ZWD: Inside chapter 3

ZWD: Kind of and Empty City sold HERE.

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Before I get into this chapter I want to talk about the title a moment since the title and the chapter are both kind of related. I have had several question about what does ZWD stand for? It stands for Zombie War Diary. I thought calling the book Zombie War Diary King of an Empty City would be too much so by shortening the title to ZWD: King of an Empty City I accomplished two things. First I made it easier to find on Amazon.com. All you have to do is type in ZWD and hit the search button and you pretty much go straight to it. Second,  if this story is successful I already have an outline for a squeal ready and so I would just add an "s" to the end of it and it becomes Zombie War Diaries. Also if it turns into a series people will be able to easily find it on book store shelves. Hopefully that will be coming in late November- just in time for Christmas.  So yes there was a little thought of marketing that went into the title. Very little.

Chapter 3.  In the tweet above I said bookstore and at the time I meant bookstore. Bookstores are some of my favorite places to hang out. I love to spend an hour or so pouring over the books on the shelves and seeing what I might pick up. In Little Rock my favorite book store is on the other side of town and in my mind there was a scene where our hero's would hot-wire  a car and drive down I-630 to the bookstore to find all the info they would need. It was a tweet I came up with after leaving the book store and I think I actually wrote it in the parking lot.

In my mind the scene was in a convertible and they were speeding down the road weaving in and out of traffic shooting zombies left and right with reckless abandon. A regular Natural Born Killers kind of scene.  

But in reality or at least the reality of the story I-630 was a log jam of cars and they would not have been able to drive anywhere. I-630 was suppose to be this morass of fog and death snaking through the middle of Little Rock with the sol purpose of generating more and more walking death. One of the big reasons why our hero's thought they needed to block off the exit ramps was to keep that death out.

So I changed it to the library. Small confession there is a library just blocks from where all this action takes place in Little Rock but I thought it more dramatic to have them travel across I-630 and into a no mans land so to speak. In Little Rock their are some fabulous homes north of I-630 in the old downtown area. Picturesque places with gingerbread highlights that I will admit are a little run down but if they were brought back to their full potential by the home owners they would be showplaces, postcard quality. Arkansas weather doesn't always allow for that kind of upkeep so they are not all so showy. Add to that the normal winters of Arkansas of little snow, lots of sleet. lots of broken branches and all barren trees you get a very bleak view of the neighborhood. Because of that I wanted our hero's to walk down those streets and show just how empty the city was, and they would have to in reality pass through those neighborhoods to get to the cities main library.  

The main library is for the most part as I described it where I described it. Should you ever visit it it is a very nice modern library that I think could easily be defended from a zombie hoard. If you visit Little Rock go check it out.

Carrot plants, if your not a gardener your biggest exposure to hat a carrot looks like in the wild comes from Bugs Bunny cartoons. you couldn't point at a cluster of vegetables in the wild or in a garden and say "Oh that's a carrot plant" just form it's stalk sticking up from he ground.I know I couldn't and perhaps with the exception of Broccoli I couldn't do that with any other veggies. Tomato's if the tomato was on the plant. But outside of that I'm lost and so were our hero's. That's the main reason they needed to go the the library.

Side note; plant identification books I remember were once plentiful in the late 1970's early 1980's about the time Rambo became popular but it was primarily for plants that you could eat in the wild while hiking through the great northwest of Canada or the Amazon forest. I went to the library for the purpose of finding a book on garden plant identification just to mention it in this book and found nothing at all. lot's of books on gardening, tons of them and each had a section describing each plant but nothing on just garden plant identification. That added an entirely new dimension to the quest at the library. To gather the little bit of information I would need to identify a plants I would need about 40 lbs of books and so would they. It now became a problem of logistics. Without a computer how do you easily carry the information you need? The old fashion way. I'm not going to get into that you will just have to read the book and find out.              

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ZWD: King of and Empty City Chapter 2

ZWD: King of an Empty City Available Here

Believe it or not the wife and I were talking over dinner about starting a garden in the spring and that's how this thought came about. I got to thinking about the time line of this story in my mind. I thought that at some time in October the zombie attack would have hit Little Rock after it had spread exponentially across the country. In my mind the spread would have taken about a week to reach national epidemic levels just out of the shear stupidity of people not listening to or paying attention to the world around them. I thought that people would care too much about loved ones to really take precautions.

