350 Pages and Counting

It’s been a very good start to the New Year.

I’m still struggling with the last scene in my novella-within-my-novel, in which Agnes, A.J., and Elyssa are taken into Abundant Life. This will be the final component bridging the early narrative to the present, allowing me to jump back to where I’d left off in Act III of my five-part drama. I’m so close, but I need a dramatic transition.

Detail from a painting my wife did promoting Grace Among the Dead.
Copyright © 2020 Cynthia J. Aiken.

When in doubt, the dead attack is my motto. The Wrong Kind of Dead is a novel in which the living dead are presumably the primary antagonist, although, as with all post-apocalyptic scenarios, it’s your fellow survivors who tend to threaten your survival as much, if not more. It’s always a challenge making an attack by the living dead as unique as it is suspenseful, especially when you already know this is a backstory and your heroes’ success is assured. 

It’s going one sentence at a time. What’s interesting about the process now is I used to do so well making the connections while drinking beer and smoking during the designated night time hours. Unfortunately, as with any psychoactive supplement, more beer and cigarettes were required over time. Every morning I woke up feeling worse and worse with little to nothing to show for it.

New Year’s Day I went cold-turkey, and though I’ve had my anxious patches, I’ve suffered the precise opposite of being blocked in terms of creativity. If I can’t write one sentence more on my novel, I write a blog post. I make notes in my journal for other things I want to do; these things are often the blog posts of the future.

Then I come back and write one more sentence. Sometimes I can blast out an entire paragraph and then some. Sometimes it’s just a sentence. I’m always coming back. I don't leave until I've left something.

I’ve got this strange, powerful energy that wasn’t there before. And now I’ve crossed the 350-page mark, and I stand to make a few more before I make the long march out to the end.

Once more into the breach. There is nothing else.

The Dead of September

What a delightfully ironic title, a beautiful jumping-off point! Quick, while it still seems like a good idea....

And so we enter into that final third of the year I call the Chute. Labor Day is at the top of the slide. New Year’s Day and the gray abyss of January and February are at the bottom. It’s the most happening part of the year, the one we spent the other two-thirds climbing up from. The oppressive heat of summer is easing. School is back in session, and the excitement of high school football beneath the Friday night lights—the only form of America’s best sport worth watching—is in the air. There’s also professional football and college ball if you’re into that. 

Thank God for artist Evelyn Sprouse-Rowe and her tireless attention to the glass surfaces of the San Luis Valley.

Of course, Halloween, and more Halloween, until, finally, it’s Halloween. The memes about pumpkin spice this, that, and the other began showing up on my Facebook timeline as early as three weeks ago. With some effort, you can shoehorn some autumn in between Halloween and Thanksgiving before Christmas overwhelms everything—and then abruptly leaves us alone in the gray, freezing gloom.

Ironically, Old Spice still smells lively and fresh after all these years.

Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s an old complaint of mine, brought up by my perception of the year having moved way too fast. We’ll lay it to rest here. No, really. This is it. 

So what’s up? Well, it was a busy month with my novel in progress, The Wrong Kind of Dead....

Big weekend in Tater Town. Our spuds were coffee’d up and ready to roll.

I’ve been trying all summer long to describe what I’ve been doing. Frankly, I feared people would freak when they learned I’d stopped forward progress at Chapter 25, page 221, to go back and rewrite Chapters 2 and 5.

What happened was I’d realized my supporting cast had no supporting background to justify any kind of emotional reaction to what I had coming next. My flashback in Chapter 5 describing How Agnes Met Elyssa and Later Went On To Meet Derek was too lightly sketched, and did nothing to promote a proper understanding of their relationships to one another. 

While Agnes is a Frankensteinian creation of pieces of six women I’ve known across the years who somehow came to life one night in my Colorado Springs basement office, Elyssa was her Manic Pixie Dream Teen Sidekick with a Dark Side. This was entertaining enough to get her through that last part of Grace Among the Dead, where she and Agnes appeared midway through to complicate the Dead Silencer’s life. But the fact remained that I somehow had a 19-year-old woman overseeing the affairs of the camp’s women, many of whom were older. Even Brother Christopher, Derek Grace’s taciturn, no-nonsense 20-year-old in charge of the camp’s young men, defers to this slender girl not yet out of her teens. How does that happen?

