Here I am at the edge

  George Romero Though I have no proof, I would say, yes I believe in zombies. Not the film genre created by  George Romero ; that is pure fiction. Zombies are living people who are put in a state of trance, the practice came to Haiti from West Africa during the era of slave trading.  The fear of the Living Dead was used by Papa Doc , and later his son to control the population and to rig elections by eliminating the opposition. However, like most dictators in history, at some point, someone stands up to them. Though Papa Doc died in office, his son, and his family were sent into exile. Junior and his family lived their lives out in Paris , they reputedly escaped with as much money as the Marcos family held in the Philippines .

Vampires are creatures of the dark, not sex symbols. Forget  Twilight  disqus.com/home/discussion/channel-indieworld/twilight/ , my vampires    disqus.com/home/discussion/channel-indieworld/vampires/   are closer to the original concept of    Nosferatu    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu .   Since the advent of  Hammer Horror  in the 1970's, people forget that the vampire was initially seen a hideous creature of the night, not a sex symbol.

If nothing changes it will be the same I said years ago, "If I didn't have bad luck, I'd have no luck," and the news of my latest injury presses the point home more.  I was planning a trip to a jazz festival in May of next year, the venue is the site of my zombie story. This would have been a return visit as I went to  Bridgnorth  several years ago for a Folk music festival.

Night of the Living Dead This post is not to announce a follow-up story to Zombiewatch  - I did that months ago. This post is about the deterioration of the state of my mental health , after four nights of no sleep, I feel like one of the zombies in The Walking Dead . Where I once had the fire that fuelled my writing, now there is only a cold dark void - a void that saps what energy I have left to feed an ever growing belief that I was wrong to try to become a writer.

The chills are multiplying Treat yourself to a spooktacular double for Halloween , with two of my best stories for this time of year. The classic chilling tale of The Old Church ghosts   and Carol Caitlin's debut in  Zombiewatch . Ms. Caitlin reappears in  The Overdale incident , this time learning about alien love-making techniques .

That is no exaggeration as many of them appeared in collections and many more have not yet and probably will not emerge in public. Out of over 300 stories, only two got trashed and one re-emerged as "Zombiewatch." http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GCRPH6C  My original was called Escalaphobia and was set in a museum, unfortunately it didn't get passed page 1 before I scrapped it out of boredom.  Some time later, I resurrected the idea as a two part project. Part 1 succeeded as not only did I finish the story but I enjoyed writing it. Part 2 is out of my hands, as I was trying to prove to myself any story about zombies had a chance of selling.  The other story was about a writer who had to leave his home and family, he became so popular he couldn't go out without being mobbed. This only lasted a page or two as it was so depressing to write.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008BK1WDK  If you have been following this blog, you know one of my basic tenets is I hate a cop out ploy and yet I find myself in a jam and forced much against my ethos to cop to the dollar.  The reason for my sorry state of affairs lies with a book market which relies on the sale of books with covers displaying half-naked torsos to sell books. Having tried all other genres to get a few sales -- including zombies -- I have been forced to the conclusion that to sell e-books I shall have to write cheap porn as this appears to be what readers like to read.  This action I find repulsive on so many levels it sickens me to think that I have to drag myself down to the gutter to get a dollar sale, if this doesn't work I have no idea what to do, other than give up writing. Previously I held the conviction I would never write a zombie story as I detested the zombie genre, but I did write one, even if this too failed to sell and now I sin...