Some things..

In this particular post, I'm going to talk a bit about my upcoming novel "What Remains", and how it came into form.
I started writing this in December, when all of the talk about the 2012 Mayan Doomsday junk was hovering around. I don't want to necessarily say that I believed it, but it did give me something to think about, and that something was zombies. Let me just say this--I am terrified of them. I cannot watch a zombie movie, even now. From October to December of last year, I had this unhealthy obsession with zombies and solely being afraid of them. They constantly circulated in my dreams, to the point where I was afraid to even sleep. I know, that's super drastic, but guys, I was really scared.
It got to where I'd had enough, and I was tired of nursing this silly fear of zombies. I decided that I would try to face my fear one step at a time, and hopefully doing so would help me overcome it.
I began grabbing zombie reads offline, starting with the ones that seemed like I could get through, and gradually advancing to the ones that made me cringe a little, but were still readable. Let me just say here that I haven't read a slew of zombie horror novels because some are still a little too freaky for my chicken-hawk-self. Strangely, I came to find that I actually liked the genre more than I'd ever anticipated. It wasn't the disgusting talks of decay or gore that drew my interest, but the survivor stories.
The authors that I read had such a vivid imagination and strong gift for storytelling, that I could really feel their characters fear. I could imagine being in a situation where all of a sudden my world was turned upside down, and I suddenly had to commit acts of violence and make drastic decisions that could change who I was as a person. As an author, you could do so much with a scenario like that, and I believed this so much that I wanted to try my hand at it.
So that's how I began writing What Remains. It was such an interesting story to write, because I really had to step outside of my comfort zone and delve into the gore and terror that I've always tried to avoid. Between the writing, reading, and researching, I can almost say that I've overcome my fear of zombies. I still can't watch a zombie flick, lol, but I'm hoping to get to that point really soon.