Elyssa Marie Godwin had to make her bones and the people around her have to know about it. Therein hangs the saga of an older sister and dutiful daughter who didn’t mind taking care of the people in her life, but wished she wasn’t taken for granted. Who was slightly more mature than her peers for what her circumstances forced her into, and took a dim view of the usual teenage tomfoolery, but was tolerant. Perhaps too tolerant. Elyssa used to put up with a lot. This was the world she lived in, these were the people of that world. What else could she do?

Then that world ended in blood and horror and Elyssa was alone. She met a woman 16 years older who still had people she was responsible for, but was alone, all the same—and doing what she could on her terms as best she could in a world always working against her. My 19-year-old semi-outsider who spent her senior year of high school online so she could take care of her injured mother, now had someone to model herself on. 

The New Weird Order is ugly and mean, but she is not taken for granted. Here, she means something to the people who mean something to her. Elyssa hates and fears the living dead to the extent she prefers Agnes and Derek to do the fighting, yet she loves where she’s at what she does in a way she never knew possible in her old life. This love makes her fierce, and earns the reverence of those around her.

My wife made this. If I were to do this over again I’d have Agnes’ hair up and her big, owlish driving glasses on. In all the stories I’ve written over the years I generally avoided even thinking about what my characters looked like. Now I have to know how tall they are, their favored manner of dress, all that jazz, even if I don’t mention it outright in the narrative

Of course, show don’t tell, and all that. So I’m breaking my rule of no chapters over 10-12 pages long five-fold by showing how Elyssa comes into her own. Before one wonders if I’m getting a little too far into The Talking Too Much Dead territory, I remind the reader that the reputation Elyssa makes for herself is during the fall of civilization at the cold dead hands of the risen dead. I have an opportunity to do two things absolutely necessary for a superior zombie post-apocalypse reading experience.

First, I’m taking the opportunity to tell a tale of the fall of civilization before the hordes of the living dead. This was what Fear the Walking Dead was supposed to be about until it went off the rails by the third or fourth episode. It’s a hard fact of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre, whether it’s zombies or nukes or an alien invasion, that the most interesting parts of all that are when everything familiar begins falling apart. 

At best, it’s done slowly. You notice little things out of order. Awful things happening all around you getting ignored, then downplayed by the media. The military is moving large amounts of materiel from their bases. Some personnel disappear under new orders, others are left behind, others who had separated from the military are called back into service—for mass burial duty. Which goes wrong.

And then it’s a matter of sitting around waiting for the power to go out. You know it’s going out, and that when it goes out it’s going out for the last time. This is while you’re waiting for whomever shows first, the living dead hungry for your living flesh, or roving gangs of the living seeking that and everything else.

Secondly, I’m establishing characters with history and personality whom we will get upset for should anything happen to them. That’s all.

Imagine all this with no people. Just random dead lying under cars or squatting behind corners looking to grab your ankle and pull it into its mouth. That car coming down the road? Marauders. If you can’t escape or hold them off, be sure to save your last bullets or grenade to take you and your people out, because it will be a most prolonged and painful end for all if you’re captured.

For my part, I’m enjoying writing about women trying to make their way in world that’s become seriously, no-kidding-this-time hostile to their freedoms. This is my chance to show the pinch-faced ideologues how it’s done. As in, “with heart,” which is something such people don’t have, so they won’t understand it. It’ll just be loads of fun watching their heads explode when Agnes and Elyssa emerge as heroes all the more-or-less happy, well-adjusted people of both sexes enjoy, because these ladies aren’t doing anything to prove anything in the name of anything. They’re just getting by the best they can until they reach Abundant Life, and meet Brother Christopher and his crew, and eventually Derek Grace.

Craziest of all for me is writing in third person past tense as opposed to my usual first person present. It’s a sweet shift of gears, although I still don’t understand the problems people have with the most common (because effective) setup for action-adventure stories.

Anyway, I’m almost through this, and doing minimal edits along the way so I can get back to Chapter 25 and start the process towards everyone’s Darkest Hour. Who will survive? I can’t tell you, only that I intend it to hurt when the person that falls, falls.

It’s okay, he’s just looking for...food.

  

Early Adopter Technology and the Living Dead

Does your zombie novel have flying cars? Mine will. 

First off, fear not, this won’t hold my latest book up any longer than it’s been held up. It’s just that I have a couple of e-subscriptions to cutting-edge aviation mags (long story) and believe me, there are some serious people paying serious attention to the problem of our shameful lack of flying cars in this 21st century. Don’t get too excited, though, unless you’ve the got the kind of jack and juice a CEO or a hedge-fund manager would have, the kind that “needs” to go directly from the company rooftop to the company jet at the airport without dealing with the common traffic below.

