Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Press Release: Julie Rayzor ~ Romance, Adventure, Zombies


For Immediate Release 
Richard Howes
Contact through this blog.

PRESS RELEASE

Young-adult zombie novel, Julie Rayzor ~ Romance, Adventure, Zombies, features 17 year-old Julie caught between a world of zombies and a life of drama. Julie has to grow up fast and sacrifice her own desires for the good of everyone around her. When she learns of a plan to rescue her missing-in-action boyfriend, she uncovers a dark secret - a secret that she must keep hidden deep inside until she can complete the most dangerous task of her life.

Available on Kindle and Paperback from Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/cgmu3p5

Reviewers say:

“Julie Rayzor is a woman for her times. She is secretly in love with Corporal Jim Barnett, who is out on a mission and missing. With a broken leg, she volunteers to go outside the walls of Fort Tulsa at the start of this crisply-written, dialogue-rich novel... Successfully blends sci-fi, a love story, and a war story, and it works on all three levels.” - Professional screenwriter John Hill - Quigley Down Under, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (uncredited).

“I was very surprised by Julie's secret... related to times past & explained how and why things had changed... Action, emotion and well-planned events within the story. Two thumbs up from me!” - Jes Piddlin writer and author.

New, up-and-coming author, Richard Howes, with LRCK Publishing, is releasing Julie Rayzor ~ Romance, Adventure, Zombies, on August 1st, 2012. Richard Howes is a struggling writer who lost his job due to the economic down-turn soon after his wife lost her job for the same reason. Out of work and deep in mortgage-debt in Las Vegas, Nevada, they relocated to the green country of Tulsa, Oklahoma for new opportunities. As a new comer to Oklahoma, Richard wanted to write a fiction novel featuring his new home. 

Combined with the popular zombie theme, Julie Rayzor is the result of that effort. His idea was so strong that he wrote 40 pages in three days and completed the first draft in five weeks. Another year of polishing the work resulted in romance, action, drama, and adventure.

L.R.C.K. has produced and released video trailers viewable on YouTube. Julie Rayzor ~ Romance, Adventure, Zombies is offered in paperback and Kindle eBook, as well as other electronic book formats to follow. 

Excerpts from the work, as well as book signings and book fair schedules can be found on Richard's blog at www.RichardHowesBooks.com or his Facebook page.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9849969-0-2 

For a review copy, to place orders, arrange interviews or book signings, etc, please call or email
: L.R.C.K. Publishing 918-224-6474 office 
Kristie Medlen PR: 


Thursday, July 26, 2012

Press Release: New Young Adult Zombie Novel: Julie Rayzor ~ Romance, Adventure, Zombies by author Richard Howes

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Julie Rayzor ~ Romance, Adventure, Zombies the Thriller Novel is NOW available in ebooks and paperback!
Check it out here in paperback: https://www.createspace.com/3758847
Or on Amazon Kindle here: http://tinyurl.com/cgmu3p5
*****************************************************************************
For Immediate Release - July 26th, 2012

Richard Howes 
contact the author through this blog or facebook.


PRESS RELEASE


What does a 17 year-old girl do when the zombie apocalypse comes to Tulsa, Oklahoma?

The new young-adult zombie novel, Julie Rayzor ~ Romance, Adventure, Zombies, features 17 year-old Julie caught between a world of zombies outside of "Fort Tulsa" and a life of drama inside. When everything she loves in life is stolen away, her soldier-boyfriend missing-in-action, troubles with Jill, her best friend, Felix, a nerdy medical researcher fawning over her, plus a broken leg cast to weigh her down, Julie has to grow up fast and sacrifice her own desires for the good of everyone around her. When she learns of a plan to rescue her boyfriend and save the city, she uncovers a dark secret - a secret that she must keep hidden deep inside until she can complete the most dangerous task of her life.

Professional screenwriter John Hill - Quigley Down Under, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (uncredited), says this about Julie Rayzor:

“Crisp, fast-paced action novel... Richard Howes's writing style is very impressive... usually found in male adventures, yet his heroine is a woman in love... he pulls off the balancing act between realistic feminine energy and highly effective tough combat... Successfully blends all three genres: sci-fi, a love story, and a war story, and it works on all three levels.”

