Rebecca Besser's Blog, page 44
July 21, 2015
Shawn Chesser – Summer of Zombie Box Set
What is the Summer of Zombie Box Set?
What authors and books are included?
Meet one of the authors and hear a tidbit about his book below:
Name: Shawn Chesser
What is the title of your book that’s included in the Summer of Zombie Box Set? TRUDGE: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse
Who is your favorite character in that book? I’d have to say Vietnam war veteran Duncan Winters is my favorite character. His sharp wit and inability to apply a filter between his brain and mouth make him a joy to write.
Are there any “author secrets” in your title (things you included or ideas you had that aren’t shared with readers in the title)? Definitely … contrary to my series’ name, not everyone survives the zombie apocalypse. :)
Is your book part of a series (if so, what are the other titles in the series we should be looking for)? My STZA series appeals to readers of all ages by combining a military themed romp across post- apocalyptic America, featuring stealth helicopters and exotic weaponry, with an intertwined and ongoing story arc that follows a group of civilian preppers who are also struggling to survive the zombie apocalypse. Furthermore, my characters are easy to identify with because they hail from all walks of life and have vastly different skill sets that are continually on display during this roller-coaster-ride of a series.
My STZA books in order: Trudge, Soldier On, In Harm’s Way, A Pound of Flesh, Allegiance, Mortal, Warpath, Ghosts, and coming late July … ‘Frayed: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse’ approximately 140K words.
Where can readers find you (website, social media, etc.)?
Facebook page: https://tinyurl.com/ksr93lg
Facebook author page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Shawn-Chesser-Author/317987804885854
Amazon author page: http://www.amazon.com/Shawn-Chesser/e/B005QUZ194
Twitter: @sdchess
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5095036.Shawn_Chesser
Do you have a website readers might want to check out? www.ShawnChesser.com
Bio: Shawn Chesser, a practicing father, has been a zombie fanatic for decades. He likes his creatures shambling, trudging and moaning. As for fast, agile, screaming specimens… not so much. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, two kids and three fish.
July 17, 2015
Jay Wilburn – Summer of Zombie Box Set
What is the Summer of Zombie Box Set?
What authors and books are included?
Meet one of the authors and hear a tidbit about his book below:
Name: Jay Wilburn
What is the title of your book that’s included in the Summer of Zombie Box Set? Loose Ends: A Zombie Novel
Who is your favorite character in that book? Doc, the cook with the darkest past.
Are there any “author secrets” in your title (things you included or ideas you had that aren’t shared with readers in the title)? The novel focuses on the characters finding unfinished business from their pasts still hiding among the ruins and the dead.
Tell us something about your book that will make us want to read it: The narrator is a mute boy that follows and participates in the action without interjecting himself over the other characters.
Is your book part of a series (if so, what are the other titles in the series we should be looking for)? This one is a standalone.
Where can readers find you (website, social media, etc.)?
The Jay Wilburn Author Page on Facebook
@AmongTheZombies on Twitter
Do you have a website readers might want to check out? JayWilburn.com
Bio: Jay Wilburn lives with his wife and two sons in Conway, South Carolina near the Atlantic coast of the southern United States. He taught public school for sixteen years before becoming a full time writer. He is the author of the Dead Song Legend Dodecology and the music of the five song soundtrack recorded as if by the characters within the world of the novel The Sound May Suffer. Follow his many dark thoughts on Twitter @AmongTheZombies, his Facebook author page, and at JayWilburn.com
July 13, 2015
Craziness by Rebecca Besser
By Rebecca Besser
Psychological horror is one that has such a broad spectrum that it could be anything from someone who has lost a loved one and simply snapped to someone who has had mental issues all their life that just can’t be controlled.
Slasher horror to serial killers, nervous breakdowns to the mentally ill – what do they all have in common? All stories that fall into the psychological horror genre have something to do with human beings that have gone off the deep end in one way or another, even if they seem sane to themselves.
For this kind of terror, emotions are played up until there are such high stakes that something has to happen in the form of horror relief.
Collateral damage is a guarantee in all psychological horror. Family members of the targeted aren’t safe. Friends of the targeted aren’t safe. No one close to the targeted is safe.
There can be a lot of blood involved with psychological horror, but there doesn’t have to be. Sometimes it’s the buildup of a mystery, such as a kidnapping villain who kills there victims and only the bodies are found later. Or a stalker who just doesn’t understand limits and personal space that ends up killing someone they think they care about accidentally.
Why is this stuff scary? Because we realize it’s most likely the stuff that can actually happen to everyday people. It could happen to us, even if we try to prevent it.
Psychological horror involves that strange guy down the street in a neighborhood where kids are disappearing. It’s where the crazy guy at work snaps and blames his co-workers for all his troubles. It’s anyone. It’s random. It happens every day in the real world.
