Zombies: The Good, The Bad, and The Undead

The Walking Dead is back! To celebrate, I thought I’d talk a little bit about zombies. As you may or may not know, I pitched Reaper's Touch as a cowboys versus zombies story because that gives you a quick sense of the world in what’s kind of a twisted cross-genre mash of a series. BUT, I usually qualify that by saying that REAPERS aren’t your traditional zombies. They’re more along the lines of the creatures in 28 Days Later—infected with a disease that turns them into mindless, cannibalistic monsters—and less like classic Romero zombies.

If you’re looking for zombies, here are some of the classic movies you won’t want to miss…

I Walked With A Zombie is a 1940's classic set in Saint Sebastian.

The zombies in this movie are voodoo zombies who appear perfectly healthy aside from their blank-eyed stares and complete lack of willpower. The setup is that the heroine, Betsy, is a nurse who's been hired to care for the mentally ill wife of a wealthy plantation owner. 

Paul Holland is a dour, serious man. Not only is his wife in need of constant care but before she became ill she planned to run away with his brother Wesley. Despite multiple warnings from people living on the island, Betsy falls in love with the tormented Mr. Holland and then comes up with a wildly unconventional treatment plan in an effort to cure his wife. 

Kind of like Jane Eyre if Jane Eyre was set in the West Indies and Mrs. Rochester was a zombie. 

It's a smart, atmospheric horror that manages to be incredibly creepy without any gore. What's especially cool is that despite the film being 70 years old, the female characters are interesting, complex and actually move the plot forward.

I also love this disclaimer:

The characters and events depicted in this photoplay are fictional. Any similarity to actual persons, living, dead or possessed is purely coincidental.

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The Plague of the Zombies (1966) is kind of a zombie mystery film that starts out with mysterious deaths, a baffled doctor, and a secret organization led by the local squire. The baffled doctor and his mentor decide to dig up some of the recently deceased in order to figure out what's causing the plague. They find empty coffins and from there it's a whodunnit...with animated corpses.

The zombies are the same kind of voodoo zombies that you see in movies like I Walked With A Zombie, except that while earlier zombies could be mistaken for living people, these pretty much look like walking corpses. They're bloodthirstier too and prone to violence when left to their own devices.

The Plague of the Zombies is more spooky than actually frightening, but if you're looking for a non-gory zombie movie, this might be the one for you.

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To be upfront, Night of the Living Dead isn't my favorite zombie movie. I think it's interesting because of the way it transformed zombie myth, but the female characters are frustrating and it's a little dull. The best thing about it is that everyone dies in the end. I feel kind of guilty for not liking it more than I do, but...there it is.

Night of the Living Dead is an important movie though and no zombie movie marathon would be complete without it. It's the movie that made the leap from the old voodoo mindless-slave zombies to the aggressive, flesh-eating zombies of the modern era. These new-and-improved zombies have no master but their own insatiable hunger. They're not intentionally-made creatures either. Their condition is a side-effect of...well, whatever bad thing the author wants to comment on. In the case of the Night of the Living Dead, it's radiation.

The story is that radiation from the Venus probe is causing the recent, unburied dead to become animate. It's a "sudden general explosion of mass homicide" and the ghouls are "ordinary looking people, some say they appear to be in a kind of trance". They can only be killed by a shot to the head or blow to the skull. Because the radiation activated the brain, you kill the brain and you kill the ghoul.

Barbra ("They're coming to get you, Barbra!") and her brother have the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, visiting an isolated cemetery when the uprising occurs. The brother dies and Barbra escapes to a farmhouse where she holes up with a small, dysfunctional group of survivors.

Law enforcement and army deal effectively with the ghoul problem in more populated areas, but it takes them awhile to get into the country. While Barbra's group doesn't fare well, this isn't presented as an apocalypse. There's an uprising of a finite number of corpses. It's cleaned up and presumably people continue on as normal.