New, up-and-coming author, Richard Howes, with LRCK Publishing is releasing Julie Rayzor ~ Romance, Adventure, Zombies, on August 1st, 2012. Richard Howes is a struggling writer who lost his job due to the economic down-turn soon after his wife lost her job for the same reason. Out of work and deep in mortgage-debt in Las Vegas, Nevada, they relocated to the green country of Tulsa, Oklahoma for new opportunities. As a new comer to Oklahoma, Richard wanted to write a fiction novel featuring his new home. Combined with the popular zombie theme, Julie Rayzor is the result of that effort. His idea was so strong that he wrote 40 pages in three days and completed the first draft in five weeks. Another year of polishing the work resulted in romance, action, drama, and adventure.

To promote the Julie Rayzor novel, L.R.C.K. has produced and released video trailers currently viewable on YouTube and facebook. Julie Rayzor ~ Romance, Adventure, Zombies is offered in paperback and Kindle eBook, as well as other electronic book formats to follow. Excerpts from the work, as well as book signings and book fair schedules can be found on Richard's blog at www.RichardHowesBooks.com or his Facebook page.

ISBN-13: 978-0-9849969-0-2 
For a review copy, to place orders, arrange interviews or book signings, etc, please call or email: L.R.C.K. Publishing nnn-nnn-nnnn
Kristie Medlen PR: comment on this blog. We'll get back with you ASAP.

SEO: Zombie Apocalypse, Zombie War, Zombie Attack, Zombie Survival, zombie plan,
Zombie, attack, horror, survival, apocalypse, plan, war, zombies zombies zombies.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Book Review of JULIE RAYZOR, Romance, Adventure, Zombies by author Richard Howes

Book Review of JULIE RAYZOR, Romance, Adventure, Zombies by author Richard Howes

 
    Richard Howes's new novel, JULIE RAYZOR, Romance, Adventure, Zombies boldly hurls us into a post-apocalyptic world of human civilian soldiers against two different types of zombies.    One type is the classic stumbling but lethal, mindless zombie, wanting only to kill and eat any humans, and traveling in packs that usually comes to mind.   But the other type is Howes's own creative new take on zombies:  that some zombies are intelligent and called Leaders.   (Now there’s a scary thought for his heroine, Julie Rayzor, and the readers of this fresh, fast-paced action novel:  a zombie who can think and plan and lead!)    And Leaders are often one step ahead of the struggling, armed humans, who can never know when they are playing catch-up with intelligent focused zombies, as well as the biting, human-eating zombies.
    Julie Rayzor is a self-taught warrior, in an Army fort in Tulsa, Oklahoma, an oasis of almost-safety, in a world overrun by zombies.   She is secretly in love with Corporal Jim Barnett (who is out on a mission and missing at the start of the story, which worries her very much) and Julie is the one who discovers that clever Leader-zombies found out how to infect dogs and they attack the base immediately at the start of this crisply-written, dialogue-rich novel.    Having to kill man’s best friend due to the zombie virus infection immediately sets the tone.    Julie Rayzor is a woman for her times;  she has a broken leg, not yet healed, but volunteers to go outside the walls on the next mission, but her leg in a cast stops all this.  So right in front of the captain, she smashes the cast off her own leg, and pronounces herself ready for duty.   So she leads a group out to a radio station, into enemy territory (along with best friend Jill, and a few macho soldiers who don’t like taking orders from a woman).   They fight their way up the tall office building stairs, leaving Claymore mines behind for the zombies that come after them, and the explosions below become almost routine.   Things go from bad to worse in the ensuing battles, and the speed of Howes's narration is almost as fast as this summary.    Julie’s real hope is to find and save her secret lover, Jim Barnett, who is out there somewhere.
    Richard Howes's writing style is very impressive.   He is writing in a style usually found in male adventure, yet his heroine is a woman in love, but he also successfully pulls off the balancing act between realistic feminine energy and highly effective tough combat energy as well.   There’s a great deal of dialogue in this entertaining novel, and it’s the Elmore Leonard type:   short, character-revealing, and advancing the story conflict.   And conflict is everywhere.    This is a war novel in many ways, a war between humans working together in a combat unit, with zombies everywhere, so it’s a sci-fi zombie adventure, and also a love story.
    The impressive thing about Richard Howes's JULIE RAYZOR, Romance, Adventure, Zombies is that the author successfully blends all three genres:   sci-fi, a love story, and a war story, and it works on all three levels.   Additionally, the fast-paced (and violent - ever try to kill a zombie?) action works very well for male readers, yet the choice of gender of the protagonist and her secret love story quest will make this novel a successful read for women as well.
    Reviewers of books fall into two categories:  those who blithely give away important plot points and reveal secrets that should instead unfold in the contexts of reading the story, and those who review the book without giving anything away, yet providing some facts about what the reader can expect.   I personally am in that second group;  I will not give away any reveals or secrets or solutions to plot problems within this novel.   (I won’t tell you about the train scenes, wow, you’ll have to discover thoset yourself.)  I will say that she finds Jim, so the love story kicks in like an afterburner, but it all happens in a fast-paced, frightening world of a small Army patrol taking casualties, constantly having to run-shoot-hide, and improvise, since they are lost behind the scariest of all possible enemy lines.   They are fighting and trying to kill the already dead - and they are running out of ammo.
    Imagine the movie PLATOON or whatever the best military-platoon-o-patrol book or movie you ever read (or experienced yourself) and transplant that constant tension, surprises, and body count into a world of zombies, and you’ll have some idea of what kind of novel JULIE RAYZOR, Romance, Adventure, Zombies turns out to be.   It really is a great blend of romance, adventure, and zombies, (but not for the squeamish - there’s blood and body parts aplenty!)    Julie Rayzor on military patrol in this scary world is a total page-turner, one with fast-paced, realistic dialogue as well -- and just when you start to relax along with these warriors, zombies come around the corner and through the windows!
    And if that isn’t enough excitement for you... This is a novel that should be a movie and the first of a series of novels too.  When you finish reading it, you want more, and that is one big characteristic of a really fun novel to enjoy.
    -- John Hill, screenwriter, QUIGLEY DOWN UNDER, and Writing Instructor at the University Of Nevada in Las Vegas.

