Why I am writing Zombie

With all of the wonderful writing genres that there are out there, why is it that I have chosen to write Zombe?

-         It is trendy right now. I’m not going to deny that this factor is a driver. I obviously want as many people as possible to read my book once published however if I really wanted to follow the crowd then I would be writing a vampire romance novel, with more romance than vampire.

-    It is easy. I don’t subscribe to this train of thinking. Just because I am writing

     about rotting, brain munching creatures straight from the bowels of hell,

     doesn’t mean that the plot, characters and their interactions are any the less

     complex or that the story telling element is any more basic.

-         I am a sick and twisted freak. Now this may well be true, I must admit that I

do enjoy thinking of more and more disgusting ways for my characters to die

and putrid ways to describe the Zombies. However that said I am just as happy

writing poetry about nature and flowers as I am describing peoples heads

exploding, so again this is not really a factor.

So what is the real reason I am writing Zombie?

It is as simple as I LOVE ZOMBIE STORIES!! I have done ever since I picked up my first one aged 15 years old  “Assassin” by Shaun Hutson. I loved the way the books main characters were evil enough on their own as London gangsters without throwing Zombies into the equation.  From the first moment a Zombie appears – when a London prostitute performs oral sex on a zombie thinking him to be a smelly homeless bum, only to have him ejaculate maggots into her mouth. I was in awe as to the boundless possibilities that a story of that nature could go in. This was quickly followed by “Deathday” also by Hutson and countless others.

Around a year later I watched “Return of the living dead” (parts 1 & 2), “night of the living dead”, “dawn of the dead”, “day of the dead”, “braindead” etc and have watched nearly every Zombie movie released since. What has fascinated me right from the start is the human aspect of the story, the way the humans in the story have to deal with the horrors presented before them and have to evolve instantly to survive and discover ways to kill the Zombies by trial and error. Then there is the fact that a lot of the time although these characters are facing the most horrific of circumstances and should be joining forces to try and defeat the Zombies, a lot of the time they are feuding amongst themselves, normally at the detriment of their cause. I have been fantasising about the Zombie holocaust ever since planning how I would cope, what I would do to survive and although I have been writing for years, it is only recently that I have started to commit my Zombie stories to paper.

However it is this human story that is the main driver behind my apocalyptic journal series, a series of fictional journals written while the central character is in the midst of an apocalypse. The first of these is set in the midst of a Zombie outbreak. I am hoping to publish it in eBook format later in the year with the second book set in the midst of a new ice age following shortly after.

Keep coming back for news of my progress.