Anyway, I saw this photo and realized, “Hey, Derek and his peeps will be in one of the Redoubts where all the billionaires and almost-billionaires retreated to when the dead arose to eat the flesh of the not so well connected. The elite of these elite will have flying cars, because why not?” [grinning most Grinchily] “Now, what kind of action set-piece can I write involving flying cars and vast hordes of flesh-eating re-animated dead?” 

I’m already employing other science-fictiony elements that are actual devices that have yet to come into wide use, but would already be perfected and enjoyed among the kind of people for whom the apocalypse is an inconvenience at worst. I just got another toy for my trippy little toybox. THE WRONG KIND OF DEAD is going to be so sick, in both conventional and colloquial uses of the word.

Spoiler Alerts for Stuff I Haven’t Written Yet, Part 2

I’m on track to have the weakest posting schedule since I started this blog in 2011.  Yet, somehow, by the magic of Google, I’ve not only enjoyed an unusually prolonged superspike of viewership, I’ve been doing very well on the averages for three days straight so far. 

I should come out and say something, make this place look a little less abandoned. I’ve got a blogpost on a runaway cat started and another on what it means to turn 25 in 2018, from the perspective of my old and fading self, but I’ve been lucky to squeeze out a one-line paragraph a day sometimes. As news goes, they’re weeks old. If I abandon them after a meandering thousand words or so, they won’t be the first. That’s the way this gig works sometimes.

Anyway, to those who have found and are actually reading these posts, welcome to my corner. As you can see from the bar above, I have a little something for everyone. I’ve endeavored to remove profanity from everything except my zombie fiction, as I’ve noted there is a growing market of people who like a break from it, given how even the major newspapers employ “writers” who write like precocious, albeit bitter and vulgar 11-year-old girls talk. Even the men. It’s a post for another time. A podcast? Maybe that, too.

Might as well. I can’t go outside. Kittycats will get me.

It occurs to me I could read these posts for a quick and dirty ‘cast. I’m stacking up the scripts. I can’t say when, but I expect to throw myself at it before fall gives way to winter.

...which won’t be long, if this rapid transformation from green to blood red on the vines is any indication.

My main priority, aside from surviving a radical prostatectomy with as much of my dignity as I could salvage, is finishing the final novel in my SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER series. For all I know this may be the last bit of fiction I’ll ever write, and it’s got to be the best, or bust. 

I’ve been hung up on making the world-building plausible. Most critically, I have to make these blocks of narrative look as natural as possible, not like a lecture on, “This is how this works, from top government on down to the town council level (although I need to understand that for myself).”  If there’s a flaw in the exhaust port that will allow us to blow up the entire Death Star with a single kill shot, we need to get to that right away. 

Except there isn’t. I’ve got an evolving undead elite supported by embittered living survivors who run the day-to-day logistics of a moving zombie horde while making sure the important undead get their feast. I’ve got a black-ops colonel whose recent specialty is the ability to destroy every square inch of land for thousands of square miles, using warehouses full of conventional weapons on the edge of their expiration dates. He’s angry, he’s gone rogue, and he’s taken as many pilots and mechanics as he could with him. Like the undead hordes, when his squadrons darken the sky, everyone dies. 

For either one, that could be anytime now. And that doesn’t cover Derek Grace and company’s most immediate threat, a survivor’s government and population that regards Grace and his people as great unwashed who can serve no purpose in the new world that’s being built. A new world that can come to an end at any time. Escape is not as easy as it sounds, and our heroes will have to make one sooner than later.

The buzzards aren’t the only things waiting for you out there.

I’m working at getting more out there, though. The recordings are already in progress. I might put out a bunch of small pieces, then put those all together with bonus material for a weekly hour show. I don’t know.

They’re all problems I’m happy to have.  If nothing else, I’m invested if only to see what happens next.

It’s just over that next horizon.

Governors and Negans All the Way Down

A genre writer’s gotta know his limitations. SPOILERS OUT THE YING-YANG, including for the comic book source material, because I have some points to make.

I haven’t seen an episode of The Walking Dead since Tyreese carelessly let himself get bitten at that one kid’s house, hallucinated some dead characters from past episodes, and died. I was morbidly curious to see the end of that kid in a following episode, as he was graphically murdered in a scene the fans on Twitter dubbed “Everyone Ate Chris.”

