Take a picture with your copy of the book and send it to us Walkingkrow@swbell.net
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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