Today’s interview is with Chuck Wendig, a self-described pen-monkey  who churns out novels, screenplays as well as his popular and a prolific blog. Chuck’s charming sense of voice makes his essays on rockstar writers, what every writer should know, or his experience raising a child, entertaining as well as informative. Chuck wrote Second Base for the zombie anthology, Gimme Shelter, a story that references popular tropes in zombie fiction while breaking  the mold on how those tropes are deployed.

-J.R. Blackwell

An Excerpt from Second Base:

Jimmy’s hand is warm. The zombie on the ground is, too. It’s giving off steam in this early autumn morning, vapors rising from blistered, puckered flesh the color of oxblood leather. Come noon, the flies will find it again. And the maggots.

(The dead run hot. So do, as it turns out, teenagers.)

It moans and thrashes around on the ground. Like a baby throwing a tantrum. The dead man—least, he figures it’s a man—must’ve crawled up into one of the flower beds out behind the barn and now here he is, next to an old shovel, a bag of mulch, a rusted garden trowel.

“We shouldn’t be out here,” Becky says, giving Jimmy’s hand a little tug. Her fellow 15-year-old lifts his cap—an old Phillies cap from years back when they won the Series—and gives her that self-assured smile he’s so good at giving.

“It’s all good,” he answers, waving it off. “Dad says most of the dead are like this now.” She thinks back to a time before when they found a deer hit by a car. Most of its back half was messed up real bad, it’s guts hanging out like it was trying to birth an octopus. And still the deer lived, its front hooves scrambling to gain purchase on the asphalt.

Eventually a cop came and shot it. In the head. Just like you’d do to a zombie.

Maybe Jimmy’s father is right.

Maybe things are slowly moving back to center. Back to normal.

Interview

Today’s interview is with author and illustrator and all-around creator, Jared Axelrod. Jared is a whirlwind of productivity, and to follow his work is to be constantly entertained with brilliant podcasts, costumes, comics, fashion, fiction and essays. His first graphic novel, The Battle of Blood and Ink, is coming out from Tor in the spring.  I interviewed Jared about Don’t Work So Well, the story he wrote for the zombie anthology, Gimme Shelter.

-J.R. Blackwell

First, an excerpt from Jared Axelrod’s Story: Don’t Work So Well

I know my brain don’t work so well anymore. It’s hard to think, to focus. I keep getting distracted.  There’s all these smells around, so many smells. It’s easy to stand there, out in the street, catching all the smells as they slink past on the breeze. To just sway with the wind, taking everything in through my nose. But I’ve got to focus. I have to find Carla.

The wind smells so good, though. So good. It smells like…I can’t find the word. Words have become very difficult. They are always on the tip of my tongue.

I am trying to find Carla, Carla with her black hair. We need to find our house. Our house has white trim. I remember that. There are zombies everywhere, and I’m worried she’s been attacked, been bitten. I stay where the zombies aren’t. I have to find her. I have to find her and our house. And then, we’ll…do something. I’m not sure. I’ve never been a planner. Who can plan in a world like this? A world gone mad. Full of monsters. And smells and…

Delicious. That’s the word. What everything smells like. Delicious.

Interview

In your story, Don’t Work So Well, we actually get inside the head of a zombie. What made you decide tell the story from this point of view?

It was something I’ve always been fascinated by, because it’s something we so rarely see. Zombies are death coming for you, literal corpse chasing at your ankles, but they are so often portrayed as inhuman. They’re shown as a swarm of insects, without individuality, or as rabid, hungry dogs. Not people. And that’s frightening, certainly. To see something that resembles a human but whose action is alien or savage, that’s scary. But far more frightening to me is the idea that the people we know and love are still in there, and they are trying to function as best they can as their body slowly deteriorates.

I shattered my ankle a few years ago, and had to relearn how to walk. And it was hard. Here was a skill I had been doing nearly my entire life but because something was damaged, nothing worked right anymore. The signals I usually sent to my leg were getting lost, and I had start all over. Our narrator’s frustration with his own body came out of that. That feeling of being a rational, thinking adult in your head, but being unable to outrun a toddler.

So that horror, that betrayal of your arms and legs, and being unable to do what you’ve spent your entire life doing, that horror was very real to me. And much, much scarier than being chased.

Smell is the primary sense that illustrates your story. Since stories usually use visuals to inform the reader, was taking this route a challenge?

Yes and no. On the one hand, the narrator is slowly losing his vocabulary, so I was able to describe just about everything as “delicious.” So that was time saver! No need for the thesaurus this time!