As far as gore goes, it's not a complete gore fest but the late night zombie picnic is pretty gross, as is the child zombie eating her parents. But, then, aren't child zombies always creepy as hell?

So...there's not an elaborate plot and pretty much all the characters are unlikeable, but nothing beats it for sheer influence. It introduced the concept of zombism as a widespread outbreak and the idea of zombies as flesh-eating ghouls that could only be stopped by destroying the brain. It's so influential that lots of people consider Romero's version of zombies in Night of the Living Dead to be the only true zombies...even though they're never actually referred to as zombies in the film.

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What's your favorite zombie movie?

Also... If you want to read some zombie (or zombie-like) books, Reaper's Touch is on sale right now for only $0.99, as is PJ Schnyder's Bite Me. So get 'em cheap while you can:) Not on sale, but still full of zombie goodness is Joshua Root's Undead Chaos.

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Eleri Stone is a RITA-nominated author of paranormal and fantasy romance. Born in New Jersey, she now lives in Iowa with her husband and their three children. All of her stories have some element of speculative fiction in them and they all end with a happily-ever-after. www.eleristone.com

Pitfalls of Writing Fantasy - Or Why Your Heroine Can't Sleep So Much

The other day on Twitter, Angela James, Editorial Director at Carina Press, asked about common tics in writing fantasy genre as part of her really useful writing workshop Before You Hit Send. She used as an example that romance writers can fall into the trap of repeatedly describing hair and eye color. A few of us pitched in thoughts and the results were very interesting.

Then yesterday I started reading a fantasy romance that I'd put off reading for no good reason. You know those books - everyone and their Cousin Fred recommends it and it's been in your TBR pile for literally YEARS and you keep somehow not getting to it. When you finally, randomly - or because the number of recommendations reaches some titration point - actually read it, it's really wonderful and you gobble it up, exactly as everyone and their Cousin Fred said you would.

Yeah. So I really like this book.

But I did notice a tic, one I've noticed in other fantasy novels that take place in low tech alternate worlds or sometimes historicals. It's sometimes hard to think up what your characters do all damn day.

Because they're not watching reality TV or surfing the internet or addictively following Twitter, are they? They don't have carpools, dance recitals, soccer games and PTA meetings. They don't spend two hours every day commuting to work and another eight hours participating in meetings and conference calls. If you're lucky - and by which I mean, if you've done your job as a writer - there's sufficient conflict to keep them running around dealing with it. Inevitably, however, there's down time. This is particularly exacerbated with heroines who are upper class ladies. There's a tendency to have them lolling about all day while the women who actually do the work of keeping people clothed and fed tend to them.

What did these women do all freaking day???

Needlework, right? And gossip. I dunno. Watch any historically set film and that's all the women seem to do. No doubt this reflects a deep cultural bias where the men run around doing active, dynamic stuff and the womens dangle embroidered handkerchiefs out the unglazed castle windows.

One of the best parts of writing fantasy, I think, is that you can tear up these tropes. Maybe you historical types out there can, too? There ARE a lot more bluestocking-type heroines running around doing cool things in historical romances than HBO would have us believe. In fantasy, however, the heroines can wield great big swords and work magic and shift into predatory beasts. It gives them a lot of cool shiz to get up to all day.

So, why do we sometimes fall into the pit of having the heroine take a lot of long naps, in between bathing, eating and waiting around for the very hot hero to return from doing his active, dynamic stuff?

I think it's partly that internalizing of "if she's not loading the dishwasher, going to work, feeding the kids and dealing with the groceries, then what the hell DOES she do" thing. And it's easy to let the hot, hunky warrior hero be all protective and nurturing. Which inevitably leads to naps, meals and sex.

