If you like #scifi futuristic novels, check out this extract from Billy and the Cloneasaurus

 Excerpt from the book 

BILLY AND THE CLONEASAURUS
by
 Stephen Kozeniewsk
 

The Whirling Fan of Death abruptly stopped spinning the instant it struck William 789-6’s abdomen.  The chalky-white, pain-wracked face of 789 stared at them accusingly for about fifteen seconds before he finally succumbed to blood loss.  (Intestinal loss was also, no doubt, a contributing factor to the poor clone’s death.)

William 64-6, the slurry machine operator, clad in a white plastic apron and all-encompassing goggles whistled archly and said, “Well, that’s never happened before.”

William 790-6 reached up and tugged on his shirt collar.  He cleared his throat, not really knowing what else to do.  64 didn’t make a move and seemed to be waiting for 790 to prompt him.  It was typical clone behavior, but, of course, that meant that 790’s own inclination was also to not move, but to wait for someone else to prompt him.  With an exhausted sigh, 790 gestured at the remaining half of 789 still stuck in the slurry machine.

“Why don’t you, uh, reach in and see if you can clear the, uh, obstruction?”

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 Dark, haunting, and blisteringly satirical, BILLY AND THE CLONEASAURUS is the story of one “man’s” attempt to finally become an individual in a world of copies.

  Six billion identical clones make up the entire population of Earth, and William 790-6 (57th Iteration) is exactly like everybody else. In his one year of life he will toil in suburban mediocrity and spend as much cash as possible in order to please his corporate masters. When 790’s first birthday (and scheduled execution) finally rolls around, a freak accident spares his life.

