In which the writing question is asked:
“Did you ever find yourself lacking motivation at times to write your novels? Or like, what did you do if you were stumped for ideas or just don’t know where a scene should go next”
The answer:
Is explained in gruesome detail in the “Author’s Note” in the forthcoming and completely revised (i.e., I rewrote it from start to finish a few months ago after finishing the screenplay for it, and realizing the screenplay was way better than the novel I wrote in 2013…) version of my first novel Zombie Cop which will be re-published soon.
Until then, here is the author’s note that I hope answers the question above:
Author’s Note:
“Appetite For Punishment”
I have a shameless admission:
This book is a massively revised version of Zombie Cop, and not the original I published in 2014. By that I mean: it’s the exact same story. But it also might as well be a…
Totally Different Book.
Here’s why that’s important for you:
I decided to write the original version of this novel after a stray brain fart on a coastal drive (“What if a cop turned into a zombie and started eating people he pulled over?”), followed by a long talk with a writer friend named Robert Bruce (who would later write the intro to the seventh book in this Enoch Wars series, Lucifer’s Favorite) a few years later in August 2013. He encouraged me to just start writing as it sounded like something he’d want to read. So, I started writing the first three or four chapters. Then I got distracted by business and life, put it down, and didn’t pick it up again until that December when I banged the rest of it out. However, before writing a single word of Zombie Cop, I already knew it would be a seven-part series. And I also already knew each part would focus on a different monster with my own “twists” on that monster’s lore. So I wrote the sequel (Vampire Apocalypse) later that year in July. Then it took almost a year after writing Vampire Apocalypse to write the third book Demon Crossfire. After that, it took me more than a year to sit down and hammer out the last four novels (Evil’s Child, Werewolf Bastard, Hell’s Frankenstein, and Lucifer’s Favorite) over a 5- or 6-month period to finish the series.
Part of the reason for writing the last four all at once is I just wanted to finish the series and move on to other things. And that’s why after I finished them and was satisfied with the story, I figured that was that.
Mission Accomplished.
That is, until a couple years later.
I got another “itch” to revisit the Enoch Wars universe in 2019 and wrote the eighth novel, God Blood. That book is a collection of 14 connected short stories to expand the world and play with various dangling plot lines and unresolved character arcs I’d set up. It also gave context to certain events that had happened in my mind (but not on paper, so to speak) in the stories. I thought it’d be a good way to make reading the series a more complete overall reading experience.
After I wrote that I once again thought:
“Finally! It’s for real over!”
And it was.
Until it wasn’t…
Because in early 2022 I saw the magnificently written—but totally ineptly ended—Dexter: New Blood show. And that show inspired me to write the ninth Enoch Wars novel, Serpent Seed—with even more ideas, themes, and plotlines (some starting as early as Book Four, Evil’s Child) I still had left over but didn’t put in the prior eight books. I also wanted to give the story a real ending after leaving both Books Seven and Eight on cliffhangers. The former was done that way deliberately (inspired by the ending of one of my favorite movies Sideways). But the latter just sort of “happened” and was not-at-all intentional. As probably any novelist will tell you: after a certain point, characters and stories start to write themselves. And when that happens…
The Writer Becomes as Much of a Spectator as the Audience.
It’s a strange phenomenon that is as nerve-racking (not knowing the ending and hoping it’ll be good) as it is exhilarating (also not knowing the ending and hoping it’ll be good).
Which brings me back to why I massively revised Zombie Cop:
I sat down for a month and put everything I had into Serpent Seed—dedicating it to my son, and even writing a bunch of appendices to further expand the lore with still more ideas that had been alluded to “off screen” throughout the books, that had also “happened” only in my head, but never confirmed in the stories themselves.
I was glad I did it, too.
Because of all nine books, Serpent Seed was—and still is—the one I am most proud of.
And, yes, once again I thought, “Oh yeah, baby! This is for real, for real finished!”
Until again…I got yet another “bug” to revisit this world.
Specifically, I wanted to turn Zombie Cop into a screenplay. I had zero illusion it would ever be made into a movie. And I had even less of an illusion that even if it did get made, the current Hollywood system would not butcher it with its predictable checklist-dance of race & gender-swapping characters, making at least one of the main characters trans and probably several of them gay, and stripping all the Christian undertones and themes completely out—turning it into just another boring slasher flick with a lame social agenda.
In other words, I did not want to write the screenplay for fame or fortune.
I Wrote It Because I Wanted To.
