sound effects, at least not until the first part of this album-side-long piece is over. No, just several minutes of weapons-grade tension and fear until the sobbing release. It makes a great musical backdrop for any post-apocalypse you’re reading, and especially if you’re composing and editing one. I remember being struck by these lyrics on the record sleeve: And in the end you’ll pack up, fly down south Hide your head in the sand Just another sad old man All alone and dying of cancer. It was the first time I ever saw this cruel fact of life mentioned in a song, anywhere, that people die of cancer. If I’ve seen anything like that since then, I don’t remember it. Dogs
For all the fear and dread and sadness of “Dogs,” it is at least sympathetic. The song that opens side two of the album, “Pigs (Three Different Ones)” is the hatred one wishes people would learn to cultivate against the real-life pigs making our lives miserable in 2014. Alas, the revolution that happens in the final verses of “Sheep” shall never come to pass. Still, Gilmour’s guitar fanfare at the coda is a joyous relief after so much fear and rage, and if you need a little poignancy to cut your cynicism with, remember that this album came out in the first year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The long, sloping road to the pens and slaughterhouse that began with Reagan and Thatcher at either end of the pond was years off.
Sheep
Nothing left to do now but take your lover’s hand and skip off into the sunset, always keeping an eye out for the...
Pigs on the Wing, Part 2
Whereas Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here were musically bombastic, when not altogether emotionally removed from their themes of alienation and loss, Pink Floyd’s Animals is where the band grows a real beating heart. A little less than three years later, Pink Floyd would ditch the albatross of Dark Side of the Moon and become forever identified with the double-album epic that is The Wall, but I’ll argue the passions that enliven that album first found their voices with Animals.
It feels so strange. I get up, and there are no more wrinkles in the narrative to iron smooth. No little vertical lines to look for in the margins, no searching for invisible points of insertion or deletion to Accept/Reject. No more search-and-destroy for periods following exclamation points, duplicate quote marks, etc. This last week alone was devoted to a refit, then a complete re-do on my penultimate chapter. How’s this for a magic trick? I took a 12-page chapter, which I felt was too long, and turned it into 17 pages. Yet I managed to keep the overall page count down to 263 and drop the overall word count 394 words by ruthlessly tearing out modifiers and narrative asides from previous chapters. At 94,817 words Grace Among the Deadis still within shouting distance of 95,000, and still the longest sustained narrative I’ve written. The bottom line is it reads a lot faster, all the loose ends are wrapped up, and I’m set up for the big world-shattering thermonuclear doo-dad that will be my third and final book for the series, The Wrong Kind of Dead.
“Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty....”
I wrote the jacket copy for Grace Among the Deadlast night. I was so burned out I had to warm up to the job by writing the precis to The Wrong Kind of Dead. This turned out to be a very enjoyable task that I took to with more enthusiasm than I expected after my horrible month-long slog after spending a year and a day writing Grace Among the Dead. Aside from the excitement over a change in process, I like that I’m destroying one world and building another. Grace Among the Dead ups the ante and the stakes of Bleeding Kansas. The Wrong Kind of Dead will take us to another narrative dimension altogether. It’s stuff I’ve never written before, in a way I’ve never written before. There’s only one way to find out if this works.
Good old Pulp Covers. This is another treat from their Google+ feed, which comes by way of the International Robert E. Howard Fan Association page. I wish to share this with those who find the Fourth of July to be a bummer holiday. It’s true, there is such a vast, light-year wide chasm between the Great Story of America and its many sordid realities. We are, to put it mildly, disappointed, for whatever reasons, and most of them legitimate. But I look at this John Buscema rendering of Conan the Cimmerian, with a scantily clad barbarian girl on one knee, and a cup of Something Bad for him raised in salute, I feel a stirring of the spirit that should truly inform this holiday. A spirit that says, quite bluntly, “Death to tyrants. Today we drink and celebrate one more day of being an irritant to authority—and to many more.”
You’re as free as you make yourself. Take the time out to count that which you have, and not what you think you can’t do. Stop hating on yourself. You are alive and living the tale of yet another empire. What is your part in this tale? You’re going to die one day. Think about that, too. If you’re unhappy, there’s no time like the present to reflect upon what you’re going to do about it. You are going to do something about it, aren’t you?
A gentle rain falls outside my window. You don’t get much gentle anything, let alone rain, here in the foothills of the Front Range, so it’s a nice holiday treat. If the locals decide to chance the $500 fine setting off fireworks here in this Land of the Free—as they did on New Year’s, to spectacular effect—at least no one can say they were trying to set anything on fire. To be fair, this is a very dry area that catches fire very easily, so I understand the municipal fireworks ban. But as others have pointed out, the city limits are probably the best place to set them off. More asphalt, more fire hydrants. This year we have rain. So how about it? Naturally, it’s not so much about safety as it is about collecting $500 fines, among the other “fees” those fed into the tentacles of our court system have to pay. So what might very well happen here is I might enjoy watching other people break the law, and forget everything I saw when asked by an officer of said law. I’m not saying it would happen. Sometimes one does feel rather forced into these awkward positions, though. To think that these people setting off fireworks are outlaws celebrating the day a band of outlaw colonial aristocrats declared themselves free of the taxes tyranny of the Crown. Sweet irony, and so many layers of it, too. I know, it could be worse. This could be North Korea, etc. I, for one, am grateful for this quiet, rainy night on a ridge beneath the Colorado Front Range. I’ve got my beer, my brats, my chips. No need to get on the road. So far they can’t pull me over for drinking in my own house. Yet. It’s a fine weekend marking the middle of the year, the middle of summer. As with anything else, wherever you are, it is what you make of it. All my fireworks are digital. I’ll try and make something pop. Fourth of July Weekend is go.
Sometime around the 26th I got an email from the proprietor of Luzifer Verlag. The German translation of Bleeding Kansas is done, and the book is set to drop in the ancestral homeland on 23 October. It already has its own page at the (German) Amazon.de site.
