Gathering Momentum, One (Utterly Maddening) Start-Stop at a Time

State of the Apocalypse at the Finale of March 2016

It’s been tough to just get going. Once I get going, something seems to stop me again.

I keep flashing on a truism that applies to weight-loss programs, but applies to anything else you’re trying to maintain as well:

Diets don’t fail. People fail to commit.

As I struggle with writing The Wrong Kind of Dead, I remind myself that two of the greatest albums of all time, namely, The Beatles’ White Album and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, were created under duress, at a point in which the members of these bands were all but sick of looking at one another. 

Of course, my situation is more akin to The Who and the creation of their album, Tommy, in which the band had racked up debt, and needed nothing short of a blockbuster to keep them out of bankruptcy. In any event, this writer has to stay committed, and make the stresses of transition going on outside my writerly bubble work for me, as they did in creating these classic rock masterpieces.

Meanwhile, amidst all of March’s distractions, an audience has begin to discover the mayhem that is Grace Among the Dead (read the first chapter on my blog here). Which means I have to push hard towards finishing the finale to my zombie apocalypse action series (read early draft chapters here). As of this writing I’m still mired in the process of going through my first two books and tweaking them for consistency of tone. 

I can’t say I don’t have any outside encouragement to keep going. There are a lot of total strangers in the USA, UK, Canada, and Germany looking for a post-apocalyptic good time. It is my intention to show them one, complete with a monster truck, MQ 9 Reaper drones, and a herd of undead whose front lines cross state borders north and south.

In my darkest hours of this dreadful month, there were people on Twitter retweeting my links. I’ve got people in my corner. I don’t know who they are. I’ve never met them. But they’ve been a huge help, physically and psychic, and I cannot let them down.

Back to work, then. If I can make a decent rhythm of all these starts and stops, I’ll dance to it.