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Conclusion to Elle Klass’ “Zombie Girl” Series coming soon!

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I’m excited the final book in this series will be out soon so I can read it. When you read the following guest post, particularly the excerpt, from fellow author, Elle Klass, you’ll probably be able to figure out why. I’m really not a big vampire or zombie fan, but Elle creates vivid and endearing characters along with clever plots with new twists on what are often worn-out themes. This one has a fair share of humor, which will draw me in every time since I can use all the laughs I can get. Check it out! –MF

Maddie is my kinda girl. She’s tough, feminine and even when afraid does what needs to be done. It’s always tough saying goodbye to characters, probably why I have such difficulty in ending a series.

If you’ve been reading you know she started out as a 14 year old girl who hated science and everything related to it until one day when the unthinkable happened.

With the whole apocalypse thing and zombies trying to eat her and the group she’s with they’ve traveled over seas and lived through some extremely treacherous times.

No matter what, the humor was always there and it gives the entire series a light heartedness that makes it memorable. It’s more like Zombieland than The Walking Dead.

zombiegirlbooksI had a ton of laughs writing the story and learned a lot developing a story in a genre I wasn’t real familiar with. Writing horror for kids is different than for adults. I had to watch my words and their words. That’s where the humor comes in. I’d also never dabbled in sci-fi or post apocalyptic fiction. It was a first and I’m proud with how it turned out.

No spoilers here! Read the series. Try the game and see which character you are, share your results on social media and feel free to comment below. Click here to play.

Book 1 Premonition is now free!  (Read my review)

Amazon

Nook, Apple, Kobo and other retailers

Book 2 Infection is at .99 through August 1st. (Read my review)

Amazon

Nook, Apple, Kobo and other retailers

Book 3 Retribution is on pre-order for .99! That will only last through release day August 1st!

Amazon

Nook, Apple, Kobo and other retailers

Excerpt: (one of my favorite parts. Hehe!)

Two dead zombie eyes stared at me. I knew that was more a reflex. It couldn’t see me. Its long gray hair hung limp on its shoulders as it clicked its tongue, blood dribbling from its mouth on its way towards me. Its drip drag stagger-walk was impressively quick. A flowered sundress covered in sprays of blood, chunks of human skin clung to the fabric.

On the floor behind her was a man in a black robe. His mouth was in an O as he screamed, “No!”

I swung the blade of the katana towards her dirty, slimy neck when she came within a few feet of me. It nearly connected then something I’d never seen, nor imagined, happened. The zombie blew apart from the inside out. I was glad my teeth were gritted as I’d have had a mouth full of deader if I hadn’t. Chunks and blood sprayed the walls. It was a definite ten on my disgusting scale.

Chunks of her blew into the man’s mouth. He gagged and spat to rid his body of the nasty zombie meal. His face met mine and he scooted backwards on the floor. His eyes barely visible through the zombie mess covering it. I moved closer to him. He was living. “Are you hurt?”

“You killed her!” he growled. “You are a murderer!”

What? I hadn’t expected that one and I hadn’t killed her; she blew up like one of Deavers’ grenades. “I didn’t kill her. She was infected and there’s no cure. Did she bite you?”

“You killed my wife.” He continued sliding backwards.

That’s when I noticed it. The beam from my flashlight caught the silver barrel of a gun, only a couple feet from him. I moved towards him. “Don’t think about or you’ll be dead like your wife.”

He scooted again and I moved quicker now and jabbed the end of the katana’s blade into his chest. Keeping it centered on him, I side-stepped and kicked the gun. It flew across the floor.

“Get up!” I ordered with a sneer.

He pushed his back against the wall and slid up it. His short, dark hair was coated in zombie film. I jabbed the blade lightly into his chest so he knew I meant business. When I did, it slid through a hole in the dark robe hanging around his shoulders. “Did she bite you, Professor?” I didn’t know what else to call him and it looked similar to a graduate’s robe.

His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “That makes no difference. Go. Go now!”

Well, this wasn’t going well. The patter of rain stopped, meaning the worst of the storm was over. I glanced over the hallway. A collar of sorts clung to the wall in the muck. I grabbed it. “You’ve been keeping her alive, treating her like a pet?” That was sick. Really sick and morbid.

He narrowed his eyes into tiny slits. A chunk of deader flesh dropped from his forehead. “She was my wife.”

The memory of my father turning seemed like a million years ago but it was still fresh in my head. I knew he was turning and that I should kill him, but I didn’t. Instead we tied him up. This guy did the same thing. He put a collar around her neck. I brought the katana to my side. “I don’t want to kill you and I didn’t kill her. She exploded. I’ve never seen that before. When did she turn?”

“In the beginning. The very beginning.”

That begged a lot of questions like how did you get her past the military? What has she been eating? Was that why her drip-drag was so quick?

The rain stopped and I was on a mission. “We have to go.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you.”

I rolled my eyes. I needed some answers and he would provide them. “Yes, you are. Remember I have the weapon and you don’t. I also have your wife’s collar and I bet it’s a shock collar. The kind used for training dogs.” I smirked.

