Bait. It’s the laziest book ever written.
I pulled my hair and gnashed my teeth in the creation of the Rune series; I drove all around northern California to research and hike for the Zombies series. The Dammerung made me batty in its twisted time lines and the read-it-in-twenty-minutes Grayscale took every single book on the moon that the local library had on its (out-of-order) shelves.
I was planning to retire from the zombie genre once Heaven/Hell came out in December*, and while I was uncertain whether my next endeavor was going to be vampires or ghosts or dragons or exiled princely children, I was one hundred percent positive that the supernatural lowlifes that are zombies had run their course with me. I had nothing left to say. And then I went to bed one August night, and Bait came to me in a nightmare.
Zombies. As the dream-figure jumped off the roof of a mansion to escape them, I woke up with my heart pounding. I did not flee for my computer, as other dreams have sent me, but settled back into my pillow wanting desperately to forget it. I was done with zombies. DONE. Twelve books on the topic were more than sufficient. I fell back asleep and returned to the dream, and understood that I was simply going to keep having dreams of this world until I wrote it down. That has happened with other stories, and I didn’t want this one dwelling in my mind any longer than necessary.
I had to research bits and pieces, but my subconscious had done the larger part of the work for me. It laid out the characters, place settings, and major plot points in those nightmares, and all of the information was firmly lodged in my mind when I woke up. I dutifully typed it into my laptop, and there it was: the thirteenth zombie book that I never intended to write.
I have entered it in the Kindle Scout program, and for those of you who are not tech savvy writers, be reassured that submission is a very easy process. It was especially easy for me because my Tech Witch did it. She is convinced that in my ham-fisted, cave-panda attempts to manipulate anything more complicated than a calculator will result in the accidental triggering of nuclear launch codes. While I find that a tad hyperbolic, I do not resist when she pulls the laptop away to handle things herself. The reply was swift: Bait was approved for launch on October 28th for a one-month term in which readers can view the first 5K of the novel and vote if they would like Amazon to publish it.
So head on over if you would like to partake in Macaulay C. Hunter’s Bait, a post-apocalyptic tale of a man and a girl abducted from their home to feed zombies . . . or if you prefer dragons to zombies, try Jordan Reece’s The Tracker instead. If Amazon picks up either of them, everyone who nominated the book will receive a free copy.
* The Earth/Sky Trilogy is a rather fluffy tale of a somewhat spoiled young woman who falls in love with a fallen angel and a zombie, and all three books (Earth/Sky, Above/Below, and Heaven/Hell) were written as a joke for fans of the Rune series. Don’t read them**. My real post-apocalyptic zombie novels are: The Zombies series, Blood Games, Plantation, and Zombie Child. Read those instead.
** Or read them when you have nothing better to do, and leave comments on my blog about how stupid they are, and demand a refund for the IQ points and the hours of your life that you lost to the endless boyfriend problems of Jessa Bright.
