Selling Myself For Fame And Profit

II - Middleground

Meanwhile, as I was half-assedly selling my kid's book, I was also writing a new novel and trying to finish up one that I'd started before THE WHISPERING FERNS. It wasn't easy for me. I have a lot of ideas and I love to write but I'm an insufferably slow typist, primarily using two fingers and a thumb and along the way, I also managed to shatter my arm in six places and move 3,000 miles East to Maine. So things were going slowly. 

My long-suffering novel GRAVES (Which is just now being finished up...) is a simple zombie survival novel - no gimmicks, no fast zombies or sci-fi explanations for things - People get infected, die, come to life and bite other people. It takes place in one single overnight shift in a drug store in Montana. It should have been a simple book to dash out, but I made the brilliant choice of writing it from the point of view of eight or so of the customers and employees of the drug store, with chapters alternating. I also found that I had to be in a very certain mood to really enjoy writing it. 

Novel number two is a little different. MR. PALE STEPS OUT, to put it simply, is a revenge novel set in a post-apocalyptic version of  Utah in the 1960's. Simple, eh? I'd been reading a lot of old crime pulp and got enamored with the idea of this old-school heavy getting caught up in a heist just as the bombs go off and taking cover in a safe room and not getting out for a few years later. Everyone he knows is dead and he's stuck in the middle of Utah, which he hates, and he doesn't have any nice clothes, a plan or any idea what he's doing. So he latches onto a group that's ravaging the area and does what he does best - kills some people. Mr Pale is in the final edits stage and I dig the world I've created for him to play in - there's mutants and zombies and religious cults a-plenty. Cool old cars, reliable guns, dusty towns and bad, bad men. It also has a pretty sweet cover by Deeply Dapper - 

So I finally have some books to start flogging. I plan to self-pub them - like my Moonstone Bay series (Which I'm writing the second novel now) I think they're fun reads, but not exactly what's selling commerically right now. Zombies are hot, but mine's a pretty specific kind of zombie book and while I'm sure alternative timeline noir is burning up the charts, I've always pictured the Mr. Pale series as fun, short form pulps that I can write in between novels as palate cleansers. 

I conquered the intricacies of E-Pubbing with Whispering Ferns but any real success eluded me and I aim to remedy that this time by doing what I should have done in the first place - make people want to read my books and more importantly, make people aware of the existence of them. How? Well.... I'm not 100% sure. I'm still short on free time and I don't have money to advertise, but I have a few ideas....

There's no Wri in my NaNoWriMo.

I'd planned on writing a novel for National Novel Writing Month, I really had. I have a great story, a couple of thousand words written as a nice, thorough plot, I've even started up with some cover design elements, but last night night I officially decided not to participate.

At least, not in the full spirit and madness of the month. I'll still plug away at Falling Domino when I have the time and the urge, but for me, apart from outside influences and obligations (Inventory and Christmas prep at work, a few other projects) November has become a different acronym:

NeNoFinMo

Neal's Novel Finishing Month!

I have two novels that I'm in the finishing stages of right now; Mr Pale Steps Out, which I wrote last year for NaNoWriMo, and Graves, a zombie novel I started three or four years ago.  Mr. Pale just needs a nice breeze through revision and Graves is about the same. So instead of setting those aside in favor of fresh meat, I'm diving into these seasoned piles of flesh and pounding them into finished dishes in November.

It's hard though. I'm still keeping up with my friends and online acquaintances, tracking their progress and man, I want to join in! I have characters in me dying to get out - to kiss and kill and plot and scheme. But there are those ahead of them that deserve their due first. Writing. What a cool gig.

A Rant About Zombie Movies

 Zombie from Mindspill

I love me some zombies. Like... forever. Well, not forever. My buddy Rob introduced me to them in high school I think, before that, I wasn't much of a horror movie person, but after watching the original Romeros and a few others, I loved 'em. There was something so terrifying about the idea of something dead walking, mindlessly trying to kill you. A neighbor or friend or family member. This once whole person in shreds, wanting nothing more than to kill you. And what a visceral way too - biting. It's so personal and animalistic. I got bit once in... first grade, I believe. A girl named Brittany bit me on my shin for throwing her friend's snoopy toy on the roof of the cafeteria. Then I had to go into the Principal's office, where I had to pull down my pants so the could look at the bleeding wound. Trauma of two sorts, that.

A funny side note, the girl whose snoopy doll I tossed later dated Rob, just one of the many strange but true coincidences that exist in mid-sized vortex towns in the West.

So maybe I had some sort of ingrained fear of being bitten already, but it just clicked. And now, despite being cliche and all over the place, I still dig the undead bastards. I watch anything I can with them, read novels featuring them, hell, I'm finishing up a novel of my own about them as we speak.