If you’re not already in on the joke, the actor
playing this doomed character here was the star of
a show called Everyone Hates Chris, whereas here
they’re lovin’ every juicy mouthful. Ha!

I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I’m reminded why often enough when I check the Twitter hashtag during the course of an episode. The mid-season premiere of 25 February 2018 — the latest episode as of this writing — was no exception. Even knowing a character is going to die, you have to endure much pointless padding in between frequent (very frequent) commercial interruptions.

For my part, if I had to endure another character like Tyreese saying, “We have to talk about this” in relation to the latest fatal calamity, I was going to have a psychotic reaction. For the love of all that’s holy, why can’t people on television shows be more like real life people who understand the need for other people to mourn in silence? If people want to talk, they’ll talk. If they don’t, they shouldn’t have to.

“We have to talk,” of course, is the show writers’ laziness in padding before the big conflict. There are other ways they could build towards the big conflict that takes something and/or someone away from our heroes even as they escape with their lives. One way that would do this, which could make the death of the doomed character all the more poignant due to what we’d learn about said character, is to have everyone working together on a specific project necessary to the group’s survival. 

I’m thinking something along the lines of purifying water—impure water would be a large factor in surviving human fatalities in the post-apocalypse—or organizing a food run, or looking for a defensible place to grow crops. Scouting for a defensible position off the radar of other wandering groups would be a most worthwhile effort.

It’s a tragic waste that, for all the Big Moral Lessons television insists on imparting to us, this show couldn’t show its audience how to survive when the power grid is down. How not just to boil water, but to distill it. How to tell if the canned food is tainted. How safely to deal with waste product. How not to conduct survival activities without attracting the attention of bandits or warlord minions. Useful information that will help people live to be (fashionably) moral another day.

Alas, it is what it is, and, short of making our own media, there is nothing to be done. However, I would like to note a positive development in the series, that may keep the zombie apocalypse genre alive for a little longer on television. 

It’s been a long, long while since I’ve seen this level of enthusiasm for the show.

Everyone knew Carl, the now-grown son of main protagonist Rick, was not long for the world as of the the mid-season finale before Christmas. He’d been bitten, and it was only a matter of time. His imminent death was what kept the audience coming back after the long winter break.

This is a crucial development in the series, for reasons many  critics have yet to grasp. [HERE COME THE SPOILERS. LAST CHANCE TO BAIL.] For one, it diverges in a major way from the comics. In the comics, at least the last I saw from the second volume of The Walking Dead Compendium, (and this was three, maybe four years ago) Carl was still very much alive, and pretty much grown, especially after the year-long time jump following the resolution of the Negan storyline.

There have been many divergences from the comics source material, most of them quite sensible. Perhaps the greatest point of fascination for me about this franchise is how the original comics serve as a brainstorming platform, the ideas of which are reconfigured and refined for the television series. Two of the more extreme divergences are baby Judith’s survival (in the comics, the same bullet that killed her mother tore through her body as well) and the fate of Andrea. In the television show, Andrea is a damaged slut who dies in the Governor’s custody. In the comics, she’s known for her accuracy with a pistol, and as the eventual, and longtime romantic companion with Rick. That we can debate the wisdom of these decisions makes it all the more fun for those who follow the franchise.

Carl’s death is critical because he is Rick’s last link to life before the zombie apocalypse. Aside from satisfying the need for an important death in the series (a curious, if self-limiting feature of this franchise), it had to happen for the simple reason that the show has been on for nearly eight years already. Chandler Riggs, who plays Carl, is too obviously old in a role that should have only aged a couple of years in terms of The Walking Dead’s fictional timeline. We had emotional and rational reasons for this.

This leads me to wonder who has to be next. I’m guessing Daryl Dixon’s time might be up soon, if only because the vast female fan club behind his character and the actor portraying him has ceased all activity on social media. How Norman Reedus went from “Pls follow me back” and “If Daryl dies, I’m out” on Twitter to non-existent over the years is a development I’ve missed out on. My guess it has something to do with the softening of the character that I noticed when it came time to rescue Beth from the work and rape camp run by those former police officers in Atlanta. Daryl’s lame, let’s-not-kill-anyone-if-we-don’t-have-to idea got Beth killed by the merciless psychos they were trying to rescue her from.