“Fine,” he seethed.

I lifted the katana towards his chest again and spread the cloth of his robe. What I saw didn’t surprise me. A set of round, fresh, human-deader teeth marks. I lifted the collar towards him with my free hand. “Put this on just in case.”

Reluctantly he grabbed the collar and wrapped it around his neck. The motion caused a chunk of flesh to fall from his robe, revealing a name tag.

“You first, Mitchem.” I read the tag.

For the next hour we steadily walked towards the marina and I pried all sorts of information from him. He was a Duval County judge. That explained the black robe. He and his wife were visiting family in Gainesville when the end of the world went down. She was exposed immediately but didn’t turn until a couple days later. Dumb luck saved them from the military. They’d spent the night in their RV deep in the woods. When he woke up the next morning his wife, Gloria, was eating their Pomeranian. I imagined large puffs of fur stuck between her teeth and chuckled.

“It’s not funny!” he growled.

He was wrong. It was funny. In this new world I had to find humor where I could and that was hilarious. However, I stopped laughing out of respect and let him continue his story.

“I tied her up with bungee cords and glanced a peek out of the window. I would have waved my hands and let them take me, but they’d have killed Gloria. I couldn’t have that. A soldier approached the RV, I stood inside with my gun loaded and waited. A radio voice came through, “Need help now! Surrounded by them.” That was it. They never returned and I got us out of there.”

Copyright Elle Klass 2018 Retribution

Today’s Writing Tip

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The trade paperback size 6 x 9 is popular, but not necessarily the most appropriate, depending of which genre you’re targeting and the length of your story. In some cases, it will appear more professional if you use a different size. If you’re not sure what commercial publishers use, check several titles in your genre at your local bookstore.

There’s a lot of competition out there these days with the indie publishing boom, so every action you take to make your book appear more professional will work in your favor.

Today’s Writing Tip

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A fellow author/friend told me she uses a text-to-voice reading app for proofreading as well as finding typos and awkward wording in her novels. If your book will eventually become an audio book this is an even better idea. Besides finding mistakes, this is a tremendously useful self-editing tip that puts your writing in another sensory dimension that provides new insights into your story’s effectivity.

 

#RWISA “RISING” WRITER – @MarchaFox #RRBC

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What a pleasant surprise to discover I’m the “Rising Writer” this month! I love this group! If you’re a writer looking for a group that provides great support check out RRBC and RWISA!

via #RWISA “RISING” WRITER – @MarchaFox #RRBC

“In the Shadow of Lies” by M.A. Adler: Outstanding Depiction of California in the Early 1940s

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5stars

This book reminded me of butter, the writing style was so rich and smooth. It is one of the most skillfully written books I’ve read in a long time. The prose was like ambrosia, the imagery vivid and memorable. I always appreciate an author who can render emotions properly and thus draw the reader into the characters. Again, Adler did a stellar job.

This story is far more than a murder mystery. Its coverage of the early 1940s, i.e. the historical period during the early days of WWII, was outstanding. That was such a different time and so much has changed since then. I was particularly drawn in because I have personal connections to the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area as well as that time period through family and in-laws.

For starters, my father was in the U.S. Navy during WWII. He had fond memories of his time on leave in the Bay Area, so much so that many years later, in 1960, our family moved from New York State to the East Bay. However, it did not turn out to be the Utopia he had imagined. He’d been a diesel mechanic for the New York Central Railroad in New York for a decade and assumed he’d be able to get a job, possibly with a trucking company. As it turned out, however, the labor unions at the time made this impossible. To get such a job you needed to be a union member, and to be a union member you had to have a job. The ultimate catch-22 supported by pure nepotism. As the cliche says, it’s not what you know but whom you know. My father had a few insignificant jobs, like working for a lawnmower repair shop, then eventually transitioned from unemployment to retirement. This had a devastating effect on our family.

But I digress.

Back to the story. Even though I was a teenager in the 60s, I had no idea how bad racism was a few decades before, much less that the KKK had been so active there. I also had no idea how badly Italians were treated during the war, due to their assumed sympathy toward Mussolini. I had in-laws who were Hungarian and some married Italians. Now I understand why some of them were so resistant to providing information when I was doing genealogical research back in the 70s. It’s sad they didn’t share their stories, but they may have been too painful for them to recount. On top of it all, some were Jewish, and had fled Europe just in time; some left behind were exterminated by Hitler.

I’ve never been a history buff. The way it was taught when I was in high school was a horrible bore. Even as a child, I preferred to learn about history through historical novels and this one definitely provided a treasure trove of information for a period I didn’t know much about. For that I am most grateful to the author for her meticulous and comprehensive research. This made reading the book an actual experience that had a strong impact on my understanding of the world at that time.

