State of the Apocalypse, Early October 2015

Last weekend I broke what would have been a three-year streak, having turned another year older without a new book lumbering zombie-like among the zombie horde that is the zombie adventure book market. The Wrong Kind of Dead is taking much longer than I anticipated. It will not be published in time for Halloween. I’ll be lucky to finish the thing by Halloween.

We’ll see what happens in a few weeks. I’m 200 pages in, and just past the narrative midpoint. The difficulty is in nailing down the details of the cascading events that brings Derek Grace to his Darkest Hour. The details of the Final Boss (better known as the “climax” to older and old-school readers) have still to be worked out.

World-building isn’t as much fun as I thought it would be. As much as I enjoy the idea of describing population losses and the ecological impact of flesh-eating corpses on the biosphere, I find the time and effort expended on exploring different scenarios to be a page-stopper. I’m one cranky motherfucker when I’m not cranking out pages. It is always better to be writing one’s novel than to be thinking about it, and when the end result of so much brainstorming is one page a week or less, it’s time to rethink what I’m doing with my time.

My wife found me this sweet incense burner for my birthday. Smokin’ Sam is an old lazy-bones.

On the bright side—and there is one—The Wrong Kind of Dead is my most complex book yet. My concept of Robert Heinlein and Harlan Ellison walking into a bar to brainstorm the zombie apocalypse is paying off like one of those jackpot machines that vomits an endless stream of money all over your shoes. Yeah, a great problem to have, while you’re losing your shit wondering how you’re going to get all this money safely back into your room, and then to the bank.

Still, it’s a great problem to have. I’ve just got to get busy collecting all the shiny coins. That’s all.

“Just make sure your readers don’t look like me by the time you get finished with your masterpiece, Papa Douchinway. Not that looking like me is entirely a bad thing....”

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for some Adventures in Zombie World to read, I’ve got a couple of books for you. Just puttin’ that out there. Thanks to all for your patience. I didn’t mean to get so into this zombie writing thing...just thought I’d fart these things out and go...no, I had to get involved with the characters and their world and give a shit about their conflict...then I saw themes to exploit... well. Back to work, then.

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