Fifty Shades of Gray Flesh (or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Zombie Apocalypse)

Zombies!  Zombies!  Zombies! They’re everywhere!  In hundreds of books, on our television sets, in our movies, and lately in the news.  I’m even working on a zombie novel which is in its final stages of writing at the moment.  I didn’t really intend to write about zombies at first. In my mind, the genre was too commercial and didn’t have a lot of life left in it (pardon the pun). I knew this zombie bubble wouldn’t last forever and the whole genre would go the way of vampires which have ended up blasé and stale over the last few years.  So why did I jump on the zombie bandwagon? When I first started writing this novel for Nanowrimo over a year ago, I just wanted to put something down on paper as fast as I could. In the second chapter, my main character and his family are visiting a graveyard when a major earthquake struck.  Lo and behold, while I was writing that chapter, a quake rattled through the state of Oklahoma; an unheard of event which sent everyone to Facebook commenting on how they just felt the earth shake.  I took that as a sign to continue to write the novel.  I played around with a few chapters and rewrote them over and over again. The novel wasn’t clicking for me. There was something missing. That final oomph needed to push me to finish the tale.  Enter Jack the Zombie Killer. Jack is my main character.  Just a regular guy with a family until the zombie apocalypse happens. He becomes something more.  A man who would protect his family at all costs in a world turned into a zombie hell.  Even when there is no hope, he keeps fighting. In the writing process, the novel turned from a simple story of survival horror to something deeper. In the fabric of this tale are woven questions about religion, family, marriage, country, and death.  It doesn’t have answers, but it asks the questions wrapped around a lot of zombie ass-kicking.  I learned that the genre is not as important as the character’s story. Here it is one year later and the writing is nearing completion and the book is tentatively titled Zombie Run at the moment since all the really cool titles were taken.  Chalk it up to being late to jump on the zombie bandwagon. Whatever the outcome of this novel, I learned a lot about writing a character's story thanks to Jack, the Zombie Killer.

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