THE LIVING OR THE LIVING DEAD?

This week, I saw the trailer for “Warm Bodies,” a zombie love story that will be released next month. If I’m going to be honest, I have to admit my initial reaction was one of disbelief. A zombie love story! Really? But then I thought about it and realized I should have expected this a long time ago. The zombie craze re-emerged in 2002 with “28 Days Later.” This movie’s success led to the remake of “Dawn of the Dead” and the more comedic “Shaun of the Dead” in 2004. “28 Weeks Later” would follow in 2007 and “Zombieland” in 2009. The “Resident Evil” franchise would also come to the big screen and “The Walking Dead” would find its way to the small screen. Zombie stories are the rage and if I had thought realistically about it, I should have known it would only be a matter of time before there was a zombie love story.

So, why are we fascinated with zombies? This question has been on my mind for quite some time. Last week, a potential answer occurred to me. In my screenwriting classes, I encourage my students to write from experience because the stories we create are simply analogies for real life. The protagonist, or the hero of any story, is really us. We watch or read these stories to see characters triumph over adversity. In essence, we are relating to these characters because we hope to be similar to them in the challenges of our own lives. When misfortunes occur, we wish to overcome them just as the heroes do in the stories we read or watch on the big or small screen.

AND THE REAL ZOMBIES ARE...
Then it occurred to me! Zombies are so popular because they are also analogies to real life. Zombies represent the majority of society – the masses of people who are stumbling through their lives in jobs they don’t like or relationships they don’t respect. How many of us have said, “I wish I could...” but instead continue to do things that don’t make us happy? We are in fact the zombies of today. Society has given us all a script regardless of whether or not we are truly right for the part. We are told when we finish high school that we should go to college, get jobs and then marry and have families. While this is a fantastic path that I support, there is no single direction in life that is tailored to fit everyone. For many of us, surrendering to this “script” transforms us into zombies, urging us to march blindly down a path that is not our own. As Shakespeare wrote so many years ago:

“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man...”

Today, I urge everyone, as long as it doesn’t infringe upon or lessen the experience of others; don’t wish you could, rather know you should do what you are passionate about. The Mayans predicted that the end of 2012 would mark the beginning of a great awakening. We must all take ownership of our own realities. We must know that we are the survivors and not the zombies of our own destinies.

To view a trailer for the next blockbuster zombie pic, "World War Z," please click here.

I WROTE A BOOK!
To learn more about Volume One
of my Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Action-adventure series, “The Unveiling,”
please visit the website at TheUnveilingSeries.com.

Is The New World Order Just More Of The Same Old Thing?

AS THE YEAR WINDS DOWN...
To those of you who have enjoyed my blog, you should know I greatly appreciate you. When I first started blogging back in 2009, I admit the process felt foreign to me. I had to learn how to organize my thoughts differently. But it was fulfilling, learning how to articulate myself in a different fashion.

While 2012 was not a great year for the blog, it was terrifically productive in many other ways. As you may know, I was absent from the blog in order to finish my book, The Unveiling: 1.0:

Completing this book was a phenomenal task. Just recently, I have spoken to two authors who are working on their first books. When I hear them say things like “It’ll just take me a few more months and then I’ll be done,” I have to smile because I know things don’t go quite the way we expect.

When I first began The Unveiling, I figured I’d be able to wrap things up in a year or so. 18 months later, I had completed a manuscript but it was so terribly rough. I also made quite a few storytelling mistakes that cost me hundreds of hours to fix. Now, it’s three years later and I am finally done! Because The Unveiling is a series, I have to begin working on Volume 2.0 very soon. I think (or at least I hope) I will finish this second book in a shorter time frame, especially since I have learned from some of the mistakes I fumbled in the first one.

Over the past 18 years, I have written quite a few screenplays and I have been produced as a television screenwriter. Writing a book was a different kind of writing, however, just like the blog was. I had to learn the ropes, but the experience has left me feeling as if I’ve found my niche. I suppose I have always been a novelist and learning to be a screenwriter was just part of my formation. So far, nearly everyone who has given me feedback, including my editor, has said they can visualize the story as a movie, which makes perfect sense given my writing background.

THE BILDERBERG GROUP AND THE COMMITTEE OF 300
For those of you who don’t know, The Unveiling was inspired by my fascination with organizations like “The Bilderberg Group” or “The Committee of 300.” In modern times, most people would say members of these groups belong to the one percent. They are extremely powerful and influential people who possess most of the world’s wealth. Many believe members of these groups control the world even in countries where democracies exist. To that I have added Sumerian Mythology, one of the world’s oldest stories. Anyone who has studied Sumerian Mythology knows it is terribly similar to the story of “Genesis” in the Old Testament. The major difference involves extra-terrestrials in place of God. If you believe in the Bible (or even if you don’t), the story is terribly compelling. I hope you will enjoy it. The Unveiling: 1.0 is available in paperback, Nook, Kindle and iBook. To learn more or to purchase a copy, please visit: TheUnveilingSeries.com

"The Unveiling: 1.0" has finally arrived!

It's hard to believe, but my book is finally done!

"The Unveiling: 1.0" is the first book of a series based on the Anunnaki of Sumerian Mythology. If you've watched "Ancient Aliens" on The History Channel, of if you've read any books by Erich Von Daniken or David Icke, then you might have an idea how the story will unfold. This project has been 3 years in the making, so I hope you'll like it. Any day now, I will be starting on "The Unveiling: 2.0," the followup to this first novel. 1.0 has only been on sale for a couple of weeks, but preliminary reviews are trickling in as my first readers are finishing. While the stories are very different, many people are comparing "The Unveiling" to Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code." To learn more, or to get your copy on paperback, Nook, Kindle or iBook, please visit: TheUnveilingSeries.com Happy holidays and I hope you enjoy the book!