Steven’s Comments (group member since Apr 18, 2017)

Steven’s comments from the Navigating Indieworld Discussing All Things Indie group.

Oh and talking on panels is a great way to put yourself out there. You just approach them the year before and select through topics you can chat about. Since I'm a disabled combat veteran I sign up for a lot of the hidden disability panels, coping through art and creativity and military related panels.

I attend scifi/fantasy conventions. My favorite is BayCon which is coming up next month in California. There's all fandoms but a huge portion of it is folks who love books.

I'm pretty biased about BayCon though because I give out an award there every year. I can't tell you if it's a great place to meet an agent or a publisher because that's never happened to me but it's definitely a great place to meet other like-minded fans.

So I started writing as therapy from suffering a traumatic brain injury in the military. I wrote everything down and started to write nightmares involving zombies.

But my zombies, although they spread like the undead normally do, they evolved into more monstrous things with special abilities. While most of the world hid away from them in enclaves, my main characters were always rushing out into the world to face them.

Zombie pop culture tends to flourish when we are coming out of a recession because zombies are usually a metaphor for consumerism. Mine aren't though. They're monstrous things of a different caliber because I think they are metaphors for terrorism. That's why my main characters choose to live and rush out to face it head on because that's the only way you ever beat that fear.

A friend of mine told me that instead of being grim and depressing like most zombie stories are, my story felt more like "Well we can die at any moment and that's why it's important to live," which to me seems more real after being in a war zone. In war you aren't depressed and sad all the time. That's a misconception. You laugh the hardest and the longest because you are more conscious that life could be fleeting.

So that's why my story is different. It's a bit of life from an apocalypse and a completely different take on a classic monster.

Hi I'm Steve. I write apocalyptic fiction with a decent bit of comedy thrown in. My second book is due out this summer. Pretty excited to find out a group like this exists here because honestly, I have no idea how to market anything and I sure could use the advice.