First Monday Motivation

Embrace the suck!

December has always been a bad month for book sales, so I couldn’t help laughing at how copies of Bleeding Kansas were getting snapped up on the first of January, as if people finally had permission to buy them. My effusive thanks to fans of the carnivorous undead in the United Kingdom and Canada and the United States for kicking off the New Year in international style.

Just so you know, I’ve got a follow-up book to Bleeding Kansas. You can read the first chapter of Grace Among the Dead here. If this doesn’t have enough zombie-killing action for you, then I don’t know what to tell you—except that I have a third book in the works, and you can read the first chapter of that here. It starts with zombies versus bears, and gets progressively weirder and uglier from there.

As a writer, I never really have a day off (why would I want one?), but my heart goes out to those who have enjoyed a long weekend of New Year’s revels, maybe even a full week off, only to return to the drudgery of whatever Monday-Friday gig they’re “lucky” to have. No more Happy New Anything; it’s Day Four of 2016 and we’re back to the same drab, joyless shit our lives were before the Harvest Festival (or whatever they called it) decorations went up in September.

Even here in the cozy warmth of my basement office, declaring this the 11th Day of Christmas, Twelfth Night Eve, etc., seems like forcing the issue. Most people who left their Christmas stuff up after Christmas Day took them down over this New Year’s weekend. To riff off a meme one sometimes sees around this time of year, it’s time to stop wishing for a great 2016, and actually engage that son of a bitch.

To that end, it would help tremendously to have an anthem. It’s a crack, you’re back, from the rooftops shout it out. You’ve got this.



Hang in there, brothers and sisters. We’ve made it this far. Why not further?