PulpZombieBlog

Book Trailer for Unselfish Gene

Okay, personally, I think a movie type trailer for a book is a bit …. well, not silly, not exactly an oxymoron, but …. I don’t know. CLICK HERE for the YouTube link if you’re curious.

Back from the Storm

Back from the Storm

I thought I was going to get fired today, but I didn’t, and you know what? I’m almost disappointed. Now I still have to spend my evenings, not my days, writing fiction. Still, without my cushy, though bureaucratic day job, I would probably have to spend just as much time not writing to make a living.

Also, as I was getting chewed out, I was thinking about Knut Hamsun’s innovative novel, “Hunger,” having read it a few days previously. Hunger is about a starving writer. Sound dull? It was written about 1850, I think, and (I should get my facts straight first but what the hell!) and was one of the novels that led to him winning the Nobel Prize. But when I first started it I thought, “huh?” What’s so innovative about this? Then I started comparing it to other mid-19th Century novels and realized that a lot of his technique, which seems good but commonplace for late 20th and early 21st century novels, was just that: innovative, and decades ahead of his time.

And it’s just good writing. It’s hard to imagine that a starving journalist’s day-to-day struggle just to raise a penny for a loaf of bread, or the ranting of this malnourished mind, could be so absorbing, but trust me, it is.

Too bad he became a Nazi supporter in his senior years. I wonder if he and E. Pound were buddies. Is there anyone out there reading this that knows? Care to comment?

Me, I’m going to have a roast beef sandwich and toast the old writer, Nazi or not, for “Hunger” which kept me from popping off during my ass-chewing.

Dreamtime of an Alien God

As I’ve written before, writing is a kind of obsessive-disorder disease. You might (I do) also compare it to a destructive love affair, one where you make all the sacrifices and your loved one — the work, not the readers or publisher — gives you little or nothing back in return. The work says, “Isn’t it enough that you love loving me?” You say to the work, “Bullshit, you’re just using me,” but keep on writing anyway.

Along this line of thinking I just finished my third copyedit/revision of Dreamtime of an Alien God and turned it over to my publisher,  Swimming Kangaroo Books, Arlington. If I smoked, I would have had a cigarette afterwards. Get the picture?

I started the first book more than a decade ago, while living in MIssouri, in response to a recurring vivid dream I was having about huge angels colliding with a small plane near the farm house I was renting at the time.

There were no zombies per se in the first book. I guess I hadn’t developed the obsessive zombie writing disorder (OZword) yet. But true to form, as I started Dreamtime a little more than a year ago, I found myself not just writing about the dead who have returned to life but making two of them main protagonists.

These are not the decaying, body-part-dropping type of zombies. Rather they get better looking, sort of  like vampires, but they neither drink blood or eat brains. Instead, they become someones obsesive love interest. The perfect lovers. The one you’ve been looking for all your life and never found. Needless to say, there are a lot of sexual scenes,  which I hope are erotic not pornographic.

So it’s over. Goodbye. Except for going through a couple of more revisions and galleys as the publisher edits — which is kind of like approving divorce papers. Now, I can get busy being abused as I start the third book in the series, Awakening of the Alien God.

Writing as a sickness

Just got back from conDFW, which was in one way a good experience, talking to other small (micro?) press published authors. But the experience eventually bummed me.

I left early, hoping to see my friend S., for at least a hug, a kiss, some minor attention of some sort, but she was consumed with her own drama — a family drama, which, as you know is the worst of the worst. “I feel my head is going to explode,” she emailed me this morning, as a sort of excuse I guess for blowing me off for the whole evening. (Except she wrote the account in modern indirect style, which is kind of cool: no paragraph breaks, not quote marks, etc., as she recounted her kid’s dialogue.

Me, I dont’ feel so much as my head is going to explode as my soul is going implode.  It was a dark, stromy and lonely night, full of self-doubt, a sense of being old and stupid, fear of a future without purpose or love — you name it.  Partly it was the affair with S., but just as much due to the conDFW experience. The main message I got from the other writers, except for the big names like David Weber and Jim Butcher, is “don’t quit your day job.’

Though the micro-presses, like Swimming Kangaroo, will typically not screw over or totally ignore new authors like the big houses do,  most writers must have full-time jobs and write on the side. Worse, they count their royalties in the hundreds not the thousands of dollars - and these are the established small press published writers. Talk about Greatly Diminished Expectations! Though I was never planning to make big bucks writing novels,  I had dreams of making enough to live meagerly along with my social security and my state health insurance.

But I guess I keep writing anyway. I feel better for some reason after just venting above. Somewhere in the back of my mind, the black death crow of writing is flapping its wings, kawing, don’t waste this self-torment (kaw!) on deaf ears; (kaw!) drawn on it. (kaw!) start the new novel. (kaw!)

Maybe I’ve foundly found what blogs are for. To vent stuff that perhaps would only make a suck-novel.

Writer-man’s guilt

Oh father (or great goddess) I confess: I haven’t been practicing what I preach to other would-be writers.

“Would-be writers,” my doppleganger might ask. “But I thought you were already published.”

“That I am,” I said, puffing up a little.  “But a writer is always a writer in progress, existentially speaking. “Writing means writing every day. Which I haven’t been doing since having bone nubs ground off my shoulder.”

“Sounds like bullshit to me,” my doppleganger said.

“Now you’re getting the point.”

But I haven’t been writing much. I’m only a few hundred words away from finishing the first draft of Dreamtime of an Alien God, and I just can’t quite get there.  I don’t know whether this an indicator of a basic flaw of the novel or the shoulder pain — shit! it hurts — but then I’m writing this, albeit on an IQ-lowering dose of hillybilly heroin, aka, Vycodin.

