I am Blessed....by the Undead

I've been getting a trickle (like, um, TWO pieces in two days) of fan mail, and of course people want to know how/why I write what I write now - zombie apocalyptic horror. So I thought about it. It's a yearning, really. You get an idea, and you have to put it on paper. When I was working on GOTLD, I realized I had some ideas about the zombie genre that just couldn't be expressed by analyzing other people's zombie stories. And those ideas are not that far away from stuff in my other non-fiction that I've written about more explicitly Christian depictions of sin and evil (e.g. Dante, Flannery O'Connor, etc.), but they needed the voice or the form of fiction for them to be expressed right. So, I gave it a try.

I can also say what this move means to me. It's a blessing, a chance, a gift, and one bestowed with only very slight inconveniences (all those pesky rewrites, rejection letters, and the occasional bad review). Most people hit age forty, and if they're not 100% satisfied with where they're at (and it seems many of them are NOT), if there's some yearning they have that's not being fulfilled, then they might have to cause some real trauma and upheaval to themselves and their families to go fulfill that yearning - possibly divorce, quitting a job, moving to a new state or a new country - or stay put and never know what might have been. That sounds like a choice that sucks pretty bad either way. But me, I get to do this, keep my job and my family, and see where it leads. That's a pretty big blessing, as they go, I think. So thanks!