Gerald Dean Rice's Blog, page 82

I Have a Bone to Pick with LDP

I wrote this back on September 10, 2010, but decided not to publish it as at the time, I thought I might have been besmirching an actual publisher and didn’t want to unfairly sully someone’s name and in turn, get blackballed by other publishers. 

I have a bone to pick with LDP, but I’ve tried to keep a lid on it up until now.  My story, “Goner” appeared in volume 6 of the Dead Worlds anthology.  Up front, I’ll say my story needed editing.  But it didn’t need what the editor did to it.  It was the literal equivalent of a dentist sneezing while he’s drilling into a patient’s tooth.

 

Even before I had my deal with Severed for my novel I’ve had stuff published.  I know rewording and reworking are part of the process, but there are changes and then there are changes.  Rejection can be a great thing.  I had a story that was rejected by Alien Skin Magazine and why they rejected it helped me rewrite the weak parts, I resubmitted it and they published it.  I appreciate rejection.  I can still respect an editor and maybe resubmit something another time.  Hell, I got rejected for Dead Bait 2 (again, another rushed story and it probably showed to the editor).

 

But I had things taken out, like a mallet because, (I’m paraphrasing as the conversation took place in February or March) “Nobody knows what a mallet is.”  My main character was a scavenger, hell EVERYONE in the story was.  That’s why the bad guys were on mopeds.  But those were changed to motorcycles.  Y’know, because the bad guys always ride around in style.

 

And again, some things needed changing.  Like my main character breaking through bricked up windows.  I don’t know why boards over the windows didn’t cross my mind, but it was a good change.  But there was PROSE changed, y’know the stuff that shows your own personality?  And things added THAT I WOULD NEVER WRITE.  I have to check my contract again, but if I could I would love to post my whole story, as I’d submitted it and invite anyone to read the two side-by-side and decide for themselves which was better.  You’ll more than likely be doing the same thing as me and asking yourself over and over again, “Why was that changed?”  To this day I haven’t been able to finish reading it.

 

But hey, I thought, maybe I’m the crazy one.  So I read the story the editor wrote, a couple stories ahead of mine.  I forget the title, but if you’ve seen the movie Zombieland you already know the story.  It was completely derivative, down to the characters being named after states and using the whole “Kill of the Week” bit.  All they did was walk into a grocery store, get attacked by zombies, shoot a bunch of them, and leave. 

 

I have never trashed another writer, but by the way I was rudely handled over the phone and the end-product that showed up in the antho I feel like I’ve been mistreated.  Right now I’m working my way through “Love Prevails” and it’s by far better written and plotted than the editor’s story.

 

I wrote for the antho as a way of getting good press for my novel, but I got 0 traction.  You know what would have made up for that?  Getting paid for the 6,000 or however many word story I wrote.  I’m officially done with writing for free unless it’s something that benefits me or something I believe in.

 

As an aside, a month or two after this was published I attempted to have this added to my list of books (authors will understand) I had contributed to on Amazon. 

 

The Ravin

I am proud to announce that The Zombie Show will have an exclusive excerpt of Mark Tufo’s upcoming novel, The Ravin. Tufo is also the author of the smash hit Zombie Fallout series and you can read the first ten pages of it after you finish The Zombie Show. I’ll be interviewing Mark here and on Razorline Press about this and upcoming stuff.

The Zombie Show - Excerpt 4

In her healthier years, Mama had been a beautiful, tall, shapely woman. It burned Cole to see how men looked at her, but he knew why they looked. But that had been at least two hundred pounds ago and the full weight of her on his eighty-something pound body drove almost all the air from his lungs. If there was anything good about her size now it was that he suffocate before she could eat him and there was such an ocean of flesh between her face and any part of her body that she simply couldn’t get to him like this.

Cole saw pulsing black spots in his eyes. His free hand began worming between them even before he knew what he was doing. Mama’s hands had begun clawing at the carpet and it sounded as if it were being torn from the floor. She lunged her head at him, snapping her teeth together so hard it hurt his ears and as soon as he got his index and thumb around the butt of the knife, he began tugging it free.

He had seconds before he passed out and gave a series of quick pulls, each one bring his arm farther and farther out. Cole finally tugged his arm free and without hesitation, brought it up high and down, over and over until her jaw froze in place and his hand pulled away without the knife.

The Mama-thing made a sound as if something was caught in her throat. Cole quickly felt up the wide-expanse of her back until he found the end of the knife just below her ear. He pushed up on it and she rolled easily off of him.

