meomeoim

I finished The Hollow Land , and after giving it one cursory read-thru before the real editing starts, I'm pleased with it. It's still hard for me to tell if anything I write is good vs. publishable good , since I'm too close to the product, but I think this is good.  I think the reason I'm having any doubts is its almost complete lack of pop culture references. They were just hard to fit in a post-apopcolyptic action novel about zombies. I slid in a couple, and only one of them might be off-target. (Paul Giamatti is not big with the young adult crowd.) But it worked for me. I'm excited to go back to writing the My Blood Approves series, now that I'm done with this one.  Here's one thing I learned: It's hard writing a love interest for a super badass heroine. If he's more badass than her, if he rescues her all the time, it detracts from her own badassness, and almost defeats the purpose of making her so tough. But if he's a total wuss and alw...

So I spent the last month or maybe two feeling a little rough about the whole thing. Rejection hurts worse the closer you get. But now I've redoubled my efforts. I started a week ago, and I'm about 35k words in, and I'm hoping to be done writing the first draft by Thanksgiving. It's a post-apocalyptic young adult with zombies, bad ass female leads, rock stars, road trips, and even a little love story. Yes, it truly has it all. I am writing this for a few reasons: 1. Zombies are awesome. 2. Thanks to the 2012 crazies, end of the world literature/movies/etc. is more popular. 3. I need to stop writing such misogynistic books. 4. Ellen Ripley (a.k.a. Sigourney Weaver of Aliens fame) is bad ass 5. This is exactly what my future agent Ginger Clark is looking for. So, without further ado, here is the first line of my new soon to be agented manuscript: "This is the way the world ends; not with a bang or a whimper, but with zombies scratching at the back door."