The other thing that happens, I believe, is something I did in writing my first novel, the fantasy romance Rogue's Pawn. At that time in my life, I was freakishly busy. I had two young stepkids, I worked a full-time career job, took or taught martial arts five nights a week, including some classes a two-hour drive each way. I often did not go to bed until one or two in the morning and then would get up at five or six to try to cram in an hour or two of writing on the novel. I was chronically sleep deprived and the novel took *forever* to finish.

When I couldn't sell it to anyone, but some wonderful people had given me great feedback on it, I went back and did a major revision on it after about nine months of distance. Guess what I saw? My heroine was exhausted ALL THE TIME. She had headaches. She took naps. She went to bed early and slept in late.

Shocking, huh?

It was amazing to go through and revise for that. Partly I'd committed a newbie writer mistake, but I've seen much more experienced writers do it, too. Being able to channel parts of ourselves into our heroines makes our work come alive - that's part of the magic we bring to the process, not unlike acting - but we need to apply the craft also, to ensure that we're not "leaking" our personal woes and wishes into our characters. Kind of a write-raw, edit at leisure deal.

It also helps to get enough sleep.

I've Been Meaning...

I was going to write this craaaazy good post tonight. Like, it was so good. There were laughs, there were tears. It was romantic. It was thought-provoking. But then I ended up rushing my cat to the vet and spent four hours in and out of exam rooms while a giant four-year old (human) did everything in his capacity to anger my cat and myself. Also, he turned the lights on and off a couple of times which made a black lab go ballistic.

So, pretend none of that happened and you’re reading an outstanding post that’s practically a list of all of your favorite things.

Like that TV show you’ve been looking forward to all summer that came back and it’s even better than you thought! Remember that episode where the one person did that thing and everyone was like “that’ll never work!” but it did and it didn’t feel contrived. Ah, that was the best.

And that book you’ve been waiting for? Released, weeks early. Go. Go straight to your nearest bookstore and pick a copy up. You’re gonna love it.

You know that restaurant you’ve been hoping to be able to squeeze into, maybe after a financial windfall and for a special occasion? Congratulations. That business card you put into a fishbowl a year ago was drawn, and you’ve won dinner for two (or six, if you’re one of those weird social people)!

Actually, why do you need to read a post to have all these things. Go: explore something you've been meaning to fall in love with.

It's Win-a-Book Wednesday with...Veronica Scott!

Veronica Scott

I'm going to do something different this time around - I'm offering an audiobook!  Escape From Zulaire  is an SFR Galaxy Award Winner and was also a 2014 National Excellence in Romance Fiction Award Winner.

This science fiction romance audio book is narrated by actor Michael Riffle, joined  by actress Mary Fegreus, who portrays the heroine, Andi.

I'll send the winner a free download code from Audible. (The download code also gives you  one month's free membership in Audible, which you can cancel at any time of course! No charge if cancelled by you before the first 30 days are up.)

The story:

Andi Markriss hasn’t exactly enjoyed being the houseguest of the planetary high-lord, but her company sent her to represent them at a political wedding. When hotshot Sectors Special Forces Captain Tom Deverane barges in on the night of the biggest social event of the summer, Andi isn’t about to offend her high-ranking host on Deverane’s say-so—no matter how sexy he is, or how much he believes they need to leave now.

Deverane was thinking about how to spend his retirement bonus when HQ assigned him one last mission: rescue a civilian woman stranded on a planet on the verge of civil war. Someone has pulled some serious strings to get her plucked out of the hot zone. Deverane’s never met anyone so hard-headed—or so appealing. Suddenly his mission to protect this one woman has become more than just mere orders.

That mission proves more dangerous than he expected when rebel fighters attack the village and raze it to the ground. Deverane escapes with Andi, and on their hazardous journey through the wilderness, Andi finds herself fighting her uncomfortable attraction to the gallant and courageous captain. But Deverane’s not the type to settle down, and running for one’s life doesn’t leave much time to explore a romance.