She seemed frozen in place, as if the knife had penetrated to a tangle of nerves somewhere inside her head. Cole rolled over onto his knees and straddled her big tummy. He looked into the remaining eye, something akin to fear and perhaps… recognition in it. Her hands and feet began drumming off the floor and he reached up and grabbed the heavy metal ashtray he’d made her in summer camp last year.

Cole aimed for the temple and began swinging, crashing the metal lump into her head until it dented, until flesh broke, until bone was exposed, until brain was exposed…

…until he finally took a breath.

Cole climbed off his Mama’s dead body—not a dead thing trying to kill him—but the woman who’d given birth to and cared for him his entire life. He couldn’t hear his own sobbing voice, but knew he was crying as he stumbled into the bedroom, shoved a hand into her purse and chucked out contents until he had her keys. He didn’t feel the pain of his broken elbow as he shoved the key in the lock of the front door, not taking a moment to look over his shoulder at the corpse lying half-in, half-out of the kitchen.

When he was outside, he screamed. He screamed for someone to help him, to help his mother, but not with words. His was the language of agony, of despair, of hatred freshly born, of love newly dead.

Chronicle - Review

I loved the simple aspect of this story. A loner and two other guys discover a meteor that imbues them with superhuman powers. It covers all the aspects of the emergence of a person with sudden power. Learning how to use the power, keeping it hidden from people who wouldn't understand, having fun with said power. I found the dialogue and interplay between the characters entertaining. When Andrew, who's decided to chronicle every moment of his life with his camera after being abused by his father yet again, he acts out of character and not only goes to a party with his cousin, but trusts the popular kid enough to go into a cave with the two of them. They are quickly overcome after coming in contact with a glowing meteor with something living inside it.

After they recover, they've already realized they have powers. I like this skip. They're having fun with their power and over the course of the next 20 minutes, we find them exploring what they can do. Things really pick up once Steve figures out how to fly. But while their bond is strengthened during this period, we also learn more about Andrew's home life and why he's so cut off from people. His mother is dying from the worst case of asthma EVER and his father is highly stressed in caring for her. I really liked how his father wasn't just some angry guy who beat up on his son for the hell of it. His father was beyond stressed and just didn't know how to relieve that pressure.

But here's where there's a kink. There is only one scene where we truly see Andrew interact with his mother. I imagine he loved her and she loved him, but it's the same as a movie where there's a man and a woman and suddenly their kissing. There's no build-up to show how mother and son cared for each other, although the father's anger and how he expressed it was bordering on heavy-handed.

So when a pivotal moment occurs at a party and Andrew explodes with anger, I get why he was so detached, but when Andrew's mother (SPOILER ALERT) dies and then the movie completely spirals out of control, I understand why, but I don't think the story comes to that point honestly.

But the ending goes way beyond anything that could keep me rooted in the story. All I wanted was for Andrew to die. And when that happens, I find myself not really caring about anyone else left in the movie. The ending squeezed out any emotion I could have had for anyone. But for the first 2/3rds of the movie, it still gets 3 stars.

The Zombie Show - Excerpt 3

In those brief few moments, he confessed to himself he had hated his Mama on more than one occasion. Most specifically the needle incident. But he didn’t hate her. Not really. He knew no matter what she said or did, she loved him. Or at least had. Maybe she wasn’t all the way dead. Maybe there was something of her left inside.

“Mama?” Cole’s voice shook. Her room was suddenly silent and he wondered if his mother was herself again or if the dead thing that she’d turned into had stopped to listen. He felt the weight of the quiet in his bones, resonating from his trunk to his fingertips. Cole figured the longer he waited, the worse it would be, regardless of whether Mama or the thing that had been her moments before was there.

Cole clutched his knife, the sandwiches and his empty belly long forgotten. Even though it was where he intended to go, he steered away from her bedroom, closer to the ratty old couch against the far wall. There was a backdoor in the kitchen, but they hadn’t been able to open that since they’d moved in. Her bedroom door came into view and it was a minor and brief relief to see that it was mostly shut. Brief because the door was yanked open and the thing focused a baleful stare on him with his mother’s eyes before charging.

He couldn’t have recalled the last time he’d seen his mother run. It had been years, even before she’d been diagnosed, but this thing did. Cole had nowhere to run. To the right and back to the door would have brought him even closer, to the left and into the kitchen was an even more cramped space. In his panic, he pulled back and held up his arms, his eyes closing involuntarily as he turned his head.

There was a sound as if someone had jabbed a pin into a big, meat-filled balloon and a sharp pain that thrummed up his arm and into his neck. The Mama-thing’s forward motion stopped and so did its guttural grunting. Cole opened his eyes to see she was impossibly close. His arms were still outstretched, the one resting on her shoulder, the other… the other bent sickeningly inward at the elbow, the hand still holding on tightly to the knife.

