Z 2134
Page 27
Jonah was trapped in his own head. The words murdering intruders tore through his brain, over and over until he opened his eyes.
He was no longer in the station.
Jonah was back at his house, deep inside a memory he couldn’t remember ever having.
Jonah looked around the room at the aged panels of his apartment’s old wooden walls, and the grimy light made the space seem cruel. He tried to make sense of his memory.
Molly looked up, smiling as she saw him. “Hey, sweetie, you’re home early! Did you come to check up on us?”
Jonah didn’t answer.
Instead, he pulled the shock stick from his belt, marched over to Molly, grabbed her by the throat with his left hand, pressing his fingers hard into her flesh as the eyes bulged from their sockets, then bashed her skull in.
Molly never had a chance to scream.
Her daughter did.
Jonah turned, surprised to see his daughter standing behind him, curdling the air with her deafening scream.
Jonah flashed awake, back in the train station, his entire body shaking. Father sat next to him, looking down with his kind face.
“What the hell?” Jonah screamed. “No, no, no. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it. What the hell was that?”
“That,” Father said, “was the truth, Jonah.”
To Be Continued…
In Season 2 of Z 2134
AUTHORS’ NOTE
A year into writing our weekly serials, Sean and I (Dave) get asked two questions more often than any others.
“When is the next Yesterday’s Gone coming out?”
“When are you two going to write a zombie series?”
Having engaged readers who want our serialized take on zombies is awesome. It’s a massive compliment, like wanting to see how a director would handle your favorite book as film.
People want to see what we’ll do with zombies, and we love that!
Truth is, we’ve wanted to do a zombie story for a while. I’ve always loved zombies. They’re one of the few monsters (other than aliens) which scare me in fiction. They also plague my dreams more constantly than any other nightmare. One of the creepiest scenes planned for the second season of Z comes directly from a dream I had right when we were signed to 47North.
Back when everyone else was writing vampires, and before zombies took off as “the next big thing,” Sean suggested we write a zombie book before they became too trendy. That was in 2008, before Amazon’s Kindle helped e-books explode, and before we could justify turning down paid work in hopes that we MIGHT sell some paperbacks if we spent a few months writing.
We put a year into writing our serials each week, and had launched four series, when we finally decided to write our first zombie story. Not just a story, but the same character-driven, cliffhanger-filled, serialized fiction we love to read, watch, and write. With zombies.
But now, it seems like everyone is writing zombie books.
Zombies have become, as Sean predicted years ago, trendy. Which is not exactly a surprise — that’s how things work in fiction, just like all corners of pop culture. Everything takes its turn moving through cyclical trends. As with anything trendy, you have two camps — readers with endless appetites for anything zombie and . . . readers who see the word “zombie” and start rolling their eyes.
I belong to the first camp — as long as it’s good, I’ll take a new zombie story, movie, or awesome video game any day of the week. But I get the people who are sick of zombies. We hope that Z 2134 is different enough to appeal to both camps.
It wasn’t enough to write a by-the-numbers zombie book, like it wasn’t enough to write by-the-numbers post-apocalyptic book with Yesterday’s Gone or a by-the-numbers Young Adult book with ForNevermore, or a by-the-numbers sci-fi book with the oddity that is WhiteSpace). If it’s worth our time, it’s worth our time to make it amazing. Our premise needed something different to deliver more of the experience our readers (that’s YOU!) are used to.
Premise is a weird thing for us as writers. We like to think we can take any premise and make it interesting with the right story, characters, and scares. Distill any book or movie down to a few lines, and you have a bowl of boring oatmeal. It’s the little extra ingredients and attention to detail that make a book, movie, or TV show memorable.
For instance, Signs was a movie about an alien invasion. Yet, it was the characters and their relationships with one another, that made the movie so much more than that. The TV show Breaking Bad, is about a teacher turned meth dealer. On paper, it sounded like the worst plot ever. But when you watch it — holy shit, it’s one of the BEST shows ever!
So you can take a plain premise and make it awesome. But in most cases, you need something unique to draw readers in.
We first considered doing a different zombie apocalypse sort of book. For a few minutes, anyway. But it lacked a hook that would sell it to readers who didn’t know us.
We needed a hook to make this story stand out among the hordes (bad pun intended) of zombie books.
OVERCOMING THE CURSE OF THE ZOMBIE TREND
We never chase trends.
If anything, we try to aim ahead of the trends, like we’ve done with serials, writing them a full year before Amazon announced its awesome Kindle Serials program, and publishing them weekly since January. We write the stories we want to tell and hope enough people enjoy our work to fuel our momentum.
