As a first book this one has taken me a couple years to finish, the writing was done in about seven months, but the editing, ugh! Don't get me started about the editing. I am a firm believer in good editing…now. Unfortunately I have the editing skills of a slow zombie; this is the second edition of the book, and by 'second' I mean 'tenth'. I've read through Outbreak many times and in each instance I am 'sure' I caught all the errors and each time I am wrong. Hopefully the story overcame the many misspelled words, poor sentence structure and grammatical errors that I have missed. I never set out to write an American Classic and have always felt that a decent book should be read easily and make me look back on it with fond memories as an escape from the minor problems life was throwing at me at the time. If I have done this for a few people then I have done my job.
Thanks to the following people for their editing help and general advice: Mike Keleman, Jesse Masoner, Anne Clodi and Mike Picco. Also thanks to the people who left reviews of my work online, sometimes it is painful for me to read, but it made the work better in the end: C. Brunner, J. Coffey, Jessica Manning, Jessica Hannigan, W. Temple, Ian Bottomley and Jeffrey Johansen.
I am writing the second book in this trilogy right now and taking care to get the story right. I have also written a few other novels set in the 'Zombie Chronicles' universe, most of which are not connected directly with this book, however I do have this strange desire to connect all the works in some way, you can find the links if you hunt for them hard enough. The next book in this series will start with "The Zombie Chronicles II: " right now the working title is "The Zombie Chronicles II: Discovery", but I might change it before all the body parts are eaten, I mean words are written. Any affiliated novels will have a title like "Undead Advantage: A Zombie Chronicles Novel", just to keep things easy. The story of Max will be a trilogy, no more, no less. I like the character, but I have no plans to use him beyond three books, he'll need a rest by the time I am finished anyway.
You can keep up with my progress at my website: www.ctales.com, where you will find no advertising, no log ins and plenty of lightly edited things to read, including numerous short stories of those who didn't make it through World War Z and a few non-zombie related pieces of fiction as well.
Thanks for reading!
Mark Clodi
February 20th, 2010