Here is the full schedule for the SUMMER OF ZOMBIE BLOG TOUR 2014.
Here is where all of the posts for the #SummerZombie blog tour will be updated on a daily basis in the month of June. You can expect 3 posts a day during the tour from various zombie authors.
Sunday June 1st
Kirk Allmond (interview) on Blaze McRob’s Tales of Terror Blog
Shana Festa (guest post) on Yours In Storytelling Blog
Monday June 2nd
Christine Verstraete (teaser) on Graeme Reynold’s Blog
Jay Wilburn (interview) on Author Rebecca Besser’s Blog
Jack Wallen (guest post) on G. Elmer Munson’s Blog
Tuesday June 3rd
Charles Ingersoll (teaser) at The Bookie Monster Blog
Chris Tucker (interview) on Horror After Dark Blog
Timothy Baker (guest post) on Sweet Southern Home Blog
Wednesday June 4th
Claire C. Riley (teaser)
T.W. Piperbrook (interview)
Stevie Kopas (guest post)
Thursday June 5th
You click here and this will take you right to the SUMMER OF ZOMBIE 2014 BLOG TOUR LINKS so that you won’t miss a single segment.
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Oh shoot. I hate it when I forget things, but I lost my memory sometime ago and haven’t found it yet. I had faithfully promised to post this blog this morning and here it is dinner time and I am still farting around.
Never trust a man with a beard.
Now instead let me turn this blog over to the lovely Shana Festa – the author of TIME OF DEATH as well as this guest-blog entry.
And, if you click on this picture it will take you directly to the official Facebook homepage of the TIME OF DEATH virtual release party!
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My father used to torture me with horror movies. Every night he would find the scariest movie available and turn it on. Being the eighties, we only had the main television, so unless I wanted to go to bed after dinner, my only other option was to watch with him. Nightmare on Elm Street, American Werewolf in London, Child’s Play and Night of the Living Dead, were staples in our household.
He would up the ante by doing things like sneaking outside my bedroom window in the middle of the night to scratch at the window and howl. Or, his favorite, ask me to get things from his truck and turn off the exterior lights when I got ten feet from the front door and yell, “Watch out for Freddy & Jason!” and then he’d close the front door. I could hear him laughing from behind the door, but I’d be too concerned about the imaginary monsters sneaking up on me! Love you, dad…you big jerk!
My love for the zombie spawned from necessity. I always felt drawn to scary movies, clearly a glutton for punishment. I had seen all the “of the Dead’s” to date, my favorite being the original Dawn of the Dead (1977) and I was a huge fan of the Resident Evil (2002) movie. Sure it got my heart racing and I could only watch it through a small gap in my fingers, but I discovered I could watch scary stuff during daylight hours and not be as terrified. Nighttime was an entirely different story.
When the new Dawn of the Dead (2004) came out, I made a critical mistake…the sun had gone down during the movie.
For three months I tortured my husband with my irrational fears. I made him barricade the bedroom door with furniture every night and slept with the lights on. It got so bad that I couldn’t even close my eyes in the shower without seeing that little girl (the first zombie appearing in the remake), and I couldn’t go outside alone in the dark. One night we were sitting on the back lanai, it was basically a screened in rectangle big enough to fit a table and grill. I heard a noise in the courtyard and had…well, we’ll just call it…a moment. I hopped the table faster than humanly possible and leapt over hubs shoulder, running straight into the closed sliding glass door and bouncing off. Then I locked him outside and left him for dead. Not my finest moment, I’ll agree. But at least it’s been the source of years of humor at Chez Festa.
Three months later, I decided to take matters into my own hands and watched the movie until it no longer scared me. Mind you, I still only watched in the daytime. From that, my addiction to the genre was born. Books, Movies, TV Shows, Videogames. You name it, I found it. 300 zombie books later, not much scares me. I’m slicker now, though. Instead of covering my eyes with my fingers during The Walking Dead, I hold dog, Daphne, in front of my face and peek between her ears.
So, a lot of people ask me what zombies symbolize for me. I’m no deep thinker when it comes to my zombies. You won’t find any hidden cultural references that compare the zombie to the fall of our modern day society, or any crapola like that. It’s simple…pure carnage. I love a monster with the insatiable urge to destroy, feed, and infect. There’s no rhyme or reason and trying to predict a pattern with zombies is virtually impossible.
Bring on the blood, guts, and slaughter. I dare you to try and scare me…and if you do, just know that it’s been proven: when running from a zombie, I will be faster, regardless of my lack of cardio, and I can be ruthless.
Links:
Shana’s Website
Shana’s Blog
Shana’s Twitter
The Bookie Monster Facebook
Shana’s Pinterest
Shana’s Goodreads
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The stench of rotting flesh is in the air! Welcome to the Summer of Zombie Blog Tour 2014, with 33 of the best zombie authors spreading the disease in the month of June.