So, October disaster strikes and our heroes have been on the move since then and the story starts in December. I condensed the time they spent at the park to just a few important moments to give you a since of what the camp was like before they got overrun.

December leaves us with no gardens, but keep in mind this is Arkansas, that plays into it later in my thinking. Fresh food is now three months old so it's no good, at least for fresh food. canned food would be more valuable than gold by now and frozen is like silver not as valuable because you can't eat it immediately but it has a high value after it's thawed. But being Arkansas with compared to northern states a warm winter (I've seen Christmas with no snow) because of the warm winters there seemed to be a possibility to have at least root veggies available.

I wanted to explore more the possibility of living off the land like a Prepper or Survivalist but as the story developed I never got the chance to really go into it. There is some amazing stuff you can do to live off the land, I was surprised.

Two months of people scavenging before the story starts and I thought there wouldn't be much food left. That's why our hero hates finding things like cans of  Artichoke Hearts. Things have been picked over pretty well by the city's hidden population.

A quick word about the population. I struggled with the idea of having more adults in the story but it seemed to make it too complicated. Adding more groups of people would have cluttered the telling far more than it needed to be. There were adults, families hidden around the city. Barricaded in their homes and mostly just not trusting others just like Grandpa didn't when we first meet him later in the story.

But the kids, the kids would not be trusting but need or even crave adult guidance and here were these two fools out in the world just like them and they seemed to be doing something interesting so why not approach them. Besides they might have food.              

More Reviews from fans of the book

Not even finished the book yet!

I can't believe the reaction this is getting from people. 

It's a Thing!

People from all over are now showing off their copies of ZWD: King of and Empty City. 

(Actually it's just two of my brothers and me.) And now a long time friend.  

Show off your copy! 

ZWD: King of an Empty City Chapter One

The Night Was Moist.

When I first started Tweeting this story the only thing I knew for certain was the date. I first tweeted on Dec 1. I had just gotten back from walking our Great Danes. We had two at the time and to keep them from eating the furniture out of boredom we found that they needed a mile long walk every day. After that they could just sleep for the next 23 hours only getting up to eat and relieve themselves outside. What a wonderful life they have.

I had only casually put in some thought about what to tweet. I knew it would be a story, I knew it would be a bad story after all who tweets a story outside of kids? When I got back in the house from the walk I sat down and tweeted. ZWD. At the time there was no King of an Empty City in the title just ZWD. With 150 characters to use I had to figure out some sort of short hand with my writing. At the time things like LOL were just coming into use and I was only vaguely aware of simple tings like LOL much less trying to figure out how to write an entire story with them. So I had my title: ZWD. somewhere in there I was going to explain that it stood for Zombie War Diary, I don't think I ever did. The date I just threw in because I didn't have even the first lines.

Ten characters down and I thought about how cold the house was when we got back from the walk. I needed to bump up the heat. At the time I worked nights and we had the thermostat set to drop down to 68 degrees at 8:am after my wife went to work. It was cold outside and cold in the house I would bump it up to something comfortable everyday after I woke up and if I could stand it at 68 it stayed. This day there was a dampness in the air and I used that as I though about going back to bed. I didn't need to be at work till 2:pm so I could sleep for a long time. I threw the line in about the dog just because I had walked mine moments before.

And there you have it the firs tweet to the story:
ZWD: Dec 1
The house as cold even with all the blankets we found but it was nice sleeping in a bed again. We picked up a dog from somewhere. 

When I started writing the story I had to turn that into a chapter. Somehow I managed to do that and it led to the story. Below is the first paragraph of the story. there are two different versions of it. The original from the final draft and the one that made it into the book after the final edit.

It was one of the hardest parts of the book to write and I revisited it several times. I had for some time looked at the advice of other writers like Hemingway, Asimov, etc. and seen what advice they could offer about writing and they all offered something different but they agreed on one thing the first paragraph had to grab you as a reader. I still am not satisfied with the final edited first paragraph for this story. But it is what it is.

Side note on the writers advice; one of them I forget who said never start a story with weather. What ever I write, short story, novel, blog I almost always start it with the phrase "The night was Moist." I eventually take it out but I almost always start with it. It puts me in a mood to make stuff up and after all that's what a writer does, am I right?    