What’s going to stop it from happening to you or me? There’s no way of knowing. Chances are, at some point in life, something scary and tragic will happen in our lives or of those we know. It’s inevitable.
Psychological horror is real terror. Psychological horror is what plagues your thoughts every time your child is out of your sight, when your family leaves your house in the morning and you wonder if you’ll see them again, and it’s the fear you feel when you’re out after dark and you hear a strange noise behind you. It’s inside you. You are scared something is going to happen, or someone will step into your life and cause your death or the death of someone you care about.
Be safe, my friends, and enjoy horror entertainment while hoping none of it ever happens to you!
©Rebecca Besser, 2015. All rights reserved.
July 9, 2015
Guest Jay Wilburn – Writing What Speaks to You
by Jay Wilburn
We’re supposed to write what we know. All my stories would be about being a teacher, stocking shelves at a Wal-Mart, cooking at Waffle House, or watching Internet porn. I’d have no alien or zombie stories unless it was about a teacher being abducted or eaten. In most of my teacher stories, the principal ends up dying. I’m sure there is nothing to that though.
To be fair, that advice mainly refers to using what you know to fill out the believable sections of your story to make the extraordinary seem more grounded. It means to not overlook the stuff you do know as good pieces for story. If you live in a small, Southern town, consider writing your hardboiled crime novel set there instead of a more traditional city setting you’ve never visited. If you don’t know anything about police procedure, you can research, interview, and extrapolate. Or you can pull the story into the lives of the cop’s quirky Southern family which you do have extensive knowledge of. We each have corresponding equivalents to these setting, job, and environment elements that can serve a story in ways that all the outside research in the world may not touch on in the same visceral way. The details you know how to communicate from having your hands and teeth on it for a number of years dig down into a readers heart in a different way.
Better than writing what we know may be writing what we feel. This could still be writing what you know, but I think it goes to a bone level knowledge. Writing about pain, loss, or what you fear is more powerful than extrapolating those feelings from the outside. Those feelings can be overlaid on other situations or lives in a story in a way that convinces the reader that the characters are feeling something real and bigger than the flat page.
This can then be taken to writing what you actually care about. I taught elementary and middle school for a combined sixteen years before taking the leap to being a full time writer. Teaching kids to write is a monumental task. Beyond the nuts and bolts of letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs is getting to any level of content. Then, it was back to words, sentences, and paragraphs formed in any intelligible way. I’d spend forever pulling any level of substance out of them, then we edit, then we revise, and then we rewrite, then we repeat, and then we publish by stapling their one or two paragraphs of contrived writing on the bulletin board. Or I could make them mad about something and they would write me angry volumes that we just had to organize into sentences and paragraphs.
The same is still largely true of adult writers of every stripe. The trick as adult, professional, fiction writers is to write about what we care about in a subtle way that does not come off as preaching a sermon. Unless you are actually writing a sermon, but even then subtlety and the art of building a strong argument serve well too.
I started out writing about zombies. I actually started as a kid writing crappy fantasy and sci fi knock off stories on notebook paper that I seldom finished and never let anyone read. My pro career started with zombies. My first check for writing read in the memo line “PAYMENT FOR ZOMBIES.” Those still may be some of the most beautiful words in the English language. I still rank I Love You very highly, but Payment For Zombies is very special to me on an individual, personal level.
I moved away from zombies as my writing career progressed. I had no shame in them and jumped on writing a story about them every time an opportunity presented itself. I was just looking for other work and other tones to my voice. In the process, I think my zombie stories got better and started getting more attention. I started using tricks from other genre’s tool boxes and created better and more creative stories in every genre I explored.
“Dead Song” came out of that wild exploration. The short story is a weird, little anti story that drew some serious attention. I took another look at it and decided there was a lot of untold story behind it. I very quickly discovered that there were connections in the tale that I had not considered. I started book one of the Dead Song Legend thinking the whole epic tale would be one, stand-alone novel. After the first couple chapters, I thought I was dealing with a trilogy. After a couple more chapters, I stopped again and outlined out the entire span of the Legend, if I were to tell it in its entirety and I came up with twelve books.
I finished and published book one along with the five song soundtrack. Both are linked below.
The book deals with drag queens, zombies, music, family lost, family chosen, and identity. Tiny Jones is a gay man that ends up with multiple identities he chooses for himself or that are partially chosen for him. Almost every character in the story goes by a stage name – an apocalypse name. They all have different reasons for hiding or reinventing their identities. Identity is what we share with people about ourselves, but it is also what we hide.
The relationship between Tiny and Satch in the story represents every relationship from family to friends to more. They reveal and hide. They push and pull. They are stronger and weaker together. Their lives and relationship impact the lives and relationships around them. They deal with a world that in some cases has stripped away problems around race and sexual orientation because of a focus on survival. In other cases, the thin, social parameters that held some of those prejudices in check have been stripped away and they are more raw and less confined. Through it all, they find life between the music people still write, play, sing, and perform when they want to do more than just survive.
