Authors Notes Pt.2 - Let there be Light

 Originally intended as part of a trilogy, ‘Neurons Like Brandy’ was the middle child with my first novel ‘The Disease of Dancing Cats’ and the third ‘Anniversary of an Uninteresting Event’ bookending it. What I wanted to do was rethink the monster genre films but to be honest I am way too late now. TDoDC is a vampire novel (yes, I see your eyes rolling), NLB is a zombie novel and AoaUE was going to be/may still be a werewolf story (based off of a short story I wrote during my GCSE English class).

The market is saturated for those types of genres but please bear with me.

The point of this post is to talk about resurrecting ‘Neurons Like Brandy’ and actually finishing it. The idea is that I will be posting 1-2 chapters every 2 weeks with accompanying art (as long as I can find the sketch books that I drew in at the time as well as a functional scanner) as well as some kind of self-indulgent writer commentary.

I am not selling it am I?

I do understand that the zombie genre has been done to death, and there are few ways to go short of having a girl in a cowboy hat and bikini massacre undead.

NLB came into existence pretty much because of George Romero’s classics and Martin, which is underappreciated. Further to that, the opening of the novel was always scored by Pilote with Up or Down (imagine this music playing in a shopping centre as zombies murder people it is sinister and hilarious at the same time). A lot of the narrative conceit was taken from an episode of ‘Thirtysomething’ a terrible 90s TV show that had a couple of good ideas that Julian Barnes mined for his most recent novel (disclaimer: I don’t think that Julian Barnes actually took inspiration from this TV show). The other big influence was a film called ‘The Dead Next Door’, I don’t think that trailer really does it justice but the nihilism of a community trying to deal with zombies – in my mind – hasn’t ever been done quite as well. The sense of boredom marred by the ever impending death is a difficult juxtaposition.

Well, I am not really selling it again am I?

The few of you that actually read this blog please trust me on this one. It might be a terrible idea – every person who has read this novel has said that it needs an editor – but that is where you can help. See grammatical problems, plot holes, over long sentences? Point them out and tell me how rubbish I am. I will try and make them better.

Suspicious of a character’s motivations? I will try and explain or, possibly, change them.
Consider this a polite form of crowd sourcing.

I feel that we should finish off with a post from the forum where I got the picture of the Onechanbara image:

“the first time i masterbaited was when i was 11 and i jacked off to a animated picture of a 50 year old lady eating a hotdog on the internet.[sic]”

Food for thought right there.