Life Resumed

The last couple of weeks in September consumed nearly every spare hour of my life. Aside from the other organizations I'm involved in (and oh yeah, that pesky full-time job) I've spent that time re-editing, revising and polishing my novel, Crawl. Why you ask?

Other than it being good practice in general, there was a contest sponsored by www.chizine.com and Leisure Fiction at Dorchester Publications called the "Fresh Blood Contest." They were looking for unpublished authors with a fully-finished horror manuscript. Cha-ching!

Rather than bore you with details concerning the painstaking process of hacking and chopping a novel to pieces, then stitching and reviving it into something better than when it began, I'll just say this: added a new character, filled out some others, added a couple of chapters to round out the story and provide some more description and put a few touches into the concluding chapter.

The finalists for the contest will be posted in November of this year. I will update you guys on my novel's status either way!

Until then, I will continue to post new chapters of "SY:1" as well as update the blog. Currently I'm trying to decide which project I want to tackle next. This weekend I'll be plotting out four of those projects, hopefully picking a winner by Monday. The worthy competitors are:

SPECTRUM - a sci-fi detective thriller set in a dystopian future
Romero Strain - a post-apocalyptic zombie survival novel
Crock - an adventure story mixing treasure hunting, cutthroat criminals and Irish folklore. A pairing of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" meets "O' Brother, Whereart Thou"
The Appleseed Murders - crime/thriller, a hardboiled detective tracks a serial killer who plants seeds in his murdered victims' remains

Since it's October with Halloween on the horizon, and I just saw Dead Snow and Zombieland this week, and I'm currently reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies...I might be leaning towards The Romero Strain. Time will tell!

~VK