Indie Author Friday – David Simpson
Indie Author Friday – David Simpson
What made you want to be a writer?
It’s always been there, that desire to tell a tale. To entertain. I’ve been writing ever since I was a kid. Short stories, comic books, making‘zines using the schools mimeograph machine. I was pretty bad with math and hard science but writing, even history reports and things like that, I usually enjoyed.
Most Indie Authors have day jobs beyond their writing. Do you, and if you do, how do you balance writing, work, and life in general?
I’m a full timer and to be honest, I had more of a structured and social life when I was writing in the sleeper of my truck when I had down time. I don’t have weekends now or days off now. The urgency to tell the tale is much more immediate when it’s the only thing that brings home the bacon.
In the book Zombie Road. What was your inspiration in writing it?
Most zombie stories are grim dark and tell about how tough it is. How people will kill over a can of beans. I was a truck driver. There are warehouses crammed full of food. Enough to feed three hundred million people for weeks. If a zompoc happened and nearly everyone was dead, there wouldn’t be a shortage of anything for a long time. I wanted to tell a story of people who weren’t dumb, who didn’t make the same stupid mistakes you see in a lot of books. The mistakes that most thinking people wouldn’t make. Not the ones you’re telling the tale about, anyway. They survived. The dumb ones all got killed off in the first wave.
Do you have any projects coming up that we should keep an eye out for?
The last book in the Zombie Road series will be out in February. It wraps up the story of the people from the Three Flags truck stop for the most part. There are other books planned in the same world but the tale of the survivors that began on day one of the first book, the story of their journey, will mostly be finished. There are a few loose ends that will be addressed in future books but those six books tell a complete story.
Do you have any advice for writers that are just starting out?
Write. Tell your story. Try to get short stories in anthologies, it’s not difficult. It builds your street cred, adds to your back catalog and when you have 10 or 15 stories, you can put them together in your own short story collection. If you want to go traditional, try to find an agent who will take you on. A bunch of published stories ought to help with that. If you want to go indie, start studying marketing now. It’s not how good your book is, it’s how well you can market it. It’s more work than writing. There are a number of Facebook groups in your chosen genre that are open and helpful.
Here is the link to the first book in the Zombie Road series
Here is a link to the Zombie Road Coloring book:
http://a.co/d/fonVpUK