The final word on the Farcical Zombie Trilogy
When this site launched part one in the trilogy was already finished. Now that work is done on part three, I can put it all to rest with some final reflections.
A German Scientist on Samuel Clemens’ Front Porch is hopefully the longest title I ever have. Obviously it’s a play off Mark Twain’s book, A Connecticut Yankee on King Arthur’s Porch. The idea spawned out of a simple observation: Mark Twain and Albert Einstein look a lot alike. They both have wild and crazy hair and huge mustaches. Truth be told, that was the extent of their resemblance but it was enough for me.
The book is done and the link to purchase it can be found on the bookstore page.
An idea to do a crazy time travel story featuring the two men soon formed. This was around five years ago; I can’t recall exactly. I really only had that premise and it wasn’t much (yet) of a story, but I took it to my friend Brent, who shares my love for oddball humor. I wanted to see if just the premise was good enough to pursue.
His patented exuberance gave me the green light.
And yet, I did nothing with it for years. Too much work in other areas kept it on the back-burner until last year when I sat down to write the Kingdom of Arthur series. Around the time I was writing the sixth and final book, the idea of a zombie story set in an nursing home popped into my head. Very soon after, another zombie story—this one set on the Titanic—came to mind. Revisiting the Twain/Einstein story, and adding zombies into the plot to round out the trilogy just felt right.
Originally, the book was to focus exclusively on Einstein and Twain, putting them together at the end of the first act, then sending them out into the hijinx-filled adventure. I struggled making that story work, however, because the principle villains—Nazis, and the zombie army they create—needed more characters. I needed to know who and why on the villain side, which led me to create a slew of new characters to play with before the titular doppelgangers team up.
Those German-based characters were a mixture of real (Heisenberg, Himmler) and fictional (Keller, The Svitzhausen Brothers) but I tried my hardest to abide by the locations of things and the timeline in which things happened. I’m sure there are a few anachronisms to be found, but in those cases I can just chalk them up to the alternate universe in which all my stories take place.
With this book done, the work I began in January is also ended. It’s a great relief. When I started, I didn’t expect over nine months would be spent on them. The Arthur books took a whole year and they were six books deep; these were only three books. I expected to be done by June or early July. The latter two tales grew in the telling and, well, here we are.
What’s next? I have a schedule and over forty ideas to work through before I’m dead.
But that’s for another post…