Yeah, the psycho woman was “just trying to hold it together” at the Grady Memorial Hospital Slave Labor and Rape Camp. We could have gone with Rick’s idea, but you didn’t have the nerve to hurt slavers and rapists. So Chief Psycho and Rape-Enabler shot Beth.  Shot her good and dead. You should feel bad, son.

Come to think of it, that’s almost exactly when I began to notice the drop-off in Daryl Dixon/Norman Reedus fangirling. That was three seasons ago, during its most highly rated season. If Daryl isn’t the next major character to go, it’s because the network has themselves locked in a term contract with the actor long past his sell-by date.

Used to be the meanest, toughest, fightin’est sumbitch in the group. Then the writers got hold of him. The same ones who think we want to see and hear everyone talk about their feewings after every major zombie attack. Sorry, Daryl, they’ve already long since murdered ya.

For now, Carl is dead, and I expect Rick will be in his Ricktator “These people don’t get to live” mindset, or close enough. Will we see the final defeat of Negan and the Saviors at the end of this season? Or is this conflict going to be dragged out for one more year?

Another major thing that happened was, as Carl was dying, he described what looked to be the communities in the one-year-later time jump after the resolution of the Negan storyline in the comics. Will the series follow the example of the comics, and go with this weak Hail Mary of a narrative pass?

I shouldn’t have to post a spoiler alert to note that the crisis with Negan will eventually be resolved. So who’s the next Worst Living Evil We’ve Encountered Yet?

After a point, about the only way one is going to make this interesting is to provide those warlords with distinctive costumes and gimmicks along the lines of the 1960s Batman TV series. 

“Oh noes, it’s the Sprinkler! He’s got more metal piercings on his body than anyone outside of a traveling circus, and he wants 60 percent of our stuff!”

“Oh noes, it’s Greenface! He has all these tattoos on his face from being the scariest gang warlord ever, and they’ve all turned dark, mossy green with age, making his eyes look really crazy. He wants 70 percent of our stuff!”

“This is the worst ever! It’s Dr. Diarrhea, and he’ll put cholera into our water supply if we don’t give him 80 percent of our stuff!”

Towards the very end, they will have to contend with Satan himself, who not only started the zombie apocalypse, but really, truly, madly, deeply hates these survivors for surviving, and is therefore now sending every undead creature on Earth their way so that he may reap their souls in flesh-rending agonies beyond imagining. Which will be great, because it will be the first time in forever since the living dead stalking the land sleeplessly, relentlessly, ravenously for living flesh will be the central threat. 

For all my exaggeration and general goofing around here, I trust everyone sees the problem. It’s not confined to the characters and setting of The Walking Dead, but an issue baked into the genre itself. The reanimated corpses who brought down civilization—and captured the attention of our audience—become less and less of a threat as our heroes adjust. The largest conflict will be with the Negans and Governors and the worse and even more worse living humans to follow.

My concern with the show now is that, once it’s over, zombie mania passes with it. As someone racing to finish the third and last book in his zombie post-apocalypse series and recoup his investment of time and energy...well.... 

Burnout is inevitable. Don’t be sad it’s almost over. Be glad it’s still happening. And hurry.

Blurbity Blurb Blurb, Your Logline So Fine

My D.I.Y. so fly. Or something.

Among the many chores requiring my attention in the run up to the release of The Wrong Kind of Dead and the simultaneous re-release of its companions, Bleeding Kansas and Grace Among the Dead, I need to shape up the back cover promo copy and punch up the loglines.

[To clarify: A logline is one sentence, no more than two, that sets the stage for your presentation. The best ones I know come from modern films. “In space, no one can hear you scream.” “Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” “Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water.” If you can come up with something like these for your book—and, like it or not, you must—you’re off to the races.]

I find that I’m a lot more critical of my stuff when it’s posted for public consumption. So here’s the back cover copy for the “digitally remastered” editions of my first two books. To clarify, these will not be released until the third book is released. However, the original editions are still available for your post-apocalyptic reading pleasure—and the digital editions should be updated when the Big Release comes. 

For Bleeding Kansas:

Derek Grace leaves his sick wife in Colorado Springs for a job interview in Kansas City. In a few short days, that nuisance of an early summer cold afflicting one-third of the population becomes the deadly Final Flu. As infrastructure falls to absenteeism, Grace finds himself miles from home, trapped between anxious police and National Guard, and all those Final Flu victims arising from their mass graves to attack the living. As he fights his way out, the long-unemployed Grace discovers a new skill set that serves him well in the New Weird Order. It’s a good thing, too, because the risen dead aren’t the only ones in his way. Only the strong will survive BLEEDING KANSAS.

