National Novel Writing Month starts tomorrow, and to celebrate I thoughts I’d give you a sneak preview of what Spawn will be all about. You know the premise of the story, and you know some of the history through Alleluia, but you don’t know who the people in Spawn will be. So, without further adeue, I introduce the main character:

Say hello to Ethan Hemmings, a distraught single male doctor who mildly enjoys his work – until Spawn happens, of course. When one of his patients wakes up during their autopsy, he frantically tries to gain control of the situation and fails. Afterwards, he dedicates his time to unraveling the mystery of why people are coming back from the dead.

The secondary characters, in the beginning, are Shane and Noah Evans, a happy Irish couple with a bit of history and a lot of explaining to do when Shane ends up dead. Noah, his wife, is elated to find out that Shane might, by some miracle, be alive…

Throughout the course of the novel, I’ll be including odd new ways that this strange death-defying disease works. I’ll even have Hemmings visit the old city of Alleluia, now completely ruined and covered in new grass. He’ll go wherever it takes to stop this epidemic – even face the disease directly. It’s smart, and it can travel into anybody it wants – perhaps everybody is already a carrier. Perhaps the only thing being transmitted is a very selective activation hormone. And if the world wants to stop people from dying living, people had better act fast. Because humans are respawning at an alarmingly fast rate.

See you tomorrow, fellow wordsmiths.

I wrote this yesterday. This story is meant to be a prequel for my upcoming novel, Spawn. It tells the story of how the small town of Alleluia in northern Sweden became Hell on Earth. This story takes place ten+ years before the novel, although I haven’t yet decided its true timeline placement (it could be twenty or thirty years prior). None of the characters in this short story, however, will appear in Spawn.

UPDATE: The second draft of this story has replaced the first draft. The story is now far more continuous and slightly more meaningful. In essence, it makes good sense now. I may reach out for peer editing to complete a third draft.

Keep going »

I came to school this morning only to hear the worst news – one of my good friends, Michael Kalamar, hanged himself. All I’ve been told was that there were family problems; it doesn’t seem to have had anything to do with school or academics.

I’m incredibly distraught, obviously to the point of tears… he was a wonderful person, and a wonderful friend. He was friendly with a great number of people in my grade (we’re the senior class), so when we all found out many ran out of the classroom in tears. Several teachers were bawling their eyes out as well, including my physics teacher, who apparently has a self-defined life mission to stop teenagers from committing suicide (a noble cause, of course). The entire school stopped today, was completely silent, I along with it.

Please, please give his family your condolences… I feel like telling other people will make me feel better, make me feel like I did something about this tragedy. Mike was a childhood friend of mine, and his suicide has shocked our entire student body… so, if I can’t do anything else, I can at least talk about it here.

Only God knows why anybody would ever do such a thing… he was such a happy go lucky guy, too…

With National Novel Writing Month ‘07 coming up, I thought I’d take the time to let you in on what I’m planning for my third novel:

I read an article about a man who, during his own autopsy, woke up claiming to be in extreme pain. At the same time, I had been playing Metroid Prime 3, constantly annoyed that enemies re-spawned whenever I left a room and re-entered it. “Didn’t that thing just die?” was a consistent thought of mine.

So I was inspired to create a story. What if this kind of thing were happening all too often? What if there was, in essence, an “epidemic of un-death”? I don’t mean zombies, not at all – in fact, an entirely different direction. What if this epidemic were a biological threat?

Something is making things seem dead, and then reviving them. Or, something is reviving what recently died. A recent scare involving MRSA across the northeastern US has also inspired me – the future of bacterial survival is entirely dependent on their evolving to avoid our antibiotics. We know that in the future most every strain of bacteria will be resistant to our treatments, and MRSA is just a taste of that deadliness. But what would happen if one of these bacteria weren’t deadly, but un-deadly? Who would try and use this bacteria to figure out how it worked?

And who might try and reverse-engineer it?

I announce Spawn, my third novel – a work-in-progress right now in overall plot, but looks to be shaping up to become my best novel, and possibly most action-filled novel, ever.