Category: Rock Zombie

Rock Zombie – Best Horror Novel Finalist – 2024 Aurealis Awards

To my absolute delight, Rock Zombie is a finalist in the BEST HORROR NOVEL category for 2024’s Aurealis Awards!

I am completely over the moon and so grateful to the wonderful judges at Aurealis and to everyone who has read and supported Rock Zombie since its publication on Halloween last year. In fact, I’m grateful to everyone who supported it BEFORE publication (and during… and after!)

Rock Zombie had a long, meandering, and often shuffling journey into existence before I decided to go down the self-publishing route. There were offers, deals, contracts, lots of rejections, plenty of ghosting (ha!), and, honestly, quite a lot of disappointment. This writing lark can be a difficult gig at times. You put heart and soul into a book and you have to believe in it, otherwise what’s the point? This kind of affirmation and support is utterly magic, so, thank you!

Rock Zombie is a silly story. I know it is. But it’s a love letter to the town I grew up in and a period of time that shaped who I am. All that music, all those pop culture references, all those nods to classic horror, novels, and films – they all come together in Rock Zombie in a way I’m quite proud of. But perhaps more importantly, once I decided to take full control myself, I thoroughly enjoyed the whole process. The stress vanished and it was all about the love of the story and embracing the silly, pulp, grunge aesthetic of the whole thing. I loved creating cryptic social media posts, random TikTok videos, Spotify playlists, art work, organising a book launch and generally just making a tit of myself. And people got onboard! Having Aurealis place Rock Zombie as a finalist – alongside such stellar company – is really the icing on the cake.

So, thank you! Thank you to Aurealis, thank you to every reader, thank you to every reviewer, and thank you to everyone who still supported me despite the very real concerns of “Oh dear, what is he going to write next?”

Best wishes to J S Breukelaar, David-Jack Fletcher, Josh Kemp, Ben Pienaar and Deborah Sheldon. What an honour it is to sit alongside you.

Thanks for reading folks!

For more info about Rock Zombie, click this tag.

To buy Rock Zombie, follow this link

Cheers!

Rock Zombie is published!

Finally, after months of me annoying people with semi-cryptic posts, snippets of random nonsense, and bizarre TikTok videos, my silly, gross, over-the-top, comedy horror – Rock Zombie – has shuffled off the mortal coil and invaded your shelves/Kindles.

But as with all things Finlayson, it hasn’t been a smooth journey. You may notice – to start with – that it is not yet Halloween. In fact, we are still a few days out from the publication date. The reason for this is a combination of impostor syndrome and impatience (and an idea from Dan). I got worried that if I published a horror novel ON Halloween it would be too late for anyone to give a stuff about. Silly, I know, but I likened it to releasing a Christmas novel on Christmas Day… who is going to read it?!

So, I brought the release date forward and instantly made a mess of things… the book vanished from all servers for a few days and I had a mini melt-down thinking I’d lost everything. But it really just boiled down to me being an idiot.

And then it was here!

Sort of!

For some reason known only to the Amazon overlords, my silly little, supposed-to-be-cheap, stuff-it-in-your-back-pocket-and-dog-ear-it, pulp-fiction of a novel was listed for $42 here in Australia! That’s insane! I set the price at $18.99! I wanted it to be less than $20 and Amazon bloody doubled it! I have reached out, I have tried to change it, but there is nothing I can do. From what I can gather from other frustrated indie authors on social media, it boils down to Amazon just not playing nice with other people. Simply put, they do it because they can.

The listing is fine in other countries and territories, but here in Australia, where I live and am likely to sell most books, it costs a fortune!

I’m gutted.

I have reached out to book shops – particularly Books@Stones in Brisbane – and hope they will stock it.

In the process of writing this I have just seen that The Nile have it on for the expected price! Happy days!

Update: For some reason, I cannot add The Nile link to my Books2Read profile. Ah, well. It’s never simple is it.

So, it’s out there. My silly little book that I’m super proud of… and I’m having a book launch on Saturday 9th November at the very cool Nosferatu Distillery, Bar and Cafe in Bowen Hills, Brisbane (and I won’t chicken out of this one).

I really hope you enjoy Rock Zombie for what it is… a silly, fun, gory little romp through ’90s nostalgia. If you do, please consider leaving a review on Goodreads or (shudder) Amazon. It really does make a difference to little plebs like me.

I am beyond grateful to everyone who reads my books. I love ya!

Cheers,

Al

Why I chose to self-publish Rock Zombie

TLDR; no-one else would, so I did it myself.

TLDR2.0; my wife told me to.