Monday, July 23, 2012

More Julie Rayzor Zombie Video behind the scene photos


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Julie Rayzor ~ Romance, Adventure, Zombies is NOW available in ebooks and paperback!
Check it out here in paperback: https://www.createspace.com/3758847
Or on Amazon Kindle here: http://tinyurl.com/cgmu3p5

     *****************************************************************************



Ain't Julie and Jill cute? The J&J Team!

Run, stop, shoot, run. Good. Let's do it again! Repeat.


Get ready to run! Watch out for the post man.

On the roof tops! There's zombies on the roofs.



Hold it like this and aim down the sights.


Charlie's Angels - this isn't! But they are cute and the shoot was fun in the 100 degree sun!



They're over THAT way!

I've just gotta adjust my fly a little, then off to kill zombies.


Crap! Zombies are coming!

What's your name again?

My girlfriend is right over there. This isn't too weird.

It's July and 100 degrees outside and they want us to wear this?

Just a couple gals hanging out and killing zombies!

Behind the Scenes of Julie Rayzor the zombie book

Julie Rayzor live-fire action scene - Yes. She is shooting a real shotgun with real shotgun shells.
No blank ammo was used in this scene. 

Just another day for a zombie in Tulsa!

Julie Rayzor AKA Savanah Fraizer riding Mira down the dirt road.

A train in a zombie novel? You'll have to read the book to find out why!

Sunday, July 22, 2012

How I Became a Self-Published Author

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Julie Rayzor ~ Romance, Adventure, Zombies the Thriller Novel is NOW available in ebooks and paperback!
Check it out here in paperback: https://www.createspace.com/3758847
Or on Amazon Kindle here: http://tinyurl.com/cgmu3p5
*****************************************************************************
So you would like to be self-published or maybe you want to know how I did it...

Let's look at why literary agents and publishers reject work. We've all heard of the slush pile and know those editors are busy skimming through huge stacks of manuacripts, but getting rejected is not just a matter of getting lost in the mix. With self-publishing, as with anything else in life, follows the law of nature that good work rises to the top.