There were a lot of different characters in the story. I mean LOTS. So many that they were a bit difficult to keep track of. Fortunately, the author included a dramatis personae in the beginning, but this was not that easy to access with an ebook; I wish I’d read this in a print book, where I could have flipped back to refer to it more easily. I know I would have been doing a lot of highlighting and dogeared many pages in an actual book. Since I don’t exactly have what you’d call a “steel trap” memory, I probably should have taken notes while I was reading. LOL. Okay, I’m weird like that, when I really get into a book. This one and some others I’ve read recently (more specifically the “Finding Billy Battles” series by Ronald E. Yates) have reminded me of why I should be reading more historical novels; usually I prefer science fiction.

The one thing about having so many characters with their own prejudices and agendas is that it does make the story seem very real. My familiarity with the East Bay Area added to this, especially when references were made to streets and other areas with which I was familiar. This made it very easy for me to connect to this book.

I’m grateful the author used multiple viewpoints in different sections to get into the characters’ heads as opposed to omniscient, which would have been entirely mind-boggling. She is a very skillful writer. The story did wander about somewhat, yet it added to its rich texture and sense of real-life as opposed to one with a classic, straight-line plot. She broke some rules, but did so in such as way that it worked, which is exactly how it should be done.

This book would not be for everyone, especially those that want to whip through a story and not wander about, really getting into the time, place, and people. However, if you appreciate a well-written, complex story with considerable historical significance, I highly recommend it.

Pick up your copy on Amazon here.

Today’s Writing Tip

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I used to give away books via Goodreads, but the last time I went to that site to do so I discovered they were charging for it. I have to admit I had a fit at paying $119 or more to them, plus for books and postage. In previous giveaways, as far as I could tell I had gotten essentially nothing–no reviews or other evidence the winner did anything other than sell it on eBay.  (Of course that’s a bit of a joke, considering authors have a hard enough time selling books in the first place, unless they’re famous.)

I finally decided to conduct my own giveaways through my newsletter. I asked a trivia question and the first three to respond with the correct answer would win a book (an ebook, if they were outside the USA). It went great and I had some very happy fans. I can’t believe I didn’t do it this way in the first place!

Today’s Writing Tip

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Does an original title help or hinder finding readers? I don’t know, but I can think of some pros and cons. Pro, your book will come up whenever anyone searches on that title. Con, people may choose one of the others instead of yours!

Personally, I feel an original title implies that your story, too, is original. On the other hand, if it’s deliberately surfing the wake of a best-seller, then it makes sense to show similarities in the title, cheesy though that may be.

Today’s Writing Tip

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Sometimes finding a title for your book is more difficult than writing it; other times you have a title without the story. It never hurts to write down title ideas for use later. Having a “working title” is common, so don’t worry if you don’t have one until you’re ready to publish.

Usually at some point your muse will help you out with a title, which may come out of the blue when you’re in the grocery store or just starting to fall asleep. Other times you have to work at it. If that’s the case, start with keywords related to your story, its theme, or message. If it’s character-centered, focus on who or what your protagonist represents.

“The Tacitan Legacy” by R.E. Weber: An Otherworldly Environment Sci-Fi Fans can Binge On

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5stars

This third volume of the “Star Agency ” series attains a new level of depth and complexity. While previous books focused more on “the seven” youth who were called to serve in the Star Agency, this one is saturated with intrigue, revealing many new facets of the universe into which they have been lured. The assassinations of numerous leaders through some mysterious means suggest that an ancient weapon has been recovered and put to an unexpected and heinous use.

Rebellion on the part of the H’th’hka has also brought a new level of chaos to the Affinity. The relationship between cultures and worlds as well as the agendas of certain leaders ramp up, the various characters introduced in previous volumes caught in the middle as challenging new responsibilities and situations are thrust upon them. Interdimensional beings and other mystical elements are introduced, adding to the otherworldly environment sci-fi fans thrive on.

This story was extremely well-written, its prose downright poetic in many scenes. The author did a fantastic job of deepening the story as well as the characters through situations which bring out a variety of unexpected yet credible reactions. This volume brings stronger and more intense emotional material that keeps you turning the pages.

Since it has been a couple years since I read the second book in the series, I could have used a few reminders on what the characters look like and so forth, but this is a common problem with serialized stories. Reading them one after the other is recommended to assure continuity, but this is often not possible when years elapse between their releases.  Since there are so many characters, a dramatis personnae to help keep them straight would be helpful, especially for those reflecting intergalactic cultures via unusual names and titles that are often similar enough to cause confusion regarding who reigns over what.

I look forward to the next volume which will undoubtedly continue the drama initiated in this one. It’s coming together like an elegant mosaic that still has various pieces missing. I recommend this series highly for science fiction fans of all ages who enjoy immersing themselves in worlds somewhere in a galaxy far, far away.

You can pick up your copy on Amazon here.

Today’s Writing Tip

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Bear in mind that reviews from people you know are likely to be slightly inflated. Those  posted by people you don’t know from Adam will give you a better idea of how your story is received. To improve your writing, always try to identify what they liked or didn’t like. Sometimes a bad review teaches you far more than a glowing one!