Guest Blog and Giveaway with Joshua Grover-David Patterson

I have a thing for cult movies. So it should come as no surprise that when a movie called “Snakes on a Plane” came on the scene, I had to see it. In a theater. With a bunch of friends. (As theater-going experiences rank, it’s right up there with the time I saw “Star Wars: Episode II” on opening night.)

But I digress.

“Snakes on a Plane” was something of an oddball in the cult movie canon – a movie that tried really hard to BECOME a cult movie. To the point where the previously PG-13 film was reshot to add violence, nudity, and additional harsh language to achieve an R rating.

Unfortunately, the ultimate message that “Snakes on a Plane” gave to movie studios was that just because everyone is talking about your movie on the Internet, doesn’t mean they’ll actually go see it when it comes out.

In other words, “Snakes on a Plane” flopped.

Which brings us to a weird P.S.

Back in the 1980s, a lot of movies had a closing credits song that directly was tied to the movie in some way, whether it was appropriate or not. For example, the 1987 dystopian action flick “The Running Man” had a song called “(Restless Heart) Running Away With You” playing as the credits rolled.

“Snakes on a Plane” brought that trend back, if only briefly, with “Snakes on a Plane (Bring It),” a novelty number by a band named Cobra Starship. It was, quite literally, their only song.

And man, was it catchy.

Naturally, I expected the band, and the song, to sink without a trace. Just another bit of flotsam from the failed “Snakes on a Plane” cult experiment.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, Cobra Starship put out a full-length CD, and most stores that carried it sold it for about eight bucks. Curiosity got the best of me. I bought it.

And I totally fell in love with it.

And the next CD. And the next.

The irony is, Cobra Starship’s music is not designed for me. I’m a 30-something dude with a mortgage and a kid. Cobra Starship is the stuff I’m supposed to mock. But it’s a fun mixture of the 80s sounds I grew up with, with 00s studio polish.

But let us go back to the first CD.

One of the tracks on Cobra’s first album was a little number called “The Kids are all ####ed Up.” What’s it about? I couldn’t say. It sounds like an ode to two teenagers infatuated with each other, and also with drugs.

Or, if you’re me, it’s a Romeo-and-Juliet story about vampires, with lines like, “They don’t know about us, everyone’s asleep when we play,” and, “Now it’s too late to go, it’s getting light out.”

Over the years, I started to mentally put together a story about these two people, who they were. How they got to be vampires. How they ended up together.

And when it was time to write my second novel, I knew it was going to be about them.

I started writing, with the music of Cobra Starship as my fuel. I got about 50 pages into the novel, and life got in the way. Then I Had an Idea to help improve the story which, ironically, made it have pretty much nothing to do with my original inspirational source. This time I made it past 100 pages, and then stopped writing again.

Weirdly, it was not Cobra Starship that got me working on the novel for the third time, but a short story of mine in the works named “Baby Teeth” that ended up so long it turned into a novelette. Near the end of the tale, a character walked in and tried, and failed, to fix the troubles of the main character.

I realized that this same character was also part of “Blood Calling.” Her name was Emma, and she was a very old vampire.

I added her to the cast of “Blood Calling,” and after that, the story threads that wouldn’t quite knit together before all seemed to slip into place.

The thing is, most people go through phases with their media, and I am no exception. I haven’t listened to Cobra Starship in more than a year. I considered putting their music on as I wrote the final chapters of “Blood Calling,” but I write at night, while my little one sleeps in the next room, and waking her up just for a sense of closure didn’t seem like a wise decision.

But as I finished editing the book, it occurred to me that Cobra Starship hadn’t put out any new music in a long time. And so I pulled up Google, and to my surprise, they had put out a CD a few weeks ago.

I guess you could call this type of thing fate. Or you could call it a nifty coincidence. But either way, it feels right to me.

So what’s the book about?

When Lucy Leary turned 18, her life fell apart. She crashed her car, her best friend abandoned her, her parents divorced, and her grandfather passed away, leaving her a single possession: A vampire slaying kit with a note that said, “THEY’REREAL. FIGHT THEM.”

Now Lucy must stop the oldest, most dangerous vampire in history, before it can kill her family.

“Blood Calling,” along with my other ebooks, is available on the Kindle and nook .

Or You Can Win a Copy!
Just drop a name and email address in the comments below, and my charming four-year-old daughter will pick three lucky winners out of a hat. All three winners will receive a copy of “Blood Calling” in the e-format of your choosing, and one also will win a copy of “Baby Teeth: A Blood Calling Novelette,” a shorter work set in the same universe.

