I’m running a Kindle Countdown deal for my book trilogy this week and doing a promotion for book 1: The Outbreak for $2.99. (You can get book 2 for $3.99 and book 3 for $4.99). Getting ready for this has sent me down memory lane. It brought me back to where I was when the story began to take shape. This blog post does have mild spoilers for certain story elements of the trilogy. If you haven’t read the books yet and want to be surprised, consider yourself warned.

I was hanging out with some friends on my birthday. We were talking about ideas for games, and I had an idea for a zombie video game where you play as the zombie, but there is a karma system similar to Fallout, so you can choose to be a monster or a hero that only looks like a monster. You grow in strength over time until you are able to control an entire horde of zombies, and it is up to you whether to use your abilities to target innocent survivors or gangs of raiders. Looking back, it was one of those brainstorming moments where an idea comes out of nowhere, pretty much fully formed. I ended up using 90% of that original idea in my series. The one thing I didn’t include was the ability to use a group of zombies to form a make-shift ladder of bodies that the main zombie climbs to get from A to B. If I ever write a fourth book in the series, I will make sure to include the zombie ladder. 

The idea of a reverse-Jeckyl and Hyde situation with a morally good zombie who wanted to help survivors (that had no idea of his intentions and saw him as another target) stuck in the back of my mind for a few months after that day. I felt like there was a lot of potential in that scenario. My friend and fellow author, Timothy Morris, helped me to transition the idea from a daydream to an actual story in February 2016. 

The first attempt at writing chapter 1 ended up being a slight variation of what ended up being the last chapter of book 1 and the first chapter of book 2. I knew it wasn’t the right place to start, so I backed up and wrote a chapter about the election and policies of President Adam Chambers next. That was starting way too early. It was all backstory and no action. I needed an inciting event, so I tried again for the third time and wrote:

That felt much better to me. Something was happening, but it wasn’t the ultimate something I was getting to. Suddenly, I had a timeline to work with. I had a landmark to reach for. I was off to the races. 

I remember how I felt after writing that first chapter. Part of me was thrilled about transitioning from the realm of commentary and critique that I had been in with Escapist Magazine to the space of creating something brand new. Another part of me felt like a total phony writing from the perspective of an American President when I had no business doing so. So I decided to include another perspective, and alternate back and forth between D.C. and the other characters. 

One of the big inspirations for writing this story was the idea of how a world with decades of zombie pop culture might be able to actually handle a zombie outbreak better than the worlds dreamed up in the original films or the Walking Dead. Zombieland is a good example of this situation. In that world, people know what zombies are, and the first film starts out with a series of common sense rules for surviving. The way I pictured things, zombie lore existing in that universe would help on a macro level, but there would be issues and snags on the ground level. I wanted to explore that concept in my story, so I introduced Patrick, Reggie, and eventually Kayla and Dez to the story. 

In my dedication pages for The Outbreak, President Zombie and the combined Resurrection Collection, I share a fun fact about borrowing a real conversation I had with a friend of mine named Reggie about stealing a church bus and high-tailing it to the outer banks in the event that the world started to slip away. We’d had that original conversation way back in the fall of 2008, and I told Reggie I wanted to borrow that idea when I wrote my first novel, and so I called him up eight years later and asked his permission to include the story in my book. Reggie said I could use the story, so long as the character who has the idea is also named Reggie. 

For the record, the Reggie character in my series is not 100% inspired by my friend Reggie of the same name. The character is mostly inspired by my friend, but he also has a few traits of another friend, and some traits that are unique to the character. Just as the Kevin character in book 3 is not 100% based on me. For instance, he had writer’s block for five and a half years, but I only had it for four years. I wouldn’t have written in the Kevin character if I hadn’t first gone with the Reggie character. Storytelling can be a slippery slope. One thing leads to another and before you know it, you are somewhere you never imagined being.

In hindsight, I wouldn’t change a thing about it. The Reggie character quickly became one of my favorites in the series. I feel like The Outbreak holds together better by representing at least two wildly different perspectives of the beginning of the end of the world.