Then Andi is captured by the rebel fighters, but Deverane has discovered that Zulaire’s so-called civil war is part of a terrifying alien race’s attempt to subjugate the entire Sector. If he pushes on to the capitol Andi will die. Deverane must decide whether to save the woman he loves, or sacrifice her to save Zulaire.

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Releasing today! Launch yourself IN THE VOID!

IN THE VOID releases today, the sequel to the successful first book in the Tales from the Edge series, IN THE BLACK!

When you're preparing to be boarded by pirates you take every bit of help you can get - and if that includes a short teaching session by April Osano, the resident self-defense/BDSM expert, you take it.

Especially when Sean Harrison is the unfortunate target...

***

April strutted around a half-naked Sean as the courtesan studied his bare torso.

Studied the marks Catherine had left there only a few hours ago.

“Fighting dirty isn’t something women tend to do. We’re told to play nice, don’t hit below the belt and don’t pull hair.” April twisted her fingers in Sean’s short black hair and yanked his head back, hard.

His lips pulled back to expose his teeth but he stayed silent.

“I find pulling hair quite acceptable under certain circumstances.” She released him and continued her circling. “Your teachers didn’t allow you to think outside of the box where anything goes.”

Her hand flew to the inside of Sean’s right arm, just below the shoulder. “For example, pinching. A sharp pinch in the right place—” She twisted and snapped her fingers away. “Can distract even the most determined opponent.”

Catherine watched the purple welt rise.

Sean didn’t flinch, didn’t pull away.

“Fighting dirty tends to have you thinking about smacking a guy in the balls. A great target if you can get to it.”

April brought up her right knee and stopped less than an inch from Sean’s crotch.

He instinctively moved to cover with both hands.

She smiled and dropped her knee down. “Most men know that and protect the family jewels automatically.” April patted Sean’s cheek. “Understandable reaction. That’s the problem when you’re told to go for the balls—it’s more likely than not an attack will be thwarted.”

Sean exhaled slowly and returned his hands to his sides.

“But there’re other areas that can be attacked to inflict almost as much pain. When it comes to vital areas, both sexes have the same vulnerabilities. The arms, the legs, the nipples.” Her fingers landed on Sean’s left breast, pinching the delicate skin between her thumb and forefinger.

He rose up on his feet, grimacing, but he kept his eyes closed.

“Same for us, dear.” April looked at her directly. “Giving control, having control and using it. Knowing when to do what is important and not only in the middle of a fight.” She cocked her head to one side. “There are always going to be situations that are totally, utterly out of your control. How you react to them will decide your future.”

Sean whimpered.

“Enough.” Catherine found her voice. “Enough.”

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Book two of Tales from the Edge

Catherine Rodgers doesn't like Mercy spaceships, or the courtesans who work on them--not after her husband left her for a Mercy woman. But after her luxurious transport ship gets blown up to prevent her from cracking the lid off a corporate scam that's left hundreds dead and a few people very rich, the only vessel around to save her is theBonnie Belle.

Sean Harrison has worked as one of the Belle's courtesans for years, bringing happiness to countless women along the space lanes. When he's asked to look after Catherine while the Belle brings her to safety, it should be just another job. Somehow it's anything but.

Sean is captivated by Catherine's sense of justice and responsibility. And Catherine finds a softer, more emotionally intelligent man in Sean than she expected. Drawn together in darkness under the threat of death, they find the beginning of something lasting. But with pirates after the Belle and a price on Catherine's head, that beginning might be all they get.

IN THE VOID is out NOW! Come on board and see if they can make your dreams come true!

Drop on by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, iBooks, Kobo and Carina Press to hop on board the Bonnie Belle for another fateful adventure!

Also on Goodreads!

Here Be News

New Releases

Book two of Tales from the Edge

Catherine Rodgers doesn't like Mercy spaceships, or the courtesans who work on them--not after her husband left her for a Mercy woman. But after her luxurious transport ship gets blown up to prevent her from cracking the lid off a corporate scam that's left hundreds dead and a few people very rich, the only vessel around to save her is the Bonnie Belle.