Good luck!

Mercy Giveaway with Joshua Grover David Patterson

One of the most frequent things people ask me is some variation of, “What’s up with your name?”

My name, if you didn’t notice, is Joshua Grover-David Patterson. And the questions range from, “Are you two people?” to “Why do you list your real name and your pen name together?”

So let me clear this up – Joshua Grover-David Patterson is my full name. You can find it on my birth certificate. It’s what my parents tagged me with, for reasons that are interesting to me, but probably not to you.

This leads to everyone’s next question: Why don’t you use a shorter version of your name professionally?

There are two answers there.

I grew up in a town where another kid shared my name. Same age, same grade, different schools.

Periodically, he would appear in the newspaper, sometimes with a picture, sometimes not. Inevitably, one of my parents’ friends or acquaintances would clip the article out of the paper and give it to my parents.

Sometimes it got weird. Once I got a call because “I” was late to a science fair. That call came at seven in the morning on a Saturday. I was displeased.

More recently, I got drunk-dialed at 11 PM by someone who wanted to catch up with “me.”

Then there was the time Entertainment Weekly went to a Star Wars convention, and talked to a guy with my name, who lived in my town, who was wearing a homemade Boba Fett costume.

Because of all this confusion, I started using my initials along with my name whenever possible. I wrote my name as Joshua G-D Patterson. Then someone asked why I didn’t put an O where the dash was, and I stopped doing that.

After graduating college, I started writing screenplays. You’d be amazed how many Joshua Pattersons there are in the movie business. One of them acted in “Children of the Corn IV.” Others produce. There’s even one fellow named, no lie, David Joshua Patterson.

So I decided to go all out, use my full name, and even if I confused a few people… at least I’d stand out.

Which brings me to my novel, “Mercy.”

Let’s face facts - there are quite a few zombie stories in the world. And with the advent of e-publishing, new zombie novels aren’t just coming out every week, they’re coming out every day.

So how do I make my novel stand out?

When I was sitting down to write “Mercy,” I knew that it was going to have to be a little different. Scratch that. I knew it was going to have to be very different if people were going to seek it out.

My favorite work of zombie fiction (as opposed to zombie fact, I suppose) is probably George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead.” There are a lot of reasons for this – great action, a fascinating premise – but most of all, there’s a profound moment where a character dies, and dies badly, and it’s surprisingly poignant. We are, after all, talking about a movie where LOTS of people die.

I decided to create an entire cast like that. Instead of putting twenty people on an island and letting them get picked off, one by one, I wanted to put five, or six, or seven on an island, and make the audience understand what they were going through emotionally.

I wanted the reader to root for everyone to live – and to mourn a little if they didn’t.

This isn’t to say my book isn’t fun. It also has zombie action, a plane crash, island survival, and other fun and exciting elements that I can’t tell you about, because it would ruin the surprises.

In a sense, my name and my novel are similar in that way. Both of us contain elements that are pretty common, and both contain something you don’t see very often.

That works for me.

I’ll be giving away one e-copy of “Mercy” (Kindle, nook, or PDF) – and to win it, all you have to do is offer up something that makes you unique in the comments.

You'll also get a copy of my new vampire novellette along with Mercy.

Be sure to mention which ebook format you would prefer to receive.

I’ll put everyone’s name into a hat and let my four-year-old pick a name.

She promises to be very unbiased, and I’m almost certain she knows what unbiased means.

Blurb:

When Georgina Fulci’s plane crashes into the Atlantic, her troubles have just begun.

Desperate to get home to her family, Georgina and a handful of survivors must find a way to escape an uncharted island… while fighting off hordes of the living dead.

“Joshua Grover-David Patterson writes in a style that will surely connect with many contemporary zombie fans. His use of tone and narrative structure are miles ahead of most who work in the genre.”

-Scott Kenemore, author of “Zombie, Ohio” and “The Zen of Zombie.”

“You expect a zombie novel to have brains, but you don't expect it to be this smart. You expect a number of internal organs to be on display, but you don't expect this much heart. MERCY is a kicka** zombie novel, but it's also a thoughtful, moving story about the joy and importance of being human and alive.”

-Seamus Cooper, author of “The Mall of Cthulhu”

Buy the book:

Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Mercy-ebook/dp/B004TSJBKE

nook: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Mercy/Joshua-Grover-David-Patterson/e/2940012397874

Check out the author:

Twitter www.twitter.com/GroverDavid,

Facebook at www.facebook.com/JoshuaGroverDavid

www.groverdavid.blogspot.com