ON JULY 30, my first novella, Living Death Race: Beauty & The Brains, was released in paperback and e-book editions by The Evil Cookie Publishing! It’s hard to believe, but it’s a story that I’ve had in the works for 13 years. And after I turned in The Bloodstained Doll to Flame Tree Press early this year, I finally decided to dig in and finish it.
The core of Living Death Race was originally written in 2011 to be part of a multi-author shared novel. But while I finished my piece of the story, a couple other authors dropped out and then, after a few false re-starts over the next six years, the publisher finally threw in the towel in 2017.
My story then sat unread for years, but when I pulled it out early this year, I realized that I still loved Mira, the beauty of the “Beauty and the Brains” Death Race team and I wanted everyone else to meet her too. I decided to do some editing and fill in the “bits” that other parts of the original shared author book would have covered.
Once I started working on it, I got more excited about the project and I reached out to K. Trap Jones to see if it was something The Evil Cookie Publishing would be interested in. I’ve wanted to send him something ever since he picked up some of the pieces of the late, great Necro Publications (which is where I would have sent this if Dave Barnett was still alive).
Trap liked it… and then I really dug in in earnest to finish it. I decided that adding a couple of chapters showing Mira and Tony (“the Brains”) meeting the other teams in the race would broaden the scope and make the story complete. I also implemented the original idea of having a narrator voice talk about the race to provide more context (that was how the original book stories were going to be “stitched together”). By the time I’d finished adding those elements and fleshing out some things in the original chapters, I’d nearly doubled the length of the story, and Zombie Gwen, in particular, gained some more screen time. Now it is a full novella, while maintaining and expanding on all of the things I loved about the original story.
I hope you have as good of a time on the road with Mira and Tony and Gwen as I did.
While the original project didn’t pan out, I have to thank James Roy Daley for coming up with the concept and pulling me into a driver’s seat for this Living Death Race. And I have to thank K. Trap Jones for helping me to finally see the journey through to the finish.
I think it’s a ton of fun and hope you will too!