Another thought occurs to me.  Maybe one shouldn’t write an occult sci-fi novel when one is in love. I’ve got all these passionate scenes in there. Even the living are falling in love and doing stupid things over their undead lovers.

Whatever, I should just write it and throw it out later. That’s what I say to people — friends, lovers and strangers — who say they are “working” on a novel but haven’t started writing yet.

Hey? Where’d my doppleganger go. Here’s where he’s supposed to butt in and say something both wise and pithy.

More on this later…

Nazi Zombies in Austin, TX

AUSTIN (KXAN) - Austin drivers making their morning commute were in for a surprise when two road signs on a busy stretch of road were taken over by hackers. The signs near the intersection of Lamar and Martin Luther King boulevards usually warn drivers about upcoming construction, but Monday morning they warned of� “zombies ahead.”

Market, my ass!

Okay, this time I’m listening to conventional wisdom. To market my current book, I’m:

1) Doing book signings. Feb. 15, Hastings in Tyler, Tx; April 4, Barnes&Noble in Tyler, Tx, and Feb 20-22, setting my ass down as a vendor (of my book) at ConDFW.

2) Also, I’m reviewing books in the same Genre as mine to link them back to this profile/blog. It seems dishonest to me, but I actually kind of enjoy writing the reviews. It’s almost like fiction wr

Unselfish Gene cover at Amazon

iting, only sort of real.

3) Trying not to think about how I could be spending the time finishing Dreamtime of an Alien God, the sequel to Messenger’s of Alien God which should be ready to go on Amazon this summer.

4) If you read this and buy m

y book, maybe I won’

t have to spend s

o much time trying

to act like a

Mad Man, and more ti

me writing something you’d actually enjoy reading.

Argh! Scope this out

Do zombies feel pain? I guess it depends upon whom (or what) you talk to. Some don’t. Some do; that’s why they eat brains. Brains pate relieves pain. This zombie writer feels pain, not in the brain, but in the shoulder.

Five days ago I had orthoscopic surgery on my shoulder for bone spurs and a tear in the rotator cuff and it hurts like a son-of-a-bitch. Imagine if you will, your author as a zombie. Remember those essential scenes where the undead converge on the lonely farm house. Always there’s at least one who died of a stab wound or maybe was at least attacked with such. See me with a eight-inch knife sticking out of my left shoulder, the blade lodged between the ball and socket. That’s what it feels like now — after two narcotic pain relievers. That’s why I’m awake (sort of) writing this entry at 2:30 a.m. instead of sleeping.

Right now, I’d probably try gulping down a chunk of gray matter if I thought it would make the pain go away!

Surgeon-cam view of my rotator cuff

Arse fixated

Behind every great woman is a man — trying to grab her ass.

Zombie Books: They’re everywhere, eating readers’ brains

What is it about zombies and books about zombies? Or for that matter, reviewers writing reviews about zombies?

Or maybe I should start this review like a 12 (stumbling) step, program. Hello, I’m Robert Burns, and I’m addicted to zombies — novels, movies, arcana — you name it, I’ll lap it up like spilled brains.

I remember to this day the zombie movie that got me hooked: It was Romero’s first make of Dawn of the Dead. I’m sure my fellow zombified fans remember this one: the shopping mall, the helicopter, the shopping zombies. The remake was good, but like a first fix, this is the one fest that irrevocably changed my brain chemistry.

I’ve been an admirer of Brooks since I picked up the Zombie survival guide. When I read it, I thought it sort of a sleeper novel from a parallel universe. One where aging Boy Scouts earn merit badges for zombie dispatching methods(did Brooks write that or did I imagine it?) and the progress of the power grid failing post the zombi-fication of all engineers is outlined in a day-by-day fashion reminiscent of how to put out a campfire.

Somehow, being off the TV powergrid myself these days and writing more than reading, I missed the appearance of World War Z on the bookshelves at B&N. I miss a lot there. And for some inscrutable reason, Amazon neglected to inform me when I logged on who-knows-how-many times, that given my past reading/purchasing history, I might be interested.

It took Scott, a bookseller friend at B&N, whom I’d bribed to read one of my unpublished novels, to alert me to the book. I promptly bought the Kindle edition.

There’s been a lot said already in other reviews. So I won’t recap; not too much anyway. The form differs the traditional “I said, he said, third person” narrative that’s been around since Flaubert and refuses to die despite the best efforts of post-modernists. Instead of such hack, Brooks relies on interview transcripts from some (unnamed?) journalist who travels about the post-apocalyptic (somehow) interviewing the all the players, the movers and the shakers if you’ll pardon the zombie pun, in the world-wide war against the zombies. This is itself, a time-honored novel style. For instance, Dracula is largely told by letters. But it’s less used, and therefore fresher, IMHO.

His epistolary form frees him from a lot of constraints that both plague and comfort modern journalist — oops, I mean novelists and writers. What we get is a freeing up of dripping creative juices. The technique allows Brooks to give us THE BIG PICTURE, from the front lines solider to the captain of a hijacked Red Chinese sub.

Underlying the gristliness and terror is a dark, infinite jest brand of humor. I marveled at this conjunction, the way one does at an alignment of planets in a winter’s sky. Where did it come from, I asked myself? Then I read Maximillian Michael Brook’s bio on Wikipedia and learned he is the son of director Mel Brooks and the late actress Anne Bancroft. I then understood; or thought I did, at least momentarily. Like the inevitability of the whole city or whole world going to shit fast as soon as the first zombie crunches in to the first skull, then Brooks was probably destined to write such a book by his genetic heritage. It’s simultaneously funny, dark, and philosophical.

I’m glad I bought it. I got my fix.