Stop by the event page on Facebook so you don’t miss an interview, guest post or teaser… and pick up some great swag as well! Giveaways galore from most of the authors as well as interaction with them!
Don’t forget to Tweet this out and add the hashtag #SummerZombie
And – if you click on this picture it will take you directly to the Amazon listing for TIME OF DEATH – and it looks like a truly kickass book!
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And, one last time – my most sincerest apologies to Shana and Armand for being so freaking late.
yours in storytelling,
Steve Vernon
Let’s face it.
Facebook has been taken over by old farts like me. The younger folks are messing around on some other secret sector of the internet, once they’d figured out that their parents knew how to Facebook.
And since when did “Facebook” become a verb, anyway?
Anyhow , I have just realized that I owe somebody a guest-blog that I had faithfully promised and I am getting right on that right away.
But before I do, let me post this handy chart for the next time that you are “Facebooking”.
yours in storytelling,
Steve Vernon
This week I stumbled across a fun little blog writing project that is called the SATURDAY STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
The idea is every Friday a subject is posted and on Saturday you write a complete stream of consciousness blog entry pertaining to that subject.
Today’s subject was OBJECT.
I took a look around my writing desk and the very first OBJECT that I saw was my Mountain Man carving.
I carved this mountain man during a cabinet making course I took at trade school. At the time that I attended I intended to make a career out of creating fine cabinetry.
Only problem was I sucked at cabinetry.
I have long since accepted the fact that when it comes to being handy I make Red Green look good.
Or – as Clint Eastwood might say – “A man has got to know his limitations.”
The Mountain Man has always represented a special kind of symbolism for me.
I grew up in the hills of Northern Ontario and at the time I thought of those hills as mountains – but later in life when I hitchhiked out to British Columbia and saw what real mountains truly looked like I gained perspective.
“Talking to men who had but lately kissed their wives goodnight and slept under storm-tight roofs, they must have had a look in their eyes and a way of a standing. Their shirts and breeches of buckskin or elkskin had many patches sewed on with sinew. They were worn thin between the patches, were black from many campfires and greasy from many meals. They were threadbare and filthy, they smelled bad, and any Mandan had a lighter skin. They gulped, rather than ate the tripes of buffalo. They had forgotten the use of chairs. Words and phrases, mostly obscene, of Nez Perce, Clatsoy, Manadan, Chinook came naturally to their tongues.” – Bernard DeVoto
In fact, one of my personal favorite go-to movies when I am sick or weary or just want a little comfort is The Mountain Men.
The carving is made from obeche – (oh-bee-she) – a West African wood, used for racing boats and sea planes and Fender guitars. The word is a song and you can’t say it without smiling softly and smelling the tall African grass and feeling the sunshine and the water splashing. It is a wood that sings and soars and it sometimes reminds me of the time I road in the back of a work truck with a group of African field hands as we drove away from a long week of fiddlehead picking in Northern BC.
They sang working chants – songs that I had previously heard only on Tarzan and Jungle Jim movies and there was something in that way that they sang those tunes that reminded me that no matter how much of this world a man has seen and experienced there is always a shade that dances behind experience – something that you haven’t seen just yet.
“Sing,” they told me and I sang old Willy Nelson and Waylon Jennings and Gordon Lightfoot tunes right back at them – as many as I could remember. We sang together – them in their tongue and me in mine riding in the darkness in the shadow of the Northern Rockies.
And sometimes that word – “obeche” – reminds me of the O-Peach-Eee chewing gum that I chewed as a kid and it makes me grin and there’s nothing wrong with grinning, is there?
I had to laminate the original carving blank, gluing four chunks of the wood together, clamping it overnight to harden into a solid block. Then I worked on it with a bandsaw to rough out the shape. Used knives and wood gouges and chisels and rasps and surforms and a spokeshave to get down closer to the man who was hiding inside of that wood. Than I used a Dremel motor tool for the fine detail. I sanded it and finished it with mineral oil to give it that deep yellow sheen. The carving is about thirty years old and it is one of the few belongings that I hang onto.
It is sitting above my desk looking down at me while I type. I can hear him muttering under his beard – “What the hell are you waiting for? Get busy. Get writing.” and then other times I think of him as just standing there, worn down from wandering yet still gazing into the far off horizons of forever-go-yonder and my spirit breathes a deep clear breath of pure mountain air.
Damn it. Now I want a beer.
This post is part of SoCS. Find it here and join in the fun! http://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/05/30/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-may-3114
Yours in storytelling,
Steve Vernon
(PS: The rules of this blogging exercise PROHIBIT editing. It is strictly free-form stream-of-consciousness blogging – and I have stuck to that – but I had to re-edit it to add that Van Damme clip because WordPress froze up on me and I had to re-enter the blog to fix that)
Posted in writing
Tagged mountain man, Saturday Stream of Consciousness, SSoC, Steve Vernon, writing
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