In a year when The Hunger Games was the biggest thing in literature (or at least the literature that didn’t come in a Grey wrapper), a simple sentence during one of our weekly story meetings, “Hey, what if The Hunger Games had zombies?” gave us the seed for a sprout of an idea.
The idea took immediate root. After many conversations, story sessions, and several drafts, the newest story in our Collective Inkwell was born: a strange brew inspired by The Walking Dead, The Hunger Games, The Running Man, and 1984, going places only Platt and Wright can go. Z 2134 is a mash-up of many inspirations, but with our sensibilities, pacing, and killer cliffhangers. This is the zombie show we would create for television, which is how we think up all of our serials — what TV show would we want to watch? Let’s write that.
We’re especially thankful to Amazon Publishing and 47North for helping give Z 2134 a larger life, out of the gate. As our first non-indie title, we couldn't be happier with the experience. We've been waiting since Stephen King's The Green Mile for a publisher to embrace the possibilities of serialized fiction. I think with Amazon Publishing, we might just be seeing the resurgence of a format too long ignored. I'm excited as both a writer and reader for the next golden age of serials!
Thank you, Dear Reader, for joining us on this ride!
David W. Wright & Sean Platt
::OUR SERIALIZED SERIES::
by 47North
::Z 2134 — the futuristic zombie serial thriller::
Season One (Episodes 1-4)
::Monstrous — a hellish revenge and redemption serial thriller::
Season One (Episodes 1-6) Coming Soon
by Collective Inkwell (our indie publishing company)
::Yesterday’s Gone Series — the post-apocalyptic serial::
Season One (Episodes 1-6)
Season Two (Episodes 7-12)
Season Three (Episodes 13-18)
Season Four (coming summer 2013)
::WhiteSpace Series— the sci-fi/horror serial::
Season One (Episodes 1-6)
::ForNevermore Series — the dark fantasy Young Adult serial::
Season One (Episodes 1-6)
::Available Darkness — the new breed of vampire thriller::
Season One (Episodes 1-6)
Season Two (coming November 2012)
::OUR SHORT STORIES::
DARK CROSSINGS: Volume One
Chris Wakes Up
Diner Faded
Pull The Trigger
Respero Dinner
The Watcher
The Visitor
DARK CROSSI
NGS: Volume 2
Are We There Yet?
Hide and Seek
If You Don’t Finish Reading This, Then Everyone You Know Will Die
What Would Boricio Do?
The Good Deeds Society
Monsters
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Sean Platt is coauthor of the serialized sagas, Z 2134, Yesterday’s Gone, WhiteSpace, ForNevermore and Available Darkness. He is also author of Writing Online, and co-founder of Collective Inkwell.
Despite having a big plate, full of dark horror and serialized mayhem at Collective Inkwell with his co-author David Wright, Sean is also cohost of the Better Off Undead, and Self-Publishing Podcasts. Sean helps tomorrow’s authors with David, and Johnny B. Truant with the Self-Publishing Podcast, and Sean nurtures his tribe of “digital writers” at his home site, SeanMPlatt.Com
Sean is currently developing super cool serialized fiction for children, available some time before spring, 2013Sean lives the writer’s life and dreamer’s dream in Ohio with his wife (who endlessly listens) and two children (who sometimes don’t). He wakes up happy almost every day.
Connect with Sean at:
sean@thedigitalwriter.net
http://seanmplatt.com
http://collectiveinkwell.com
http://twitter.com/seanplatt
http://www.facebook.com/DigitalWriter
https://www.facebook.com/CollectiveInkwellPublishing
David W. Wright is a former newspaper reporter and cartoonist. He is the co-author of Z 2134, Yesterday’s Gone, WhiteSpace, ForNevermore, and Available Darkness series.
You should avoid feeding David after midnight, getting him wet, or exposing him to bright light.
He writes about Collective Inkwell stuff at:
http://CollectiveInkwell.com
He blogs about himself, pop culture, and other stuff at:
http://DavidwWright.com
David lives on the East Coast with his wife, his five year old son, and the world’s most pooping-est cat.
Connect with David at:
Collectiveinkwellmedia@gmail.com
http://twitter.com/thedavidwwright
http://collectiveinkwell.com
http://davidwwright.com
http://facebook.com/CollectiveInkwellPublishing
This book was originally released in episodes as a Kindle Serial. Kindle Serials launched in 2012 as a new way to experience serialized books. Kindle Serials allow readers to enjoy the story as the author creates it, purchasing once and receiving all existing episodes immediately, followed by future episodes as they are published. To find out more about Kindle Serials and to see the current selection of Serials titles, visit www.amazon.com/kindleserials.