On the other, it was a different way of thinking about things. While I wanted our zombie narrator to have conscious thought, I also wanted him to have a typical zombie behavior. So all those zombie tropes–the lurching walk, the ignoring of obstacles, the desire to eat brains—all that had to come from an understandable place. Making smell the primary sense, then, made a great deal of the justification easy. Smells distract us when we’re walking down the street. They can waft through closed doors and around corners. When we smell something enticing, we will often stop what we’re doing and walk toward it. Walking into a bakery in the morning can be a delirious, overwhelming experience.

Bad smells, by contrast, will force us to move ourselves out of our way to avoid them. We can look at something ugly without flinching or sit through several minutes of a siren going off. But a bad smell, and our body is not our own. We have to get away from it. Despite how much we might want to stay, our body moves us to where the smells are sweeter, less toxic. Only then can we think clearly, and regain control of the body we thought we were in charge of.
So imagine then, if that was your only sense, your only way of interacting with world. Unable to register process visual cues, who knows what obstacles we might blindly charge toward, in the pursuit of comforting scents? That’s the narrator’s life, and he’s dealing with it as best he can. Which is not very well at all.

What are the projects that you are currently working on, and where can people find you online?

I’ve got a graphic novel, THE BATTLE OF BLOOD AND INK coming out this spring from Tor Books. It’s got art by the amazingly talented Steve Walker (who’s work you can see at http://stevejwalkerstudio.blogspot.com/ ), and can be pre-ordered from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Blood-Ink-Fable-Flying/dp/0765331306 and Barnes and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/battle-of-blood-and-ink-jared-axelrod/1103277235 I’m working on a pair of podcast prequel stories to the graphic novel, which you can listen to over at http://fablesoftheflyingcity.com Book 1, ASHE OF THE AIR, is complete and ready to listen to and Book 2, MOUTHS OF THE DEAD, starts up later this month. There’s also some great character art by Steve on the site, as well as some comic pages, to give you an idea what the graphic novel is going be like.

I’ve got a bunch of projects that I can’t quite talk about yet, but when I do, I’ll be talking about them on http://www.jaredaxelrod.com

Gimme Shelter can be purchased in Print, PDF, e-book and Kindle. For more information about Gimme Shelter and the other authors that contributed to the project, visit the Gimme Shelter Page.

I met Philippa Ballantine at Balticon, and she has always impressed me with her wit and kindness. She is a writer of great talent, and a her sweet, melodic voice makes her a delight at readings.  Her fantasy and steampunk novels are the kind of books you smile at all the way though. I was pleased that she was able to contribute to Gimme Shelter with her zombie apocalypse story, Unexpected Residents, a story as seen through the lens of reality TV.

-J.R. Blackwell

Now an excerpt from Philippa Ballantine’s story, Unexpected Residents:

Footsteps on the stairs, running, screaming, and there she is. Ellen, covered in blood, scratched by twigs, her eyes as wide as the moon outside the window. “Not ghosts, not fucking ghosts!” She is screaming.

Below he can hear the groans. They have broken through the second floor doorways. The zombies are moving, slowly but calmly up. They’re hungry. Steve can smell them.

Interview

What made you think of using a reality show to stage a zombie story?

I’ve always been a big fan of those ‘reality’ ghost shows on television. I find them a curious mixture of the unexplained and ridiculous. People jumping at every creak of a house, and breath of wind, and yet then sometimes something inexplicable. It tickled my sense of humor to imagine that a group of people finding something paranormal and yet something they never really counted on. Oh, and then imagining the chaos that would ensue.

A part of this story is told from the point of view of what a camera sees of the action. Why did you make this choice to tell part of the story through this lens?

The lens is really the only reliable witness in this case. It moves with the people and sees the things in a purely circumspect light. It also gives the literary illusion of the reality show that the characters are living in. I don’t quite have them slobbering into it like the Blair Witch…but it’s not far off.

What are the projects that you are currently working on, and where can people find you online?

I am currently working on Harbinger, the final of the Books of the Order after Geist, Spectyr and Wrayth (coming later this year). Then Tee and I will start thinking about the third Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences novel. You can find all about me http://www.pjballantine.com/ and the Ministry at http://www.ministryofpeculiaroccurrences.com/

Gimme Shelter can be purchased in Print, PDF, e-book and Kindle. For more information about Gimme Shelter and the other authors that contributed to the project, visit the Gimme Shelter Page.