An excerpt from todays’ revisions of Season 2 of This Plague of Days.
Jack ordered her daughter to close her eyes, too.
“No, Mom.”
“Anna! I don’t want you to wake up screaming with nightmares tonight.”
“No,” Anna said. “I’ll look. Years from now, I’ll tell my children what I saw here.” She gazed at tangled horrors as the van bumped along over a sprawl of bodies. The uncaring Sutr Virus had not done this. People had done this to other people.
Many of those murdered had no eyes now, but their gaping jaws suggested anger, fear, pain and surprise. Anna saw torn flesh. White bones rose. Skeletons emerged from their hiding places.
“If I don’t look…” Anna said, “it’s not right. Someone has to bear witness. If I don’t look, it’s like saying this doesn’t matter or it means I won’t be around later to pass it on. Someday soon, the animals will finish eating and what will be left but me and my memory? Not looking is like…”
“Giving up,” Theo said. “Yes. Look, Anna! It’s a heavy load, but someone who can tell the story should carry the memory.”
Season 2 arrives this fall. You can get Season 1 now by clicking the cover. The revisions are going well, but I’m adding a lot of new material as well. Season 2 is packed with action.
The Zombie Apocalypse serial is here. Get 5 episodes at 99 cents each or the whole Season for $3.99. Season Two hits the world at the end of September.
Jaimie Spencer’s dictionary from This Plague of Days is real. If you’re reading my apocalyptic serial, you know that Jaimie has a dictionary obsession. That’s an obsession that, conveniently, I share with my young, autistic friend. I have slang dictionaries, rhyming dictionaries, quotation dictionaries and dictionaries about poisons, fables, mythology, imaginary places, Latin, Spanish, French, Modern Thought and more.
Yes, I use online dictionaries sometimes, but I’m one of those people who browse from one word to the next and get lost in discovery. I love to find something I didn’t know I was looking for. That’s why the main dictionary I use for This Plague of Days is the one pictured.
Of all my dictionaries, this one is special. I picked up this dictionary at a yard sale. It was falling apart so I duct taped the binding. It’s the unabridged Webster’s Twentieth Century Edition from 1939 (original edition 1904). It’s packed full of words no one uses anymore. And just like Jaimie Spencer, I can get lost in it for hours. It’s the one book that contains all the others.
Some read This Plague of Days because they love zombies, twisty suspense and autistic heroes. People who are word nerds grok it, too.
If you’ve read any of the episodes or the complete first season, please do leave a review on Amazon.
From tonight’s revisions of This Plague of Days, Season 2:
Dayo kept the girls quiet. She’d thought it would be an impossible task, but one look out the window had been enough for the girls to retreat to their pillow fort beneath the dining room table. Mostly, they slept. They slept not to rest more, but to escape the waking terrors. When they did not sleep, Aasa and Aastha held each other’s hands and whispered quietly.
It was Sinjin-Smythe who gave them away.
Prizes for friends and allies
Today, I had a little email meeting with my graphic designer, Kit Foster of KitFosterDesign.com. As we gear up for the launch of Season Two, we have many great things in the works: t-shirts, raffles and prizes aplenty. There will even be…wait for it…free ebooks for people who help promote the serial.
Jaimie contented himself watching auras. The people who had arrived by car or truck were obvious. Their feet didn’t hurt. Many were bent from back pain. He surmised that at one time the refugees had tried to carry much more weight. What had once been considered necessary was now a heavy trinket, abandoned by the side of the road and soon forgotten. The Apocalypse did not tolerate nostalgia and survival living in the same dark, cramped room. Jaimie saw everyone’s skull that way.
No matter what dangers lurked in their bodies, their crown chakras were always busy trying to sort out each individual’s place in the world before their inevitable exit. He felt sorry for them. Such struggle cried out for pity. If he could speak, he’d tell them the truth of their existence. He wanted to relieve them of their heavy burdens, but there were too many and their needs were too great.
Mrs. Bendham called from the back of the van. “The man who warned you the epidemic was coming — ”
“Uncle Cliff, Dad’s twin brother,” Anna said.
Jack glanced in her rear-view mirror. “Cliff told us to get ready when people were still laughing at those of us who took the pandemic seriously.”
“That’s nice. Though what kind of preparation can you do against the Sutr Virus except take your vitamins, live in an aquarium and hope for the best?” asked Mrs. Bendham.
“We were better off for longer because of my brother-in-law,” Jack answered.
“Until everything was taken away.” Anna said. Jack heard something new in her daughter’s voice. That wasn’t self-pity. Anna hated the old lady.
Good, Jack thought. Self-pity drains energy. Anger pays it out.
Mrs. Bendham seemed oblivious to Anna’s anger. “Where is he now? Do you think he got out of the way of it all?”
Revising Season 2 of This Plague of Days this evening. Here’s a bitter taste of Sutr-X. This is just before the Infected invade America.
Jack stomped on the brake and swerved to avoid a body in a narrow gap between abandoned cars. It had been a woman. Three large black birds tore into the gore of her open belly.
Jack blasted the van’s horn. The birds backed away a few feet, but did not fly. In their retreat, the birds revealed more horror.
The dead woman lay on her back, swollen and decomposing. The corpse was too close to avoid being seen. What was seen could not be unseen.
