Earthquakes and Zombies

Undead Flesh is my newest novel set in my home state of Oklahoma and takes place after a massive earthquake causes the dead to rise from their graves. At the time of its writing, I had lived in Oklahoma for fifty-five years and never experienced or heard of an earthquake. I only chose one as the catalyst for my zombie apocalypse because it fit with the supernatural theme of the novel. I knew early on I wanted to write a scene where the actual dead crawled out of the ground. Diseased and plague zombies had been done to death (pardon the obvious pun). I had to have the real walking dead in all their maggoty gruesomeness. Originally, Undead Flesh was born out of a Nanowrimo which stands for for National Novel Writing Month. It is a challenge every year for writers to produce a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. I took the challenge, along with my good friend and fellow writer, Tim Baker, and dived right in to start whipping out this tale of Jack Garret fighting to keep his family alive in a zombie-filled apocalyptic world. I had already written two books and it seemed easy enough task to write this one. With only a basic image of how the tale began, and very little else, I plowed into the story letting the words fly off my fingertips as fast as I could write them. One morning, while writing about the earthquake happening to my characters, a real quake struck Oklahoma. It started near Norman and rattled up the state to Tulsa. Where I sat in my writing room, it felt like a large truck had rumbled past the house. I checked on Facebook and saw dozens of posts about the event that just happened. Granted it was not the huge quake described in my book, (thank God) but it gave me the incentive to continue on with the novel. That was over two years ago and Oklahoma has had several earthquakes since then. I didn't complete the Nanowrimo challenge of 50,000 words (I fell 6,000 words short) but the story of Jack Garrett kept dragging me back to the keyboard. It wasn't as easy to write as I thought. It was the story of a man who would walk through a zombie-infested hell to protect his family. It challenged all my skill as a writer and it reached deep into my heart. Now it is done and in just a few short weeks will be available on Amazon for readers to enjoy my little tale of earthquakes and zombies.