All of these issues speak to me as a writer, as a reader, and just as a person. The Dead Song Legend is the story that speaks to me. It is the story that sings to me.
Check out the latest book and music from a new series by Jay Wilburn:
The Dead Song Legend Dodecology Book 1: January from Milwaukee to Muscle Shoals –
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00YDZKXCI/jaywil0d-20
The Sound May Suffer – Songs from the Dead Song Legend Book 1: January –
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/amazing-circle-of-suffering/id996569862?i=996569871&ign-mpt=uo%3D4
Jay Wilburn lives with his wife and two sons in Conway, South Carolina near the Atlantic coast of the southern United States. He taught public school for sixteen years before becoming a full time writer. He is the author of the Dead Song Legend Dodecology and the music of the five song soundtrack recorded as if by the characters within the world of the novel The Sound May Suffer. Follow his many dark thoughts on Twitter @AmongTheZombies, his Facebook author page, and at JayWilburn.com
© Jay Wilburn. All rights reserved.
July 4, 2015
Bloody Hell by Rebecca Besser
By Rebecca Besser
Supernatural evil is a prominent element in a lot of horror entertainment. Demons and disgruntled ghosts are unsettling, and they’re great for building the tension of terror before the horror really kicks in and the collateral damage begins. There’s something intimately frightening about something that can literally possess one’s body and displace their soul.
It would be like being dead without really dying. And, if that’s not bad enough, you’ll usually end up dead. (Again, it’s all about death.)
Even if you don’t believe in the supernatural, Hell, Satan/Lucifer, or even God, there is always the implication that you can be possessed by strong evil spirits. This is brought about in many tragic and simplistic ways. From early supernatural horror, we know not to play with Quija boards; that’s almost always how the possessions or unsettling of evil spirts happened back in the day.
Now it’s getting raped by strange plants or looking at writing on a wall that allows the takeover of one’s body.
Sometimes the exercising of the demon(s) is farfetched and complex. Sometimes it’s simple and straight forward.
Ghosts that can control their surroundings, such as haunted houses are equally as creepy as personal possession. There’s no escape because it’s in your personal space. There’s nowhere to go, and often there are few you can turn to for help, and even then, dispelling the entity from your life can be complex.
The supernatural/demon elements are costly to the lives and emotions of their victims. They are elements far beyond control and understanding that can wreak havoc on anyone and everything they touch.
They are intense beyond words in terror and horror. There’s nothing scarier that something reaching from beyond the grave to mess with the living, is there? They make death that much scary, knowing there are dark things there we might have to face in the afterlife.
©Rebecca Besser, 2015. All rights reserved.
July 1, 2015
Summer of Zombie Box Set Ebook – $1.99
join forces to bring you one, massive, zombie book box set!
^^ Look at me! Aren’t I sexy?! You KNOW you want me. ^^
This amazingly affordable book contains:
A Shrouded World Whistlers by Mark Tufo & John O’Brien
Bob the Spy by Jaime Johnesee
Loose Ends by Jay Wilburn
Undead Drive-Thru by Rebecca Besser
Trudge: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse by Shawn Chesser
T-Minus Zero by Jack Wallen
Humanity’s Hope: Camp H by Greg P. Ferrell
Benton: A Zombie Novel by Jolie du Pre’
The Orphans: Origins by Mike Evans
Dead Hunger II by Eric A. Shelman
Dying Days: Origins by Armand Rosamilia
Odium: The Dead Saga by Claire C. Riley
~
Now you’re probably wondering how much you’ll have to part with
to make this limited time, awesome zombie ebook yours.
Right?!
Wait for it…
WAIT FOR IT…
…$1.99!
What are you waiting for?
Go buy it!
Amazon US Link: http://www.amazon.com/Summer-Zombie-ebook-box-set-ebook/dp/B00YB0VNSS/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1432904204&sr=8-2&keywords=summer+of+zombie
Amazon UK Link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Summer-Zombie-ebook-box-set-ebook/dp/B00YB0VNSS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1432904578&sr=8-1&keywords=Summer+of+Zombie
June 30, 2015
Immortality by Rebecca Besser
By Rebecca Besser
Remember that fear of death I was talking about? What if you didn’t have to face it…ever? That’s the main draw of vampires (in my opinion). Who wouldn’t want to live forever? ME! But, there’s a catch… You have to kill to stay alive; it’s not an eternity for everyone.
To be a vampire, you have to be willing to truly leave humanity behind. You have to be willing to see humans as your food. They are no longer your family. They are no longer your friends. You will either kill them to get the sustenance you need, or they will die from being human over time. The only exemption to this fate would be if they were too turned into a vampire.
