Z 2134

wasn’t enough to write by-the-numbers post-apocalyptic book with Yesterday’s Gone or a by-the-numbers Young Adult book with ForNevermore , or a by-the-numbers sci-fi book with the oddity that is WhiteSpace ) . If it’s worth our time, it’s worth our time to make it amazing. Our premise needed something different to deliver more of the experience our readers (that’s YOU!) are used to.
    Premise is a weird thing for us as writers. We like to think we can take any premise and make it interesting with the right story, characters, and scares. Distill any book or movie down to a few lines, and you have a bowl of boring oatmeal. It’s the little extra ingredients and attention to detail that make a book, movie, or TV show memorable.
    For instance, Signs was a movie about an alien invasion. Yet, it was the characters and their relationships with one another, that made the movie so much more than that. The TV show Breaking Bad , is about a teacher turned meth dealer. On paper, it sounded like the worst plot ever. But when you watch it — holy shit, it’s one of the BEST shows ever!
    So you can take a plain premise and make it awesome. But in most cases, you need something unique to draw readers in.
    We first considered doing a different zombie apocalypse sort of book. For a few minutes, anyway. But it lacked a hook that would sell it to readers who didn’t know us.
    We needed a hook to make this story stand out among the hordes (bad pun intended) of zombie books.
    OVERCOMING THE CURSE OF THE ZOMBIE TREND
    We never chase trends.
    If anything, we try to aim ahead of the trends, like we’ve done with serials, writing them a full year before Amazon announced its awesome Kindle Serials program, and publishing them weekly since January. We write the stories we want to tell and hope enough people enjoy our work to fuel our momentum.
    In a year when The Hunger Games was the biggest thing in literature (or at least the literature that didn’t come in a Grey wrapper), a simple sentence during one of our weekly story meetings, “Hey, what if The Hunger Games had zombies?” gave us the seed for a sprout of an idea.
    The idea took immediate root. After many conversations, story sessions, and several drafts, the newest story in our Collective Inkwell was born: a strange brew inspired by The Walking Dead, The Hunger Games, The Running Man , and 1984 , going places only Platt and Wright can go. Z 2134 is a mash-up of many inspirations, but with our sensibilities, pacing, and killer cliffhangers. This is the zombie show we would create for television, which is how we think up all of our serials — what TV show would we want to watch? Let’s write that.
    We’re especially thankful to Amazon Publishing and 47North for helping give Z 2134 a larger life, out of the gate. As our first non-indie title, we couldn’t be happier with the experience. We’ve been waiting since Stephen King’s The Green Mile for a publisher to embrace the possibilities of serialized fiction. I think with Amazon Publishing, we might just be seeing the resurgence of a format too long ignored. I’m excited as both a writer and reader for the next golden age of serials!
    Thank you, Dear Reader, for joining us on this ride!
    David W. Wright & Sean Platt

::OUR SERIALIZED SERIES::
    by 47North
    ::Z 2134 — the futuristic zombie serial thriller::
    Season One (Episodes 1-4)
    ::Monstrous — a hellish revenge and redemption serial thriller::
    Season One (Episodes 1-6) Coming Soon
    by Collective Inkwell (our indie publishing company)
    ::Yesterday’s Gone Series — the post-apocalyptic serial::
    Season One (Episodes 1-6)
    Season Two (Episodes 7-12)
    Season Three (Episodes 13-18)
    Season Four (coming summer 2013)
    ::WhiteSpace Series — the sci-fi/horror serial::
    Season One (Episodes 1-6)
    ::ForNevermore Series — the dark fantasy Young Adult serial::
    Season One (Episodes 1-6)
    ::Available Darkness — the new breed of vampire thriller::
    Season One (Episodes 1-6)
    Season Two (coming November 2012)

::OUR SHORT STORIES::
    DARK CROSSINGS: Volume One
    Chris Wakes Up
    Diner Faded
    Pull The Trigger
    Respero Dinner
    The Watcher
    The Visitor
    DARK CROSSINGS: Volume 2
    Are We There Yet?
    Hide and Seek
    If You Don’t Finish Reading This, Then Everyone You Know Will Die
    What Would Boricio Do?
    The Good Deeds Society
    Monsters