Whether it got made or not was irrelevant. Worst case, I was adapting the screenplay into a graphic novel anyway.
Not to mention this:
I am a writer by trade (copywriting and non-fiction books & newsletters). And pushing myself into different kinds of writing has always made all my other writing better. Plus, I’d also wanted to write a screenplay since the early 1990’s after writing a college paper on the subject. And it finally dawned on me after finishing Serpent Seed that I’d written some 8,000 pages of emails, several thousand pages of combined sales letters/ads, and more nonfiction books than I could remember…in addition to nearly 150 issues of my monthly Email Players print newsletter (which alone had a bigger word count than both The Lord of the Rings—including The Hobbit—and The Chronicles of Narnia combined). But I’d still never written a measly 100-page (give or take) screenplay in all that time.
So, write the Zombie Cop screenplay I did.
And turned out great (in my humble, but biased opinion) it did.
And get a glimmer of hope it might someday even be made I did.
At the very least, it was way better than the Zombie Cop novel. Certainly, the screenplay was much tighter, with none of the bloat, and with the redundantly deranged parts (there were many) either taken out, implied, or “retrofitted” in a way that made for far better storytelling.
And That’s When It Happened Yet Again…
What I mean by “it” is this:
After letting some friends and family read the Zombie Cop screenplay (some of who’d also read and enjoyed the novel) and getting their feedback…I realized that book being so ineptly written made the rest of the eight books…
Mostly Inaccessible.
Except maybe to the mentally disturbed minds who read it. No offense to the fans who enjoyed it. I was certainly mentally disturbed when writing Zombie Cop. Even my cousin’s stepdaughter asked, “What’s wrong with your cousin?” after she read it.
(I still have no answer to that…)
Which brings us to the here and chow:
I spent a month rewriting and re-editing, word-by-word, Zombie Cop based on that screenplay. This also meant—much to my own horror—doing even more work in the form of writing brand-new Chapters 7 and 14 for Book Seven (Lucifer’s Favorite) and a small edit to the ending of Book Six (Hell’s Frankenstein). Not to mention having to pay to have those changes (including all of Zombie Cop) re-recorded in the audio books and figuring out the logistics (like buying out all the old inventory of those books…) so all the new material came out at once. That way, I figured, anyone who’d gotten into the series wouldn’t be confused by what they read later due to changes I made in Zombie Cop.
Yeesh.
Sometimes I think I have an appetite for punishment as voracious as my zombie characters’…
Appetites For Flesh!
But you know what?
I’d do it again in a zombie victim-panicked heartbeat. Because it was not only a labor of love…but this version of Zombie Cop (we’ll call it Zombie Cop 2.0) you’re about to read is not only much shorter (nearly half the length), but a faster, cleaner, and hopefully more entertaining experience for you, the reader, to enjoy.
It’s also a story I’d let my mom read, too.
It’s no joke or exaggeration that, over all these years, I forbade her from reading the original. I just didn’t want her wondering how she’d failed her boy…
Again, this book is the same story.
But if you’ve read the original, it might feel like an almost totally different book in some ways.
Personally, I like to think of it as:
“Reverse Osmosis Zombie Cop”
I.e., a novel, adapted from the screenplay, which was adapted from the original novel.
All right, enough of this yapping.
If you’ve read this far, I don’t know what else to tell you.
You must have an appetite for wasting time as great as mine is for doing extra writing. How about we both fix our evil ways then? Me by wrapping up this author’s note, and you by reading something productive—such as the rest of this book?
As Chief Rawger might say with his hyena-like laugh:
BONE-appe-TEET!
That should answer the above question and then some.
I can’t speak for anyone else.
But for me it’s not a matter of needing motivation.
It’s looking at all my ideas and having to figure out what to work on next, and rearranging my schedule to fit it in. And if you write enough, and if you are invested enough in your stories and characters and legacy (even if it’s just a legacy in your own mind…) your problem could very well be like what happened to me:
You shift from not enough motivation, to TOO much motivation.
And between you and me… I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Because the satisfaction makes it a lot of fun, and a labor of love.
I hope this helps anyone reading this in some way.
I really believe copywriters have an advantage in fiction. Not because we are better writers (arguably we are worse pure writers). But because a good copywriter will be naturally paranoid about boring people. And I’ll take a non-boring but terribly “written” novel over a boring but perfectly crafted novel any ol’ day.
It’s not all that different from how I approach email, too.
You can learn more about that in the paid Email Players Newsletter.
More info here:
Ben Settle