Although the allure of vampirism will always be there, because the idea of having all the time in the world to travel, learn, and explore will never grow undesirable. Everyone wants that free pass that keeps them from having to face death (death thing AGAIN!). But, in a way, they do have to face death. They watch generations pass away and new ones rise up (not to mention at every meal). I imagine it would be like having babies over and over again as you watch each generation try to learn and apply what the previous generation has mastered. That could get tedious.
Vampires were all the rage for a while, but not in their pure state. They were popular in a watered down version of “people friendly” vampires in literature/movies in the Twilight version.
This disgusted most people who had been fans of vampires forever (like me). Gone were the glory days of Blade, Interview with a Vampire, and From Dusk Till Dawn. Gone were the days where vampires were classy, killing death machines that didn’t apologize for being kickass!
Now, after the spotlight was pointed at the “soft” vampires, the popularity and demand for anything vampire has gone way down.
I, personally, would love to see a strong, true, violent uprising of something new in the vampire world. Unfortunately, that will be hard to pull off, especially since the horror creature of desire is now the zombie. And even zombies are being watered down into “people friendly” niceness.
©Rebecca Besser, 2015. All rights reserved.
June 27, 2015
Undead Trending by Rebecca Besser
By Rebecca Besser
Zombies are currently the most popular horror creature. Why? That could be anyone’s guess. The popularity of The Walking Dead has definitely pumped up the fan base with people who normally wouldn’t give zombies a second glance. I think that’s partly because of the drama of survival.
People want to see who lives and who dies, and the how for both. They know there’s the threat of a zombie attack at every turn. They know that if someone does something stupid, someone will die. (There’s that death thing again.) So, zombie entertainment becomes about the survivors more than the zombies; it becomes about the people who live and how they deal with those who don’t.
Zombies are also popular because of the apocalyptic element they bring on their…puss trails. People understand and know that once everything gets so bad that something like a zombie plague breaks out that society will evaporate. This lends zombies a political angle.
How many people are happy about the way things are going in the world? I would say pretty much no one. And that leads us to crave a “reset” and that’s why any apocalyptic fiction is of interest. We love the art, we love the literature, and we love the shows/movies that depict what we crave.
We crave change. But we know it would be ugly. Zombies are ugly and violent. They are the perfect vehicle for our innermost yearnings of change.
Everyone imagines themselves as a survivor in the Z-poc, but most of us would be the shambling, rotting corpses that run around being the hardship of those who survive (those crowds of zombies had to come from somewhere). I don’t think anyone imagines themselves as a zombie for real. I mean, it’s fun to pretend to be a zombie at Halloween, but wouldn’t you want your loved one to shoot you in the head if you really were a zombie? I know I would.
Let’s all hope we never have to find out if we can survive…or if we’ll be just one in the horde of deadly change. Either way, we’re likely to die at some point and that terror of possible death lends to the undead horror that is the zombie.
©Rebecca Besser, 2015. All rights reserved.
June 26, 2015
Teaser: Leah Rhyne #SummerofZombie
Read an excerpt from Leah Rhyne’s Undead America: Jenna’s War! #SummerofZombie
Originally posted on Dying Days:
“Meat’s meat,” said Sam, thumping the butt of his ancient shotgun against the dull hardwood floor. A sound like an actual gunshot rang through the room, and the gathered collection of ragtag survivors sat up a little straighter. “We need to survive, and to survive we need protein. I don’t care where it comes from.”
He paused, letting the words sink in, and I stared at the ground beneath my feet.
Winters in Nebraska – or at least that winter, since it was the only one I’d ever experienced – were hard. The chaotic thunderstorms of the fall gave way only when the furies of blizzards took over, with snow falling so thick and heavy and fast we found ourselves paralyzed, stuck in a farmhouse whose walls cried out in agony against the winds and whose roof sank beneath the snow’s wet, heavy weight.
The number of refugees in the…
View original 605 more words
Undead Regeneration by Rebecca Besser
A great review for Undead Regeneration! #SummerofZombie
Originally posted on Out of the Green:
The zombie is gone…finally and truly dead.
John and Ky try to get on with their lives, but they can’t. They are haunted by the past and it’s tearing apart their future.
With no other options, they go undercover where Sam had worked before he came home…undead: ReGen.
They struggle with their circumstances, their fears, and their relationship as they fight to tame their nightmares and create a happy and healthy future together.
What does one do when your friends and family are killed by zombies at your family’s Drive-Thru and you and your, now fiancée, barely escape with your lives? Why move four blocks away from the company you suspect created the undead beings. What else?
Okay, okay, that wasn’t fair to Ms. Besser. Yes, our couple does move close to one of ReGen’s facilities and yes, I did question the author about it because I thought that was…
View original 421 more words