It chomped the air between them, its arms hanging loosely at its sides as if the thing had not figured out how to use them. He looked into his Mama’s eyes, ignoring the intense pain in his arm as best he could, using it, in fact, to focus him into doing something to save his life.

Those light brown, almost hazel eyes—his were a carbon copy, just as big in a child’s head—were locked onto him, bloodshot and filled with a rudderless hatred. So much hatred, they didn’t look real to him in a way. Like the googly eyes on the armless stuffed monkey in his room. Cole took his free hand, raised it, and fixed his thumb the same way he did before plunging it into the hole of a bowling ball. Mama had been alive not more than a half hour ago; dying, but alive. Maybe she wasn’t all the way dead. It made sense to him on an instinctual level and without hesitation, Cole plunged his thumb into the Mama-thing’s eye socket, hooking it around something behind the eye and yanking.

The thing screeched, shaking its head once before pulling back and wrenching the entire eye out. Cole’s knife hand slapped into his thigh, numb and as useless as her two had been. A fat drop of near-black blood oozed from the new empty hole in the Mama-thing’s face. A red-green froth had begun at her mouth and nose and when he saw she was readying to charge, he let his body do what came natural. Cole’s legs slid out from under him and he rolled forward and to his right, avoiding her just before she crashed into the wall. He tried crawling on his hands and knees, but a sick feeling squeezed his stomach into his chest as he tried to use his broken arm.

Cole felt a foot kick him in the backside as he rolled over onto his back, the arm flapping onto his chest in a manner that looked totally wrong. Mama fell on the floor next to him—she must have dived and missed—and then frog-hopped on top of him.

The Cover

Here's the cover.  I have to crop it, though.[image error]

The Zombie Show Cover

The cover to The Zombie Show is in the works right now.  Hopefully, I'll have a draft in the next day or two.  It should either be classy or nasty.  Either way will be good.

The Zombie Show - Excerpt 2

“Mama?” he asked, sudden guilt propelling him back to her door. “Mama, you okay?”

There was a sound, a voice, had to be hers, but it wasn’t right. Cole hadn’t understood and inclined his ear to the door to listen. The voice—Mama’s—said something else, but he just wasn’t getting it.

“Mama, I’m opening the door, okay?” Cole reached and saw he had the butterknife in his hand still, a smear of mayo on the blade ending in a full glop at the tip. He wished he’d left it in the kitchen, she might say something about him leaving her, but he’d look even guiltier if she opened the door and him standing in the kitchen.

The door gave a brief squeak before bumping into something that stopped it. The opening was wide enough for Cole to fit maybe his head through and peer around at Mama in the bed, but he wanted to come all the way in. Sometimes Mama fell out of the bed. Like when he’d given her her shot that one time without her knowing.

He looked, but the twin lumps of Mama’s feet under the covers weren’t there. Neither were the covers. He stepped farther into the room and saw her pillows at the head of the bed and then the door smashed into his shoulder, rolling him back and almost coming down on his neck. He’d turned his wrist by some draw of luck and had managed to pin the knife between the door and the frame. Something heavy on the other side pushed, driving the knife deeper into the wood and Cole let go of it to shove at the door with both hands. He could feel the force on the other side, held temporarily at bay. The sick-stink wafted over him then, not just from the room itself, he’d practically grown immune to it, but another stink. A deeper one that set off the ancient alarm inside his lizard brain. Without knowing why he knew, he knew it was the smell that had been scrubbed and perfumed away before they ever got to the funeral home for his Uncle Matty’s funeral. It was a death-sick stink.

And if Mama was dead and trying to crush him on the other side of the door…

Cole pulled away from the door, banging the rounded section of skull behind his ear on the edge. It stung like hell, but spurred him on even more. He couldn’t turn his head, but could see in the corner of his eye a mass rise from the floor. Then he heard it breathing, but not like a living person would. Like… like… the engine to the last car Mama had had. A big, grey Camaro, that coughed and sputtered as if it were being resurrected with each turn of the ignition. Except, the breathing was the opposite of what the Camaro’s engine had been doing. Mama coughed and sputtered as if her lungs were shutting down for the very last time. What looked like an arm jerked into the air and Cole used the opportunity to give one last desperate shove and the form pitched over into the side of the bed.

He was free!

He had to get to the door and outside. Mama might have been big and slow, but the house was small and he had no doubt his bedroom door couldn’t keep her out. Cole dashed for it and a moment later he was unlocking the bolt. But the front door had two locks. The second one required a key. And the only set was in Mama’s purse. In her bedroom.