Here’s the original from the 2013 first edition (the 2018 remaster will be the third):

If you have trouble reading the above, it’s probably for the best. I was thrown when my editor first asked me to write my own jacket copy. Like a lot of newbies, I fumed and fussed that I had to do the job the promotions departments of publishers used to do. This is an...unintelligent...thing to do for two reasons: 

1. It is what it is. If you’re an aspiring author, and you’re not well-connected in that upper middle class Real Artists’ Caste that’s always been with us, but in the last 30 years has been dropping the portcullises and raising the drawbridges against us peasants—you’re not getting published. They won’t even look at you. However, expressing anger and bitterness about it serves nothing but the continued amusement of the Big Publishing gatekeepers, while eliciting annoyed grunts and sighs from the rest, so...

2. Instead of being angry, be of good cheer, and especially grateful for this indie publishing revolution that allows us a platform that didn’t exist so many years ago. If it’s a little D.I.Y.-intensive, rejoice! Do you really trust a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears HR hires to promote you and your work with any understanding (let alone sympathy) of who you are and what your work means? These people are, for the most part, your generic common lazy slobs drawing breath and a paycheck. You’re doing your life’s work. Who can do this better?

I remember reading an interview with Gore Vidal around the turn of the century in which he was asked if he found writing fiction or non-fiction more difficult. “Writing is writing for writers,” he replied. “Others, I’m told, have problems.” 

Put more colloquially, “Is you or is you ain’t a writer?” Promo copy and the like should be no more difficult for you than writing the stuff you want to be rich and famous for.

With that rant put to bed (for now), I present the jacket copy for my 2018 digital remaster of Grace Among the Dead:

Returning from his Kansas adventure too late to save his wife and teenage children, Derek Grace loses himself in booze, books, pills, and the occasional killing spree among the undead. But then a stowaway and her fatal secret flush the Dead Silencer from hiding and into a busy post-apocalypse already in progress, where he must decide whether life is worth living when he’s already lost everything that matters. In the heart of darkest horror, you will find GRACE AMONG THE DEAD.

There’s more to the story than is mentioned in that short paragraph, and I bring the best of all that together with a secondary logline, “A Tale of Love, Redemption, the Living Dead and a Monster Truck,” which informs potential readers that the book isn’t going to be all gloom and misery. And having written that out, I realize I should come up with a logline independent of the titles of the other two books. Those loglines make great title banners over the cover copy, as seen in my primitive attempt here:

 
As you can see, there’s not much change from the above cover copy. The layout needs improvement, so I’m changing some words around so they will fit. 

The idea that eyes other than mine might be looking at these things is a great motivator. Given where I am on the learning curve here, I’m grateful I don’t have a huge audience for this blog. Yet.

My third and final book in the SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER series is coming along, and it helps to have good jacket copy over the desk to maintain focus. But is this good jacket copy? I’ll have to look at this again. And then a few more times...I don’t like that I have it sectioned, but this is a bigger, far more complicated book than I have ever written. Like all the jacket copy before, it doesn’t even cover half of what’s going on, just one big narrative thread running through the novel. 

One year has passed since the dead climbed from their graves to feast on the flesh of the living. Having consumed nearly every living thing that walks, creeps, or crawls in the cities, even the mountain to which Derek Grace and his community have retreated becomes a killing floor as millions of walking corpses fan out into the countryside in search of food.

What if, in the midst of escalating chaos, you could go back to the way things were? When all you needed was a job so you could have a place to stay and accumulate stuff, watch TV, surf the Internet? To go about your business without fear of bandits, wannabe warlords, or hordes of cannibal corpses?

The Redoubts, fortified oases of modern civilization in the remotest rural areas of North America, offer all of this and more. As Derek Grace and his family learn, though, there are no safe spaces. Don’t get caught among THE WRONG KIND OF DEAD.

A secondary logline for this—certainly not the logline—goes, “The Numbers Are Against Us.” It’s an apt refutation of the hubris of the Redoubts rulers, but a little too generic. On the other hand, I have no other logline for Bleeding Kansas, either. Nothing is jumping out at me at the moment.

So, let’s close with a few promo images, post this, and check back from time to time for further inspiration.