Random information about Adopting a Sex Doll and Zombie Punter…

When I finish posting Adopting a Sex Doll, there will not be a free e-book version coming out. I’m sorry for that, and I cannot explain further for now. But rest assured I will post the last three parts on time.

Normally I take a break between stories, but a few days after the last post of Adopting… I’m going to head directly into Zombie Punter. This is a dark fantasy about two best friends who have been planning for a zombie invasion since they were little kids, and who finally have a chance to test out their theories when a global outbreak occurs. Throughout their early teens, Eugene  “G” O’Donnell and Jake Mahoney filled a notebook with experiments and zombie killing ideas, and now they can’t wait to try out their ideas on the undead hordes. But what if the zombies aren’t the “classic type” that G and Jake were fantasizing about? Can they keep killing zombies after they learn the truth? And will G ever get over his fears and admit how he feels about Jake?

So, that’s the basic pitch. Now I want to explain a little bit about why I developed this story. This 33K novella is loosely inspired by Brian Keene’s Dead Sea. You see, I bought Dead Sea when it first came out because Brian Keene said, “The main character of this story is a gay black man.” I wanted to see how Brian handled that unique perspective, given that he is straight and white. But the problem is, aside from some lectures, the main character’s sexual orientation never comes up.

Being fair to Brian, the story doesn’t lend itself to being able to do much with character development, since everyone is always running from more zombies. You have to expect that…it IS a zombie book. But I was disappointed with how little the character’s orientation came up, because it was the main reason I was getting the book.

Fast forwarding to March, I set out to write a zombie story based on a joke I told hubby. But before I got started on it, I got into a discussion with someone on a forum about Dead Sea, and their impressions were close to mine. The story is okay, but there’s nothing really gay about the main character. That he’s black has more relevance in the story than his orientation.

This got me thinking about  making the main character of Zombie Punter gay. I didn’t just want him to say he was gay, either. No, I wanted to make sure something really, really gay happened somewhere in the course of the story.

Enter my two main characters, G and Jake. G is gay, while his best friend Jake is bisexual. Jake is mixed race, with an Irish father and a Jamican mother. So this is both a gay and an interracial relationship. And yes, they do eventually have sex…twice.

But, the book also needed an antagonist, and while casting about for ideas, I remembered one of the more steretyped characters in zombie fiction, the crazy Christian. I’ve seen so many zombie stories that have a crazy Christian who sees the zombies as “proof” of God’s existence, and so I wanted my antagonist to be an Atheist, a crazy Atheist who saw the zombies as his way to prove that God doesn’t exist.

I named this crazy Atheist Blaine Kerne. Yeah, kinda silly, but then I named all of the characters in a similar way. Among the cast, there’s a zombie killer named Jorge Ramirez, for George Romero, and a cameo by Repairman Robert. These names are intended as a tongue in cheek tribute to the people who’ve inspired me over the years, and I hope that should Brian ever get wind of me using him as the “bad guy,” he understands that I killed him with the utmost respect, as a way to thank him for inspiring me to write this story.