S.G. Browne

Well, August went by pretty fast. Time flies when you’re doing edits and copy edits and galley edits on your zombie novella that’s been pushed up to an October 30 release date, while in between you’re finishing up your next book that you promised to your agent the day after Labor Day.

Yes, for the past month I haven’t had the time to do any writing that doesn’t involve either I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus or Big Egos, thus the dearth of blog posts. Actually, I haven’t done much of anything else, as I’ve been bouncing back and forth from one project to the other—which isn’t always the easiest transition to make, especially when you’re switching from a sentient zombie who is dressed up like Santa Claus to a narrator who sometimes believes he’s Elvis Presley, James Bond, or Captain Kirk, among others.

In case you’re wondering what it’s like to work on two projects at the same time, both of them under deadline, the last month went something like this:

• Turn in first draft of I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus on August 1
• Spend three days reintegrating with human beings, who you haven’t seen for the past two weeks and most of the past two months
• Catch a cold and get so sick you can’t write for most of the next week
• Work on edits of your next novel, Big Egos, which you stopped editing at the end of May to start writing your zombie novella
• Receive first round of edits on zombie novella; stop working on Big Egos for 4-5 days
• Send in edited draft of zombie novella; start working on Big Egos again for the next week
• Receive copy edits for zombie novella; spend entire weekend reading your novella out loud—twice; make edits; send back to publisher
• Work on Big Egos for the next ten day, rearranging chapters, fixing plot holes, and tying things together
• Send Big Egos off to agent the Wednesday after Labor Day
• Receive 1st Galley Page edits for I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus; spend all day Thursday reading galley pages out loud and making final fixes
• Take a long bike ride across the Golden Gate Bridge on Friday morning, eat some breakfast, watch a couple of episodes of Robot Chicken, and then write this blog post
• Go visit your mother

Now I get the weekend to relax, visit some friends and family, and then start working on Big Egos next week once I get edits back from my agent. Then it’s on to Super Duper. Or maybe another project I’ve been working on. Hmm…

While blogging has never been my passion, I realize that it’s been nearly a month since I posted anything. And there’s a reason for that. Unfortunately, it doesn’t involve sitting on a remote tropical beach with no Internet access.

About three months ago, I was approached by my publisher to see if I was interested in writing a Christmas themed zombie novella. I thought about it for a few days, wrote up a synopsis and pitched them an idea, and a couple of weeks later they came back and said OK.

Now I’ve never written anything on spec before. My first three novels were all completed, vetted by my agent, and then sold, so selling a book before I’d written a single word of it was a new experience. And writing a 40,000 word novella in a little over two months meant any creative energy I had was channeled into writing that novella.

Thus no blog posts. And a limited amount of interaction on Facebook and Twitter. I just didn’t have the time.

The good news is, the novella is done. The title?

I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus: A Breathers Christmas Carol.

Yes, the novella is a sequel to Breathers and picks up a year later, about a week before Christmas, with Andy waking up in a body farm in Portland, OR, where he’s spent the last year being experimented on at a zombie research facility.

I won’t give away too much of the plot, but it involves an escape, a Santa Claus costume, a lonely nine-year-old girl named Annie who reminds Andy of his own daughter, a couple of zombie handlers, and a trio of inept zombies.

I’ll share more about the novella in a later post, but at this point it’s scheduled for release on November 13, 2012, both in print as a small hardcover and as an eBook.

Now I need to get back to edits on my next novel, BIG EGOS.