I've written for years. I wrote many short stories and submitted them to sci-fi and fantasy magazine. I was turned down with two or three word rejections written on the manuscripts: "Too long" (When they say 500 words they mean it!) "Not suitable" to the subject matter (fantasy, paranormal, apocalypse, etc. is not Sci-fi). The lesson there for becoming published, or being successfully self-published is to know your market.

I wrote two and a half unpublished fantasy novels based on Dungeons and Dragons games in college - yes, I am a geek. They were fun games and I wanted to remember them well. I wrote them down and then decided it would make a good book if I changed just a few things. The lesson I learned there is that I needed to change everything around in the story, time-line and keep only the character names, some character traits, and some of the things that were said in conversation. Don't get bogged down in your fiction with the idea that your real story "didn't happen that way". If you want to write fiction, write a good story.

On that note, I recently ran into a poem writer who admitted she gets so attached to her words that she can't let them go and delete a sentence or a stanza. Let it go! You may have the perfectly formed descriptive prose in your manuscript but if it doesn't fit the scene then get rid of it! your writing will improve with practice and you won't miss that bad sentance for very long after you see how much better the scene is without it.

The reality of all writing is to write well. As a writing coach told me one time, "If you remove all the bad writing from your work, you are left with good writing." Learn the recognize your writing weaknesses. Learn to rephrase and rewrite sentences so that they flow well through the scene. The lesson here is to know your tools. The English language is a tool set for transmitting information. Know how to use it! Good stories are well written, crisp, easy to read, and flow naturally. Make sure you balance dialog with narrative and action.  J.R.R. Tolkien was a great writer and his works are wonderful, but in today's book reading market people will simply not read three pages of description about a landscape scene - unless it is a book about landscaping!

Skipping ahead... so you now have a well written book and all your friends are kind to you and tell you that it is great. Don't take their word for it! It's free advice! Free advice is almost worthless (unless your friends are literary agents or "big publisher" editors.) I edited Julie Rayzor ~ Romance, Adventure, Zombies no less than 11 times, and 5 or 6 of those times were AFTER my copy editor made her first pass through the work. Write and edit, write and edit and then keep editing.

Okay, so NOW you have a well written book... You need a book cover. Hopefully you can do it yourself or you hired someone to create a book cover for you. Hopefully you don't have to learn about PDF printing to get the correct size and shape demanded by your POD company. I used GIMP, a free image editing tool, to produce my book covers, but my POD company (Createspace) couldn't accept huge size PDFs. The free PDF printers I installed for creating the final cover PDF document were 60 megabytes. The Print on Demand company had a maximum size of 40 Meg. to reduce the size I had to compress the graphics quality and the only option was a 1 Meg file size, but the image quality was terrible. To solve this problem I downloaded a trial version of Photoshop to simply print the pdf. I personally finished the Julie Rayzor book cover within the 30 day free trial. The good thing is that photoshop has a subscription service of only about fifty bucks a month, so you don't have to go out of pocket for the hundreds of dollars to buy it. Build your book cover using GIMP and print it using a free trial or subscription to Photoshop (and then cancel your subscription).

NOW: You have a well written book and a book cover... What else do you need? Advertising. Amanda Hocking is famous for selling a million copies of her book in one year as a self published author. The reality is she worked on advertising for ten years. She gave away copies of her work to the thousands of friends she made on social websites over that ten years. She had a following and she did it herself. If you don't want to work for ten years, well then you need to have millions of dollars to give to a big publisher to hire television advertising. I'll bet that you, like me, don't have millions of dollars to produce, create, and release TV advertising commercials.

So while we are social networking what else can be done?

