I get asked all kinds of questions about my writing: “What kind of tree would you be if you were a tree?” “What animal best describes your writing style?” “What color best describes you?” I had a good deal of trouble with that last one. Dearheart, my wife, assures me I’m orange—a burnt, dark, orange…
My name is Daniel Greene, and I am the author of End Time, a zombie apocalypse thriller. End Time is a multiple-point-of-view novel, primarily following elite counterterrorism agent, Mark Steele, and CDC virologist, Dr. Joseph Jackowski, as a zombie virus with a wicked bite is unleashed across the globe. Many people have asked me: How…
I recently finished my sixth draft of a new novel, which takes place in the Iraq war. I’m ready to show it to agents as I look for new representation. At the recent AWP Conference in Los Angeles, I attended a panel called “Agents on Agenting,” where afterward I asked Noah Ballard, an agent at…
Describing a character in your story is usually an easy task. After all, you can see the character clearly in your mind. It’s as if this person is real and standing right in front of you. He might even speak to you, allowing you to hear the sound of his voice. Let’s say, in this…
A teacher of English literature was lecturing a class of adolescents on one of the syllabus’s prescribed modern novels. She selected a short passage which included the following two sentences: “Vanessa’s passage was impeded by the building’s front door. The door was blue.” She read the sentences aloud and said to the class, “What did…
Waterkill is a high-tech thriller that weaves a story around nanoscience and fanatical religious terrorism. This gripping story takes place on three continents. It’s a thrill of a ride that you won’t want to step off of once you open its cover and turn the first page. It took me only about four months of…
Even while a baby is still in the womb, their future is being planned—perhaps they’ll be a judge, ruler of a country, or that athlete who scores the winning points for their team. And, like all other parents, I too had lofty goals for my child. In the last trimester of pregnancy, I’d decided that…
During the first few months of 2010, a friend of mine somehow talked me into writing a project based on the assumption that the 12/22/12 craze had some momentum. She had explained that it was quite a hot topic and I should jump on the bandwagon and run with a story about the end of…
With Halloween right around the corner, everywhere we look we see the orange and black color scheme, decorations of skeletons, ghouls, witches, and ghosts. When you go into the city, you see store aisles and occasionally entire stores dedicated in celebration of the darkest holiday of the year. On this day of vampires, witches, and…
So, you want to write about the zombie apocalypse, but you don’t want to travel down the same beaten path as the ones before you. How many times can you tell the same story and still keep readers on the edge of their seats? You can do it several times as long as you change…