Final Draft

We slept in our clothes. I think it was the first night of real sleep we had had in a few weeks. It’s a shame too that we slept in our clothes because I like to sleep naked. But you can’t do that anymore, not these days. You never know when you’re going to have to fight for your life or run. We have been doing a lot of running over the past month.

Final Edit

It was a cold morning when we woke up. I think it was the first night of 

real sleep we had had in a few weeks. It was so cold in the room you could see 

your breath in the air. But the blankets and quilts were so warm that we just 

wanted to stay in bed forever. We slept in our clothes. That was the only bad 

part. I like to strip down and sleep. But you can’t do that anymore, not these 

days. You never know when you’re going to have to fight or run. We have been 

doing a lot of running over the past month.

      

ZWD: Hidden Things

Some of the things that didn't make it into the book but are referenced in a strange way on occasion are that our hero kept having prophetic dreams of his two best friends. Guys he grew up with in Colorado. They were adrenaline junkies who were always off doing something stupid and had died during the "Shock and Awe" campaign in Iraq. As teenagers they were always dragging him out on "pussy trips" trips that were  not as dangerous as the ones they went on alone. Mainly they would take him on hunting trips that helped develop his shooting skills.

Because of these hunting trips and adventure outings our hero is a much better shot than he realizes. Although I never say it in the book he really likes guns but not for the firing, it's more for the mechanical beauty of them. His mind loves the way the parts interact with each other more than anything else about the guns. That is partially why he never was very good with the bow and arrow, the mechanics of it just didn't appeal to him.  

In the dream that didn't make it into the book his friends are trying to help him and at the same time kill him always hunting him or driving him to a certain point in his dream world. Naturally it's just his mind trying to figure out the problems of his waking world manifesting themselves in ways he can understand but with many dreams everything is not just spelled out and he stays confused.  

Second Review

Thank you for the kind words Elanowolf

First Review

ZWD: Kind of an Empty City -The Journey

It has been two years into he making but finally my first book is published. ZWD: King of an Empty City is available on Amazon.com both in paperback and Kindle eBook format. You should buy a copy. Good looking cover isn't it? And yes that’s me on the cover. Sexy ain’t I?

ZWD:King of an Empty City

  This book started out as a series of tweets. I had been talked into getting a twitter account and didn't know what to do with it. Somewhere I had read that a girl in Japan had written a number one bestselling novel on twitter so I thought; "I can write a book like that" and that's what I did. I started writing tweets that for some reason were about zombies. I think I had seen a few people walking with their heads in their phones and thought what a bunch of zombies and I was off from there.  It actually wasn't the first zombie stories I had tweeted. There was one before this. I have it somewhere; when I find it I'll post it here so you can enjoy it. But after I finished that one I didn't say anything for a long time on Twitter till I got a tween asking for more. I put a little more thought (not much) into the new story mainly just thinking about the food running out and where people would find it when they were starving.  

Eventually several people asked for more details and someone said I needed to write a book about this so I stopped tweeting and started writing the story using the tweets as a kind of guide. I put them in the header of each story just to give readers an idea of how I was progressing. After a point the story stopped following the tweets and I had to change them the "tweet" headers to match the action in the story. At the end of the book I think I have all the tweets or at least where I left off. Maybe I'll fix that in the second edition.  Since it was my first book I didn’t know what I was doing and decided to just write everything down that came to mind and cut out the crap later. That wasn’t easy since I thought all of it was brilliant. My wife who is a wonderful supporter of my writing tried to convince me to cut the crap out and I just didn’t see any crap to cut. She had her vindication when my editor had me cut a lot of crap out of the story. About twenty seven pages and make it much more streamlined. I’ll have a whole new blog about the importance of editors later. Mine is awesome.  

As she was editing the story and ripping my heart out cutting things form the story I thought were brilliant I started sending out query letters and got a lot of generic thank you but no thanks letters in return. That’s when I turned to self-publishing. Honestly, Amazon.com made it easy to self-publish but there is a lot to that process. It’s not streamlined to the point where you can upload a book and send it to the different formats, printed, eBook, audio-book etc. So I have several different Amazon sites that I have to log onto just to take care of different business. That’s the subject of yet another blog.  Anyway, the book is done and available for your enjoyment. Buy a copy and leave a review on Amazon about what you think of it. I especially like the bad criticisms, they are more honest that most so don’t think you’re going to hurt my feeling.