I personally "donated" about a thousand dollars (when I was still in debt and on the verge of bankruptcy and walking away from ten years of real estate holdings that turned upside down) to make a video for Julie Rayzor ~ Romance, Adventure, Zombies. I bought two nearly complete military costumes one piece at a time on eBay. I bought Airsoft helmets and camouflage helmet covers, belts, holsters, Airsoft military weapons - painted with silver modeling paint to look like worn, battle scarred real guns. We got sweat shirts for the girls, canteens, etc. I grabbed a couple black pouch binoculars and slid them on the belts to look like gear and equipment. I solicited friends and looked on Craigslist for actors to star in the video. I sweated and worried that actors wouldn't show up. I hired stand-ins and undersudies and paid them all for showing up - just in case. My wife and kids helped me put together a story board for two versions of the video - with and without zombies. We drew picturs of each scene on small pieces of paper and taped them up in the order we wanted them to appear and moved them around to test different concepts. Then we filmed. After filming we edited the video on a PC and when the video and sound was right we pushed it onto youtube.

If you do that, you now have a video to go with your book and book cover. So what's next? Sit back and collect money... NOT!

Get on facebook, myspace, pinterest, instagram, twitter, and enter forums related to your subject matter, and then self-promote and advertise. You cannot do enough blatant self-promotion. As a marketing genius friend of mine says, "target your market." If you advertise outside the subject matter, that is almost worthless. Considering the value of your time, it is worthless. I went on zombie webpages and told everyone about the video and book. Post behind the scene images from the video shoot and pin and tag them. Make pages dedicated to your book and invite everyone you know to see them.

Then create a blog and write about your writing and post short stories and excerpts!

That's it for today! I'll leave the details of uploading to Kindle and other ebook websites to another time.

Oh yeah! Don't forget that Julie Rayzor ~ Romance, Adventure, Zombies comes out August 1st, 2012 and please watch the videos of youtube here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=joKyRye_ZyQ

and here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY83JSkBh-M

and see the facebook page here:

www.facebook.com/JulieRayzor?ref=hl

See that? Blatant self promotion!

Remember, good work reveals itself! Don't give up! Write and edit, and write, and edit, and then promote and advertise.

And also more self-promotion follows:
Julie Rayzor ~ Romance, Adventure, Zombies is available in ebooks and paperback!
Check it out here in paperback: https://www.createspace.com/3758847
Or on Amazon Kindle here: http://tinyurl.com/cgmu3p5




Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Excerpt from Julie Rayzor ~ Romance, Adventure, Zombies by Richard Howes

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Julie Rayzor ~ Romance, Adventure, Zombies the Thriller Novel is NOW available in ebooks and paperback!
Check it out here in paperback: https://www.createspace.com/3758847
Or on Amazon Kindle here: http://tinyurl.com/cgmu3p5
*****************************************************************************

Enjoy the excerpts:

   I killed a puppy - murdered it, actually. I shot it right between the eyes with a gun and didn’t feel even a little remorseful. It didn’t bother me. In fact, at the moment of pulling the trigger, it was the right thing to do.

