Interview with little ol' me

Check out my interview on zombie blog Bricks of the Dead.

Short excerpt:

"ZombieMutts: Even major publishers seem to have somewhat of a bastardized idea of what horror content is. Inside a bookstore looking on the shelves you see a lot of cookie cutter horror books sharing space with the sci-fi books. Yet what’s being produced in the E-Book market by self-published authors to indie publishers is very different.


Rod Redux: That’s why I’m making a living and they’re closing shop. Seriously, though… when I develop a story idea into a book, I continually ask myself: Is this original? Has it been done before? How can I make it MORE unique? I get on the internet and search for names, try to double check myself for originality, because it’s easy to accidentally copy someone else nowadays, there’s so many people writing books and making movies and comics. The mainstream publishers do the opposite. They say, “Harry Potter was such a huge success. How can we repeat this?” The problem is, Harry Potter was a success because it was original. There was nothing else like it. You lose that when you try to manufacture the NEXT Harry Potter or the NEXT Twilight. The best advice I could give to an aspiring writer would be to concentrate on originality, not on copying what’s considered “hot” at the moment, because it’s the originality, not the subject matter, that makes them hot.


ZombieMutts: Mort is a huge fan favorite character that would have fit perfectly in any number of situations. What made you drop him into the zombie apocalypse?


Rod Redux: From the outset, he was a zombie book character. His genesis as a protagonist was the question: what was the worst thing to be if there was a zombie apocalypse? The answer was, “a fat guy”. He’s the guy who is supposed to die first. The nerdy, fat, smart guy. He can’t run. He’s not fast or graceful or particularly brave, but he’s very pragmatic, and I believe, if there was a zombie apocalypse, that it would be the practical people who had the best chance of surviving. Plus, he genuinely cares for the people who become his friends during the course of the tale, and that gives him the strength to persevere, even after he’s been shot in the head with a cattlegun and infected with the Z virus and all the other horrible stuff that happens to him. If you don’t love something or someone, why fight? You’re going to die eventually anyway, so just let the zombies eat you and save yourself the bother. Plus, Mort is French for “death”, so even his name is sort of zombie-related."

Click here for the full interview!