Cole turned. He listened to the sound of his breathing. Of the sound of his Mama, sliding over the wall as she pulled herself up again. Of the death rattle still killing the last few living parts of her. He realized he still had the butterknife in his hand.

Could he?

Zombopoly!

Okay, I tried to Trademark the name, but it turns out that's pretty expensive.  But after that, I sent Hasbro an email to try to gauge their interest in creating a special edition, zombie Monopoly game.  Below is my email.  I'll post their response if I get one:

 

It's an idea so simple, it should have been thought of at least 2 years ago. Zombopoly. With at least several dozen versions of Monopoly out right now, why shouldn't there be one of our favorite horror sub-genre?

 

They're popular across the entire media spectrum. Novels, comic books, television, movies--and they're a constant every Halloween. They want to eat our brains and we love them for it. I don't know if Hasbro has a R&D department, but it doesn't take a statistician to see zombies are popular. I've started a Facebook page a few minutes ago and you can monitor it here to watch it grow in popularity. Or if you aren't comfortable clicking on a link, just go to Facebook and type in 'Zombopoly'.

 

I hope you can forward this message along to the appropriate parties and I would greatly appreciate a response at your earliest convenience.

 

Sincerely,

Gerald Dean Rice, BA

The Zombie Show - Excerpt.1

Mama was really sick. Cole had asked her just an hour ago if he should call 9-1-1, but she’d said no. She was afraid of hospitals for some reason. She’d told him to close the door and he’d been sitting sentry outside her door ever since.

But now he had to go to the bathroom. He knocked on the door and put his ear to it and listened. She was quiet. Must have been asleep again. He crawled to his feet, his leg numb from the butt cheek down.

“Mama, I gotta go to the bathroom,” he leaned into the door and spoke. No answer. He told himself she was sleeping. Cole race-walked to the bathroom, a short distance away from his mother’s bedroom in their tiny ranch house. He closed the door out of habit and stole a glance at his reflection in the mirror. Even he knew a boy his age shouldn’t look this old.

Mama had gotten real sick a while back, so sick she’d almost died. So sick, the doctor told her she’d gotten diabetes. She had to take shots for her sugar and needles had always been hard for mama. Cole promised the doctor he would give her her shots if she wouldn’t. The doctor had told her to be careful, that she could come down with colds a lot easier, that they would be a lot harder to fight off. She would need to test her sugar every day. She’d need to get a flu shot every year. More needles. More doctors. Mama had begun stockpiling her medical supplies in her bedroom.

Cole finished his business and flushed. As he washed his hands, he looked at himself in the mirror again. Mama was a lot moodier than she had been. Had gained a lot of weight. Cole was barely five feet tall and skinny. He couldn’t really force her to do anything she didn’t want to. Once, he’d given her a shot while she was sleeping. Had managed to test her blood sugar and saw she was really high. He used the little booklet the hospital had given her to calculate how much insulin to take, thumped out the little bubbles as the syringe dangled from the little bottle, held upside down and swabbed her shoulder with an alcohol pad before injecting her.

She’d opened her eyes as soon as the needle went in and his heart skipped, thinking she’d awakened. But he steadied his hand, pushed the plunger down, and quickly removed it. Before his brain had told his body to relax, Mama shot up in bed.

“What was that?” she’d screamed, wide awake. “Something bit me!” Cole, in hindsight, wished he’d lied. Mama had changed since the diabetes. She was a lot meaner. A slap here, a biting comment there. But he’d told her, held up his hand and showed her the syringe. She’d tumbled out of bed on top of him, sat up, pinning him there, and as calmly as reading the Sunday paper, plucked the syringe from his hand and began poking him in the chest with it. Over and over and over.

“You see now? You see how that feels?” she’d kept asking him. He hadn’t intended to, but couldn’t help subconsciously counting the pricks into the thin muscle of his pectoral. He’d cried, wailed, but she kept on until she’d poked him thirty-two times.

Cole turned off the water and flick-dried his fingers. His stomach growled as he came out of the bathroom. Mama was sleep, it wasn’t like she needed him right then. Why not a sandwich? He could make two—one for her if she woke up. He could even cut off the crust just the way she liked.

He went into the kitchen and pulled the bread down from the top of the fridge. He had to hop just a little bit to reach. Cole took the meat and the mayo out and laid everything out on the counter. He worked quickly with a knife from the silverware drawer. A healthy smear of mayo on both his slices, very little on one of hers. He plopped two slices of meat on both slices of bread and then covered them. Cole cut his sandwich diagonally and was halfway through cutting Mama’s vertically when a muffled thump came from the bedroom. It sounded like a bowling ball had been thrown against the wall.