    Awaking to tears on my face, my long red hair sticking to my cheek, I couldn’t remember when I last cried. It must have been a year before or even longer, when little Julie Rayzor was just an innocent pup herself. Sleep escaped me the rest of that night. I dried my tears and slowed my breathing to avoid waking anyone else up. To pass the time I listened to the sounds of the military hospital compound that we called ‘Fort Tulsa’.
    Through the barricaded windows set high-up in the warehouse the September sky forewarned of the coming morning. The night patrols should be back soon, and maybe Corporal Jim Barnett would return from his mission. It had been three days with no word.
Missing Jim, the man who had gone off to help defend Tulsa from the zombies, and the boy who pulled my ponytail when I wasn’t looking, I tried to forget that his patrol was long overdue and stifle the realization that he might have been bitten by a zombie. I stared at the ceiling wanting to cry.
    I almost never slept. Private John Wilcox, our resident explosives specialist and all around red-neck jerk, was snoring again from the men’s side of the warehouse-barracks. The sound came through the twenty-foot tall wall of shelves that separated the men from the women. Wilcox wouldn’t let anyone forget him either awake or asleep.
    His fiery red hair like mine, only much shorter, was a tribute to his temper. Even his snores sounded angry, but something was wrong with the noise. With every second or third snore a little creak or scratching noise came to me. I wondered if some of the other soldiers or civilians in the makeshift dorm were snoring in sync. I wondered if the rats had learned to work under cover of nasal protection.  
    Listening again for the odd creaking noise, I found that it had stopped. Wilcox continued snoring. I turned on my cell phone and used it as a flashlight. (No one had phone service anymore.) I looked across the room at hundreds of beds, army cots, hospital beds, double and triple-decker bunk-beds, hammocks, and sleeping mats lining the floors of the former city hospital warehouse. Half the beds were empty; the rest were occupied by sleeping soldiers and civilians.
    My right leg itched. I retrieved a straightened coat hanger from my nightstand table and slid it down between my leg and the plaster cast that protected a broken shin bone.
    The cast was intolerable from the moment it went on. When Dr. Teresa Scarbrough, a former general practitioner, and Felix Vinson, our full time zombie researcher, applied the cast to my leg, I asked for a walking cast. Felix brushed his long brown hair from his eyes and looked at me. “That was before the zombies,” he laughed nasally. “No one gets anything like that anymore.”
    Felix was a nerd in every way and he had a crush on me, but his laugh always made me want to vomit. Literally throw up. He’d scolded me as if I were a child for carrying a stretcher. I told him that Jill Addison my blonde-haired, blue-eyed, mid- western, California-girl, best friend and I could manage moving the patient down for surgery.
    Jim Barnett, with a square-jaw, brown-hair and dark hazel eyes, darker than my own brown eyes, was handsome in the way a man can be, that a boy cannot. Slightly older than I and strong, he had a man’s carriage, a man’s frame, and a man’s voice. I liked Jim enough when he offered to carry the stretcher for me. I wondered if he felt insulted when I said, “I’m not a weak little girl and don’t need your help.”
    Jim had laughed but then I added, “Like you,” and punched him in the arm. He laughed again and left me and Jill to manage on our own.
    A few minutes later I stumbled on the steps, and the stretcher slipped from my grasp as it plowed over the top of me. The patient went for a wild ride down the stairs, and I snapped my leg bone in an instant.
    I lay on the floor at the bottom of the stairs with Jill laughing at me. (She was the only girl who could make cargo-pants and a sweater look sexy.) I laughed with her as I’d felt no pain, but when I tried to stand up I realized that I’d broken my leg, and the laughter ceased.
Jim came to see me every day I was nursing my broken leg until he left on a mission with the Lieutenant-Colonel and three squads. Their return was long overdue, and everyone wondered when they would be back.
    The scratching returned in perfect rhythm to Wilcox’s snores. I wondered if the zombies were tunneling beneath the hospital. I wondered if Wilcox was dreaming up some new vulgar jokes and laughing in his sleep or if he were dreaming of killing zombies. I slowly realized that the scratching sounds were not coming from him or even from that side of the warehouse, but from the air vent under the stairs.
    Getting up, I reached for my .44 caliber revolver I kept under my pillow. Then I remembered it was gone, confiscated by Felix when he annoyingly tucked me into bed after putting the cast on my leg.
    “Ms. Ray-zor,” I recalled the sinus pitch of Felix’s voice as he scolded me. “Teenagers aren’t allowed to have weapons.” He knew, everyone knew, that I hated having my name drawn out like that - RAY-Zor or even worse, Raz. I told Felix I’d been shooting since I was eight years old. I told him it was my dad’s gun. He said he didn’t care, and he checked it into the armory where my dad’s Model-12 shotgun was stored when I first arrived at Fort Tulsa. Everyone also knows that almost everyone carries a handgun and to not get caught with it. Even Dr. Scarbrough rolled her eyes at Felix’s stupidity.
    I swung my leg-cast over the side of the bed, being careful to not make any noise when it touched the floor. My cell phone flashlight went to sleep so I woke it up. A glint of metal came from a pocket of my jeans which lie over my nightstand, and I recalled that Jim told me he couldn’t get my .44 back, but he had a .32 semi-automatic handgun. He hid it in my jeans pocket for ‘just-in-case’ and told me to deny all accusations if it were found.