One eye protruded, swollen in its socket. The other eye was missing, lost to the vultures. The tongue, too, was fat and stuck out at an angle from the yawning maw. Then Jack spotted something worse…
Episode 4 is out now. Get each of episodes for 99 cents each or grab all of Season One for a discount of just $3.99.
An autistic boy and his family versus The Running Dead
(Author’s Note: The following article is about why I serialized This Plague of Days. If you came for a secret revealed that isn’t a spoiler, The Link for the Curious is at the bottom of this post.)
Dickens wrote serials. So did Hemingway. Much of television is based on the serial format. The formula for reader satisfaction is pretty straightforward: hook ’em and give them some play but keep them on the line. Give readers rising tension and cliffhangers and you have a story that keeps them coming back week to week.
When I worked in traditional publishing, the model was much different:
The Zombie Apocalypse serial is here. Get it week to week for a scary summer or get the whole season.
One launch date; blitz all media all at once; concentrate the push within the first couple of weeks of launch; watch all efforts either win or peter out as bookstores sent back their inventory returns a few weeks later.
Here’s what’s different about This Plague of Days:
It has six launch dates; five episodes per season sold at 99 cents each; or get the whole book immediately at a discount (just $3.99) and find out what happens to my autistic boy and my uber-villain.
The change in the publishing model
Amazon used to work something like old world publishing in that you could marshal your forces and do a book bomb. A book bomb is where you get everyone you know to buy your book on Amazon at 2 pm on a Tuesday. The way it used to work, the algorithms would boost your book up the charts. Once the Mighty Zon recognized that was what some people were doing, they changed the algorithm to push those books down as fast as they rose.
Now I know drip marketing is the best way to go (as I learned from David Gaughran, author of Let’s Get Digital and Let’s Get Visible). Amazon algorithms favor book sales over time. It’s still great to get a big X of sales over a short Y amount of time, but Amazon likes sales consistency, not stabs in the dark that can’t be sustained.
Serials can sustain. With each episode serving as a sample to encourage readers to go ahead and buy the full Season One (and Season Two comes out in September) I feel like I haven’t even begun to reach new readers. When you launch one book, it feels like the date comes and goes quickly. Maybe you make an impact, but it feels like one kick at the can. After that, you’re repeating yourself and boring potential new readers. (What? He’s still on about that book he published all the way back in June?)
An autistic boy and his family versus The Running Dead
Serialization allows me to keep talking unselfconsciously. I have new launch dates, new material, and new information. I give readers a lot to look forward to.
What’s more?
I didn’t skimp on the episodes. Many serials give 10,000 words per episode. My episodes run 20-25,000 words. I wanted to be generous and give them lots of action.
Also? This Plague of Days is like two books in one! This is a zombie apocalypse with a contemplative side. At its heart is a boy with autism who sees the world very differently. So yes, there’s tension and creepiness and fast zombie action and an international thriller. There’s also a family dealing with a plague from the cold comfort of their living room in a world suddenly dystopian and unfamiliar.
Not all mysteries will be solved in Season One. A very important story arc in This Plague of Days is fooling readers right now!
Many authors experimented with serialization. It didn’t work well for them. Perhaps they were ahead of their time. Perhaps there were other variables that didn’t fall into place. I modelled what successful authors were doing and added length to the episodes to give bang for the buck. Then Amazon came out with its serials program and I felt like the biggest brains in publishing blessed the model I adopted.
If you haven’t bought Season One yet, there’s a secret I’m prepared to reveal now.
Not only did I serialize This Plague of Days, I did something no traditional publisher would have allowed.
An autistic boy and his family versus The Running Dead
When I worked in traditional publishing, author Anne Rice made vampires huge in popular culture. It seemed everyone was reading Interview with the Vampire (and then all her other books). Soon after, many agents and editors burned out on vampires. Vampires were done to death. The professionals were ready to put a stake through the heart of the phenomenon, so it must be so, right?
Foolish humans.
After the pros declared vampires were finished, the next wave came: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Twilight series, endless graphic novels, fan fic and True Blood.
If you live long enough, you begin to see patterns repeat. It happens in products and news cycles and franchises. Interesting things don’t go away. They get made anew.
The challenge in resurrecting any subject is to make it fresh: Cheerleader versus vampires in a world secretly packed with demons; vampires that sparkle in sunlight, more sex and whatever else it takes to make the old seem new.
Today I ran across an interesting blog entry. The author is tired of zombies. Good news! Zombies are still undead, too. Whether it’s new fans discovering old material in new forms (e.g. the World War Z movie), zombies as love interests, or my new serial (This Plague of Days), fresh takes abound for new fans and for those who think they’ve seen it all.
Innovation doesn’t stop with George Romero, or any other artist no matter how gifted.
If we’d stopped because the genre seemed to be running on fumes, we wouldn’t have 28 Days Later,Shaun of the Dead or The Walking Dead!
My zombie serial features a hero on the autism spectrum, eco-terrorists and more Latin phrases than Harry Potter has spells. It starts with one terrible virus (as if that wasn’t bad enough) that mutates into something more deadly.
What interests me most about dangerous situations is how they bring out truth.
Jack ordered her daughter to close her eyes, too.
This Plague of Days 