Rock Zombie has quite an interesting past. Once upon a time, it was scheduled to be published before The Book and the Blade (my debut), but due to a variety of reasons, it never quite worked out.

In preparing for this blog post, I checked my trusty spreadsheet, which is my equivalent of Stephen King’s ‘nail on the wall’, but instead of spiking publisher rejections on a nail, I organise them in a table and highlight in red when a story gets the brush off.

Like Rock Zombie, there is a lot of red.

So, let’s see. Rock Zombie has been submitted to:

  • 23 publishers
    • 8 said no
    • 10 didn’t respond
    • 3 said yes

Of those 3; 1 turned out to be a vanity press and wanted an author contribution of $4500 (now there’s some small print!), 1 pulled the plug during a run of edits because they didn’t want to risk the song lyrics (since removed), and 1… well, it just didn’t work out. I was gutted about the last one… to the point where I wanted to give up completely, but my wife told me to suck it up and self-publish. I dwelled on it for a long time, submitted to a few more places, tweaked the word count to try and force it through the door of others, and eventually came to the unerring (and some would say, obvious) conclusion that my wife was right.

There are other reasons to self-publish – not just matrimonial harmony – chief among them is complete creative control. I had a LOT of fun writing Rock Zombie and I wanted it to be a certain way. Various back-and-forths with publishers showed me that might be a little tricky. Everyone had a different idea of what this story was.

At it’s core, Rock Zombie is a shlock horror. Cheap thrills, big scares, gross humour, and a little heart. I’m aiming for an ’80s high-concept film style – terrorists seize tower, soldiers attacked by alien, three men take care of a baby – in this case, a ghost and a zombie come from the same body.

Rock Zombie should be a quick, entertaining read… a knackered and worn paperback stuffed in a back pocket and pulled out on a train… or abandoned in a pub after a quiet night suddenly gets out of hand. I want the cover to be ringed with beer stains and the pages to be turned down from over use. An easy, quick distraction in a world of bollocks.

Don’t get me wrong, I might not have accomplished that, and it certainly won’t please everyone, but this version of Rock Zombie (the one releasing on Halloween) is the story I wanted to tell all along. It’s a love-letter to the ’90s, to my childhood in the north east, to high concept films, grunge, and reading Stephen King when you’re far too young!

I hope you enjoy it. If you do, please let me know.

Cheers,

Al

Pre-orders available now

Rock Zombie – Available as a Smashwords pre-sale – read it now!

Full disclosure – I don’t really know what I’m doing. I imagine this will not come as a surprise to anyone who knows me. Rock Zombie is a new venture. I have self-published books using Amazon, and I have been lucky enough to be traditionally published (by the wonderful folks at Parliament House Press), but this is the first time I’ve tried to self-publish with expanded distribution… which these days just means ‘places other than Amazon’.

I used the platform Draft2Digital for this book and thanks to their internet jiggery-pokery-magic-trickery, Rock Zombie is available in a number of different bookshops and online retailers (well, it will be on Halloween).

One of those online spaces is Smashwords.

Smashwords, as you can see in the pic above, does ‘pre-sales’. This is not the same as a pre-order. From what I can gather, if you’re a member of Smashwords, you can buy Rock Zombie now… and read it now.

That’s a whole two weeks before Halloween you lucky ducks!

I don’t know why. I think the idea is to generate some buzz for the book before it comes out on general release… and I imagine it only really work for author’s with large and established fan-bases, but it’s there, and I have access to it, so I figure… what the hell?

So, if you’re a member of Smashwords and want early access, or you’re just dead keen to sink your teeth into a gory zombie/ghost horror, he’s the link…

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1608312

Cheers!

Rockefeller Copyright Laws!

Rock Zombie is an unkempt zombie graveyard of pop culture references and nods to ’90s culture. They are bursting through the pages like reanimated hands clawing towards the sky, but much like a teenager in a classic zombie horror, I have to be very careful where I tread.

Copyright laws are slathering ghouls just waiting to sneak up and devour an unsuspecting author who hasn’t looked over their shoulder.

Okay, that’s enough of the belaboured metaphor… the first draft of my silly little comedy/horror was littered with direct song lyrics, movie quotes, and famous lines from television shows, but that is very much a Donny Don’t.

Don’t do what Donny Don’t does.
The Simpson’s Season 5 Episode 8 – Boy-Scoutz ‘n the Hood

Funny, I can make direct references here, but absolutely NOT in a novel. In fact, I could get in all kinds of trouble. So, the book that exists now is a far different beast to the one I first wrote. There are absolutely no direct quotes of copyrighted lyrics in Rock Zombie, though there are references and nods… and the occasional sly wink. Song titles are okay – thank God, as every chapter of this little novel is the title of a well-known track from the era – but quoting song lyrics is not on. There are grey areas of course. Words like ‘satire’, ‘parody’, and ‘fair use’ get bandied around but I have to be super careful even there. Some bits and bobs are in the public domain but I still have to be very careful.