    Pulling the jeans on, I cringed at the long slice up the leg that Felix cut to fit over the cast. I was still p.o.’d about that for it was my last good pair of jeans and I had to fix the gash with safety pins. I threw a scarf around my neck and longed for my old long- lost bathrobe to ward against the cold in the warehouse.
    With the .32 from my pants pocket in hand, I felt for the loaded chamber indicator. A round was in the pipe. Jim had shown me the safety latch and I clicked it to red.
    My flashlight went out again, and I left it off as I slowly limped across the warehouse. The sound of the scratching grew louder as I approached a ventilation grate beneath the stairs. I timed the landing of my cast on the floor to the rhythm of the scratching, trying to cover the sound of my footsteps. The noise sped up and I could hear the sound of rapid breathing. My heartbeat thumped like a drum. Sweat ran down my back and soaked my shirt. The breathing changed to whining as I knelt down.
    Turning on my flashlight-phone, I found a puppy behind the grate. It looked like a mutt, and feral dogs were rampant in the wasteland that was once Tulsa. This dog was young, cute, friendly, and black. I love black dogs and had always wanted one. He looked like a Labrador mixed with German-Shepherd.
    The latches turned easily, and I raised the ventilation grate to let the puppy out from beneath the stairs. He scratched at the floor and jumped into my lap, tail wagging in joy at his release. The grate fell out of my hands and landed with a clatter. Suddenly a sound like a runaway-train-on-fire rose from the vent. I backed away in fright. Holding the puppy close, I pointed my gun at the grate.
    “Christ,” someone yelled. Footsteps approached. The soldiers that patrolled the hospital were coming. Flashlights came on around the room.
    Corporal Gary Lopez ran up to me, the flashlight on his carbine radiating light randomly about the room.
    “What is it?” Lopez demanded.
    I sighed. I didn’t feel like being hassled, and he was sure to give me crap over the dog. I just knew it.
    “Did you open that vent?” Lopez bellowed at me. His crystal blue eyes almost glowed in the dark. He was so loud that people started to wake up.
    “It’s just a puppy.” I showed him the dog in my arms, but the sweet innocent puppy growled and tried to bite me. Green and yellow puss oozed from its mouth. It tried to sink its small sharp teeth into my arm. I wondered if it could be a zombie, if a zombified dog were even possible. Lopez shined his flashlight on the dog. Its eyes were filled with blood. It was surely blind leaving no doubt it was infected by the zombie virus.
   I grabbed the dog by the scruff of the neck and held it away from me as it twisted and turned. It tried to bite me but slipped from my grasps and fell to the floor.
    The explosive rattle of a machinegun filled the air as Lopez killed the dog.
    “Why did you do that?” I screamed as the roar from the ventilation system grew louder.
    “Masks!” Lopez yelled. “Attack. Zomb attack. Wake up. Balaclavas, masks.”
    The fire alarm rang indicating a zombie attack. Emergency lights instantly illuminated the hospital warehouse. Through the windows, spotlights turned night to day. From far inside the hospital the rumble of generators started up.
Lopez looked at the grate from which the roaring train noise emanated. Rabid dogs suddenly came at us barking and growling, only they weren’t rabid; they were zombie dogs. They pushed at the grate with their noses as they tried to crawl under it. I raised my pistol, aligned the sights and squeezed the trigger.
    “One,” I counted my shots as a dog died.
    Lopez’s M4 carbine fired in quick bursts. Down went one, two, and three dogs.
    All about us, the sounds of people shouting were drowned out by the crack of automatic gunfire and the boom of shotguns. Behind every ventilation grate spaced around the room, dogs growled and scratched trying to get to us. In front of each grate, a soldier or civilian fired weapons at them, killing them where they stood.
    A dog dropped from a ceiling grate twenty feet above. It broke its hind legs in the fall and crawled, snarling in anger, on its front paws toward me. I shot it dead. “Two,” continuing my silent count. How many rounds left in the gun? I didn’t know as the .32 might have a seven, eight, or even a ten-round magazine.
    Fear didn’t enter my world at that moment for I was too busy; too busy looking for zombie-dogs, zombies, and their Leaders. The time to be frightened would be later, after I survived. Fear of the virus was part of life. I knew that later I might relive my fear of death-by-zombies, although that didn’t bother me much because I’d be dead. What scared me far more was the knowledge that some victims would be dragged away to be infected and turned into zombies. That terrified me beyond any of the many other horrors I’d witnessed.
    The human zombies came next. They first emerged from the grate I’d opened. It was a Leader. He... it... looked human; uninfected and quite normal; normal for someone crawling around in the air vents in the middle of the night and oddly dressed in a spotlessly clean t-shirt and brand new blue jeans. His face was washed. I noticed he had even shaved, however poorly. He raised a hand as if he wanted to talk. I shot him in the face. I fired twice more to be certain he was dead.
    “Three. Four. Five.”
    I never looked at Leaders if I could avoid it. Their eyes were too intense and almost crystalline as opposed to zombies’ blood-filled eyes. Leaders were too human. Too much like me, Jill, Jim, or even Wilcox, but when I saw purple blood on the wall I knew shooting him was correct. He was a carrier and a survivor of the virus. He acted as the eyes and ears of the Zombs and commanded them with his thoughts.
    Five shots. How many left? Two? Three? Five? I realized I didn’t have a second ammunition magazine for my pistol.