Here's my real problem though. Most zombie movies and books for that matter...well... they bite.A lot are just plain BAD. Poorly written, bad acting, no budget, but most importantly, a lot of them lose track of what really makes zombies scary in the first place. In my opinion, Zombies can be scary one of two ways -

1 - Zombies bring out the horrors lurking within the uninfected man. This is touched on in quite a few flicks, if only to have an excuse for some hillbillies to rape someone or for some gunplay rather than as the main plot with the primary characters. It's the classic Post apocalyptic Mad Max syndrome. I understand this, but to me, it's actually more effective in non-zombie books and movies. If I want to see the true animal in a man released in a tense situation I have other options for that. Not that it makes for a bad movie - Dawn Of The Dead is this kind of flick at times.

2 - Trying to survive as humanity actively devours itself. I LOVE this kind of movie, where people are generally good folks, not he-man commandos, just people surrounded by zombies that used to be people. Survivors that have had to watch their loved ones die, possibly had to kill them to survive. These aren't movies about fighting or explosions or heroes, these are movies about ordinary people trying to find safety and not lose their minds and their humanity in the process. There are not a lot of examples of this done well, in fact, most are pretty dire, but The Night Of The Living Dead and to an extent, Shawn Of The Dead are this kind of movie.

There are other kinds of zombie movies and books, of course, but I don't think they're nearly as effective - Cordoned Off Zombie Territory Missions, Smart Zombies That Learn To Talk, Zombies As An Excuse To Pen People Up In One Place For An Entire Film, that kind of thing, but the worst offender in my opinion is Military Shoot-Em-Up Zombie Movies.

It has no emotion, a lazy excuse for plot and it usually exists solely as an excuse to have bad actors kill lurching shapes for no real reason but to hear BANGs. There's rarely any character development - after all, there are elite military stereotypes, there's rarely any real peril as they have unlimited clips of ammo. The only true conflict usually comes from other military or mean hillbillies. I hate this kind of movie.

Now, don't get me wrong, there's a few good exceptions in each of these, (Except magic talking zombies) but for the most part, they don't scare me. Entertain, sure, but they don't make me double check the locks on my door and sleep with a sledge next to my bed.

Oh yeah, and then there's the classic Voodoo Zombie movies... Which I would love, if they'd ever really made a good one.

What about you? Think I'm off base? Convince me! I'd love to be proven wrong about Military Zombies.

Growing up, there was one man that meant Superman for me. It wasn't Christopher Reeves, though I watched his movies and Tom Wellings or Brandon Routh hadn't come around yet. For me, it was a man from before my time. In my opinion, it was a man from a better time - Kirk Alyn. My buddy Rob and I used to spend hours watching crusty VHS copies of old movie serials. It was our thing in high school especially. We'd get out of school, borrow some cash for junk food and ice cream from his brother (Because we could, not because we needed it) and go to any video store we could find that carried them. Any serials at all, we loved every one. We relished their little sum-ups, their outlandish cliffhangers and even more ridiculously great escapes.

I desperately wish I lived in an era that still did movie serials. For a long time, I thought that could be the solution to getting folks to visit the theater again. Who wouldn't go once a week to see a show if, before the feature, there was a twenty minute installment of a production? Especially if it was well done and starred real actors and actresses. I loved the idea of it.

Right now, there's a chance to try something similar in the writing world. For decades, magazines published serialized stories and Stephen King did something similar with The Green Mile a few years ago but now, with the advent of electronic publishing, someone could release a chapter a week, set their price and string happy readers along for months. Who wouldn't plop down a quarter once a week to read the next chapter in a book by their favorite author?

Lawrence Watt-Evans, one of my fave fantasy authors, has been doing something vaguely similar for years. After interest in his fantasy series waned slightly, his publisher stopped printing them, so he started releasing them himself on his website, in serialized form. After he's received a set amount in donations from readers, he puts up the next chapter and announces it on Facebook, Twitter and his site. You can read the entire book for free, provided other fans pony up the dough. And as an added bonus, anyone that donates over $25 over the course of the novel, they get a copy of the eventual printed book gratis.

I think Watt-Evans has the right idea, and he's been doing it for years before the e-reader came about. I wonder what the chances of an unpublished, largely unknown author like myself would have trying something similar with one of my books. I have a zombie novel that just needs its last few chapters finished that would be perfect for this. Wide range of characters, lots of cliffhangers and if I timed it right, it could be out in time for Halloween. What do you readers think? Could something like this gain enough of a following? Would you pay a quarter for a fifteenth of a book every three weeks or so?