Editing has been a bitch.

Although, it has been quite fun steering my way around these copyright issues while maintaining the tone of the story. In order to help with that I fully eased in to sarcasm… and footnotes. There’s a chapter called ‘Rockefeller Skank’ after the famous Fat Boy Slim track. It’s a song that used to get belted out in nightclubs towards the end of the decade (for all I know, it still does). Hands were raised to the sweat-soaked ceiling and everyone would scream, “Right about now, the funk soul brother!” over and over again. There’s a scene in Rock Zombie where this happens, but in order to keep it kosher, I had my narrator say…

Hands were raised and everyone joined in the song’s catchy lyrics and still got them wrong*

“Right about then. The small punk mother!“

*not least due to copyright laws

The vibe is the same, the rhythm is the same, but the words are different. Sure, anyone who knows the song will know what I mean, but I haven’t directly quoted the lyrics. Believe me, I wish I could source permission for every song and release a version that contains them all, but it just isn’t possible. And look, I know my silly little novel is in no way a threat to copyright; it won’t draw any attention away from the original work (if anything, it might draw some small notice towards it) but as an indie author I just can’t take the risk.

So, if you’re reading this book and you come across something that makes you go, “Oh, that sounds familiar, I wonder if he meant…”

I probably did.

Probably.

ROCK ZOMBIE is out on HALLOWEEN!

Listen to the Mix-Tape (chapters) on SPOTIFY!

ARC Reader Requests are Closed! Thank you!

A huge zombie pat and ghostly hug to everyone who reached out about being an ARC Reader… that didn’t make my guts do acrobatics at all! 😀 You’re all legends, and I love you! Cheers!

Please check your emails today for the epub ARC of Rock Zombie!

If there are any problems, please reach out,

Cheers! And happy reading!

Al

(also, it’s my Mam’s birthday today and I know she’ll read this… happy birthday Mam! Love you!)

ARC Readers… a heads-up!

Hi folks, I’ll be putting a call out this Sunday for anyone interested in being an ARC Reader for Rock Zombie.

ARC stands for Advance Reader Copy and is an initiative to get early copies of books into the hands of reviewers in order to generate a bit of buzz before the official release date. True, these are usually organised by professional companies and people who know what they are doing. I… am neither. I’m winging it, and pretty much making this all up as I go along (not unlike my stories). However, inspired by Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking, I figured where is the harm in doing just that… asking.

So, if you’re a book reviewer, podcaster, YouTuber, BookTokker, Bookstagrammer (or any other word that I’ve only really just learned about), or you just like reading grungy comedy/horrors and would like to have a shufy at the advance copy before publication (usually in exchange for kind words and/or reviews… or complete silence if you think it’s shit) then please keep an eye on my social on Sunday.

If you have any questions, folks, just reach out.

Cheers!

What it’s all about…

A little bit more info about Rock Zombie. To start with, here’s every author’s worst nightmare… the blurb… Hey, you painstakingly wrote, edited, polished, cried, and bled over 60k words… now summarise it in 50!

“Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be… Kurt Cobain!”

Robbie Neville’s big break on Stars in Their Eyes was supposed to launch him into rock stardom.

Instead, it launched him into the afterlife.

Rob is dead. But his body didn’t get the memo.

Now he’s spending Saturday night trying to stop his reanimated corpse from kickstarting a zombie apocalypse… which is really hard to do when you’re a ghost.

With enough 90s nostalgia to make you dig out your old mixtapes, follow Rob (both of them) as he faces down hungry zombies, scared scallies, horny barmaids, and the ultimate question:

Can you still become a rock star when you’re dead?

Rock Zombie is a bad-taste, grungy, comedy/horror, set in the ’90s about a wannabe rock star who dies and comes back as a ghost while his body reanimates as a zombie. That’s not a spoiler, not really, it can’t be when the main character dies in the first few pages!

This book is a love-letter to ’90s culture; the music, the films, the TV shows, books, games, and comics… the whole scene… everything that influenced me when I was a teen.

The story is short and fast, and follows the ghost of Rob as he tries to stop his body from kick-starting a zombie apocalypse in his home town. Each chapter is named after a well-known song of the time, which you may have noticed if you’ve been following my social media… I’ve cheekily been posting a chapter title every day since the start of the month. Don’t worry, it won’t give the game away.

Well, not much anyway.

I hope you enjoy it.

Come as you are