Friday, July 13, 2012

Writers and Authors: Print VS E-books

Writers and Authors: Print VS E-books: This infographic put together with information collected by OnlineUniversities.com  shows insight into the American e-book market. Although...

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Julie Rayzor ~ Romance, Adventure, Zombies - Book Cover


I just realized that the old images of the Julie Rayzor book cover are OLD! Here's the release book cover for Julie Rayzor ~ Romance, Adventure, Zombies

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Not really new-news, but I thought I'd let you know that LRCK Publishing is going to move up the release date for Julie Rayzor ~ Romance, Adventure, Zombies to August 1st. We are doing this to catch the tail end of the summer reading cycle and generate buzz for the new school year.

So that's some good news! I'm looking forward to seeing it on the shelves - electronic shelves or otherwise! The last round of edits went really well. The copy-editing and proofing was really intense and if you've read any of the ARC proof copies, those are three edits behind the actual release.

In other news, the paperback copy will be available on Amazon, as will the Ebook Kindle version, so look for it in a couple week... and while you wait take a look at the video trailer on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joKyRye_ZyQ

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

I just found out that there is a zombie walk Friday night starting at the Cains Ballroom in the Arts District of Tulsa. I'm going to see if I can get video footage for the Julie Rayzor Book Video Trailer. It would be very cool to come out with an extended version of the trailer a couple days before the book release! If you're interested in the Zombie Walk the info is here: https://www.facebook.com/events/296716630421953/

Monday, July 9, 2012

Julie Rayzor Zombie Video Trailer

Hi Everyone,
I stayed up late last night and finished the video trailer for Julie Rayzor, Romance, Adventure, Zombies. It's on Youtube, so please take a look and like it, hate it, or comment on it! And if you like zombie books, please tell your friends to go take a look! It was a huge amount of fun making the video and even though the book takes place in September, we had all the actors in full gear and sweat shirts in 100 degree weather in July! They were all troopers!

Here's the link!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joKyRye_ZyQ

The following is the text from the video description.
Julie Rayzor ~ Romance, Adventure, Zombies ~ Thriller fiction novel available in paperback and eBooks in August 2012.

A heart-stopping new thriller novel by R.M. Howes introduces unwilling heroine Julie Rayzor. A rescue plan becomes a bid for survival as Julie struggles with her love for a missing soldier, concern for her California-Girl Best-Female-Friend and her commitment to her adopted family of soldiers.

A secret she keeps hidden deep in her heart threatens to tear her apart, destroy her friends, and bring the destruction of her Tulsa home, but she soon discovers that if she can keep her secret safe, and complete the most dangerous task of her life, then all of humanity might be saved from the zombies.

More information and excerpts at http://www.richardhowesbooks.com/

Thank you to the cast and crew that helped make this video possible:
Cast: Savanah Frazier, Torey Byrne, Zachery Leeds, Andrew Micklas
Crew: Courtney Lowe, Autumn Willis, Kate Thomason, Sarah Smith, Lane-Ashton Medlen, Casey Medlen, and Kristie Howes.

Thank you to the City of Sapulpa, Oklahoma and the Sapulpa Police Department for assisting in the making of this video trailer.