Sean Harrison has worked as one of the Belle's courtesans for years, bringing happiness to countless women along the space lanes. When he's asked to look after Catherine while the Belle brings her to safety, it should be just another job. Somehow it's anything but.

Sean is captivated by Catherine's sense of justice and responsibility. And Catherine finds a softer, more emotionally intelligent man in Sean than she expected. Drawn together in darkness under the threat of death, they find the beginning of something lasting. But with pirates after the Belle and a price on Catherine's head, that beginning might be all they get.

Get it today!

To Love a King

HE’S TRYING TO RECLAIM THE PAST
To keep the balance between good and evil at the court of Annwyn, Prince Felan ap Gwyn has two weeks to marry and take the crown. But he wants more than just power—he wants love; a love he once had but was too stubborn to hold on to.

SHE’S STRUGGLING TO FACE THE FUTURE
It took years for Jacqueline Ara to put her life back together after Felan abandoned her. She’s moved on, even if her heart still burns for him. But with war in Annwyn looming and death bleeding into the mortal world, Felan and Jacquie will need to heal old wounds and rekindle the passion that once welled between them…or face losing everything.

"This compelling read will warm readers' hearts as the hero and heroine explore their second chance at love, igniting the page with their passion and giving readers a beautiful fairy tale ending."-RT Book Reviews, 4.5 stars

Buy now:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
iTunes
Book Depository
Add to your Goodreads shelf: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17969495-to-love-a-king

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On Sale for only $0.99!

CARINA PRESS | AMAZON | BARNES & NOBLE | GOOGLE PLAY | IBOOKS | KOBO

CARINA PRESS | AMAZON | BARNES & NOBLE | GOOGLE PLAY | IBOOKS | KOBO

CARINA PRESS | AMAZON | BARNES & NOBLE | GOOGLE PLAY | IBOOKS | KOBO

CARINA PRESS | AMAZON | BARNES & NOBLE | GOOGLE PLAY | IBOOKS | KOBO

Going Home

I was planning on writing a post about Autumn and why it's my favorite season, and struggling with how to put a fresh spin on such a familiar topic, and then my mother fell and broke her neck. 

Yes, I mean that literally. Apparently it's becoming more and more common especially among older women. Something to look forward to, I suppose. 

So here I am back in my parents' home for the next several weeks (although I hasten to add that this is not the house I grew up in) and for all intents and purposes, our roles have been reversed. My mother needs help dressing and bathing and eating. I find myself nagging her to drink more water, asking her if she needs to use the bathroom, complaining about her stubbornness and lack of patience. It's odd to see how we've come almost full-circle. And it's fitting that we should do so in the Autumn of the year. 

This is also going to be the first Autumn I've spent on the East Coast in almost thirty years. Already there are things that seem different than before; and other things that I am re-discovering. I've also been reconnecting with relatives I hadn't seen in some time, catching up on things I've missed, hearing old stories I'd half-forgotten

All in all, it's been an interesting and very colorful time, full of nostalgia and melancholy and memento mori--everything that Autumn should be. 

It struck me tonight that homecoming is also the theme of two of the books I have on sale this month. 

In Scent of the Roses, the first book in the trilogy that makes up my new box set Welcome to Oberon, Scout Patterson finds herself back at home after twenty years, where she's faced with many of the same emotions I'm dealing with...less the serial killer. So far. I hope. ;-)

In In the Dark, (the first book in my Children of Night series) twins Marc and Julie return to San Francisco to find that nothing is as they'd expected and, in a classic role reversal, they have to rescue the parent who'd once seemed invincible.  

Both will be available for a limited time for only .99--Welcome to Oberon is on sale now and for the next two weeks, In the Dark is on sale from October 15th through the 31st.  More information on both can be found at www.PGForte.com

What about you? Do you have a favorite season? A favorite theme? A favorite family story? I'd love to know!