Living past his expiration date changes 790 profoundly. Unlike other clones he becomes capable of questioning the futility of his own existence. Seeking answers in the wilderness, he discovers a windmill with some very strange occupants, including a freakish, dinosaur-like monstrosity. Which is especially strange since every animal on earth is supposed to be extinct…

~~~

 

Stephen Kozeniewski (pronounced: "causin' ooze key") lives with his wife and two cats in Pennsylvania, the birthplace of the modern zombie.  

During his time as a Field Artillery officer, he served for three years in Oklahoma and one in Iraq, where due to what he assumes was a clerical error, he was awarded the Bronze Star. 

He is also a classically trained linguist, which sounds much more impressive than saying his bachelor’s degree is in German.

AUTHOR LINKS

Amazon - http://amazon.com/author/kozeniewski
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/KozAuthor
Twitter - https://twitter.com/outfortune
Goodreads - https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7183355.Stephen_Kozeniewski
Blog - http://manuscriptsburn.blogspot.com
Mailing List - http://kozauthor.campayn.com/contact_list_form/signup/10334

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Oh no, not another bloody author interview! @outfortune

  First up for the boring author interview revisited is 

Stephen Kozeniewski

 

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What do you really think about erotica?
Well, it’s just porn, right? What’s the difference between erotica and porn anyway? Well, I guess people aren’t ashamed to say they watch porn…

Is it the low of the lows for writers?
Nope. That would be monster erotica. Which I guess is a kind of erotica. So yes.

If I were to read your book would I have to scroll through lots of acknowledgements saying how wonderful your book is before I got to the meat of a story?
Nah. The acknowledgements all go at the end.

What part of the world do you come from?  
The U.S. of Motherfuckin’ A., motherfuckers!!!
I'd swear if I lived in America, too.

What do you think of your government?
It seems to be a weird hybrid of the Mafia and a human centipede.

If your book is set outside England would I understand your jargon? I mean, fanny means lady front parts NOT backside, car hood is a car bonnet--everyone knows that, right? Are British Englishisms/Americanisms/Australianisms etc important in your book? It's all about identity, isn't it?
Funny old question, that. Although ostensibly my book is set in a dystopian America, the clones do have a lot of uniquely British habits. They go to pubs, play darts, and eat pot noodles. Wait a minute, did you say fanny means frontside? Does that mean a fanny pack is like a tampon in England?
The proper name is bum bag, but that's something you'd not understand being an American and a guy. Not much going for you, is there?

Why that shitty title?  
As my first 1-star reviewer somehow figured out, I stole the shit out of it. I’ve been desperately praying no one who reads it has ever heard of the Simpsons.

Did you run out of ideas?  
Of course! Why do you think everyone in the bleedin’ book is a bleedin’ clone? (How was that for Englishisms?)
Er, stick to your American drawl, your English stinks.

If you were me (you know, perfect) and knew nothing about a person and you were told to interview them, what’s the one question you would ask? (answer it).
Q: Would you bang Kim Kardashian if she was STD-free?
A: Hell no. Khloe, though…
Wear a condom just in case.

How long did it take you to complete your book (from idea to publication)?  
Like 5 weeks.

It didn’t take you long to write so does that mean it is poorly researched, edited and written on a whim?
Re…search…?

Thanks Stephen. Mind how you go, no really, mind how you go.

If you’ve read one Walking Dead clone, you’ve read them all and this book is no exception

by
Stephen Kozeniewski

I have only six words to say about the steaming, execrable hunk of titillating, sex-and-violence fueled piece of garbage so unfortunately mistitled THE GHOUL ARCHIPELAGO:

NO ONE SHOULD BUY THIS BOOK

That's your takeaway. Good enough. Walk away now. Oh you want to hear more? How about I make a list of five reasons NOT to buy it.

1. Zombies are SO OVER. There’s nothing original left to be said on the subject. If you’ve read one Walking Dead clone, you’ve read them all. THE GHOUL ARCHIPELAGO doesn’t take readers anywhere new (except a semi-colonial, semi futuristic South Pacific anti-paradise.) It's just the same old urban hellscape of ALL zombie novels. Yawn. Not to mention its characters are just the same old clichés, trotted out for one more retread:
- a sheriff searching for his family (or, in this case, a rakish smuggler captain)
- a one-eyed megalomaniac villain (or, in this case, a twenty-something billionaire inventor)
- a wisecracking pizza delivery boy (or, in this case, a silent red-headed engineer)
- a wise old farmer (or, in this case, a sexy stowaway)
 
And so forth.

2. Any decent, normal person would be shocked and horrified by the salacious, gratuitous pornography and bloodcurdling, grand guignol violence in this so-called “book.” It features (and I’m not making this up):
- Torture
- Sacrilege
- Human sacrifice
- Cannibalism (original recipe)
- Cannibalism (extra crispy)
- Corpse goo in the eyes
- Strongly implied sodomy
- A puppet made out of a dead teenager
- Masturbation
- Masturbation “paraphernalia”
- Zombie sex
- Zombie barb wire sex
- Zombie foodie porn sex
And, perhaps most damning of all:
- Mildly leftist subtexts

3. This book did NOT win the 2013 Amazon Breakout Novel Award. In fact, it made it no further than the Quarter-Finals. Right off the bat, this book was a LOSER. The fact that legendary horror publishing house Severed Press offered a contract within a week of seeing it does little to assuage its status as an ABNA LOSER.

4. It's a lucky thing this book DID make it as far as it did in the ABNA contest, because otherwise it would not have received a Publisher's Weekly review. That reviewer stated (and I quote,) "This abysmal tale of post-zombie apocalypse life in the South Pacific will try the patience of any reader...elements might have been combined into a decent story, but the prose isn’t up to the task. Readers must suffer through nonsensical phrases...Some passages are just straight-up gross...Many characters come to a sticky end, but most readers will have given up well before the conclusion.”

5. What’s the matter? You didn’t heed the warning from PW about how awful this book is? Okay, how about this actual one-star review from Goodreads? The reviewer states (and, again, I quote,) “…” Well, okay, so the only one-star review is blank. But a reader did think lowly enough of the book to join Goodreads (and then never log in again) for the SOLE PURPOSE of panning this novel with zero words, feeling, perhaps, that the rating was sufficiently self-justifying. That’s the sort of contempt this book inspires in healthy, God-fearing people.
So, there you have it folks. Five simple reasons not to click on the following link and hit “insta-buy:”

               Introducing the awful Ghoul Archipelago

After ravenous corpses topple society and consume most of the world’s population, freighter captain Henk Martigan is shocked to receive a distress call. 

Eighty survivors beg him to whisk them away to the relative safety of the South Pacific. Martigan wants to help, but to rescue anyone he must first pass through the nightmare backwater of the Curien island chain.

Amazon.com | Amazon.UK

A power struggle is brewing in the Curiens. On one side, the billionaire inventor of the mind-control collar seeks to squeeze all the profit he can out of the apocalypse. Opposing him is the charismatic leader of a ghoul-worshipping cargo cult. When a lunatic warlord berths an aircraft carrier off the coast and stakes his own claim on the islands, the stage is set for a bloody showdown. 

To save the remnants of humanity (and himself), Captain Martigan must defeat all three of his ruthless new foes and brave the gruesome horrors of...THE GHOUL ARCHIPELAGO. 

Stephen Kozeniewski lives with his wife and two cats in Pennsylvania, the birthplace of the modern zombie. He was born to the soothing strains of "Boogie With Stu" even though The Who are far superior to Zep, for reasons that he doesn't even really want to get into right now. 

During his time as a Field Artillery officer, he served for three years in Oklahoma and one in Iraq, where due to what he assumes was a clerical error, he was awarded the Bronze Star. The depiction of addiction in his fiction is strongly informed by the three years he spent working at a substance abuse clinic, an experience which also ensures that he employs strict moderation when enjoying the occasional highball of Old Crow. 

He is also a classically trained linguist, which sounds much more impressive than saying his bachelor's degree is in German.

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Zombie sex

by

Stephen Kozeniewski

I’ve been thinking long and hard about what topic, exactly, to write about in my WWBB guest post.  I actually wrote a post here pseudonymously last year because I was still hiding my shame at being an unpublished author.

What a difference a year makes!

Amazon.UK
Amazon.com

Since then I’ve gotten a new day job, a new cat, a bunch of other blah blah blah new stuff that you don’t really care about, but most importantly and excitingly: I found a small publisher willing to take on my horror/mystery novel BRAINEATER JONES!  I immediately thought of trying to get a spot on Louise’s schedule and when I saw her call for ‘orrible covers for the month of October I knew it was kismet.  (Sorry, other challengers, but you can’t deny it: my cover is the ‘orriblest.)

But that still left me with the quandary of what topic to write about.  Louise writes chick lit…or possible chic lit…or possibly Chiclets, although I’m not sure exactly how one would go about writing on little pieces of gum.  How could I make my little gorefest appealing to her readers?  Then it struck me:

ZOMBIE SEX

Not only would zombie sex be a great topic for Halloween AND a great topic for this blog, but it would also suddenly make that “long and hard” phrase in my first sentence seem like a deliberate authorial choice.

I’ve actually been noodling this topic a lot lately, which sounds weird, but, come on, I’m a horror writer.  We think about weird stuff for a living.  Last week I went to a midnight showing of Night of the Living Dead at my local hipster theater, which was an awesome choice because, amongst other reasons, I got to re-watch the granddaddy of all modern zombie stories.  And while I was watching it I noticed something I had either never caught before or had deliberately repressed from my memory:

THERE WAS A 100% NUDE ZOMBIE IN THE HORDE!

Seriously.  Go back and watch it.  How did I miss/forget about that?  I mean, I knew horror films in the ‘70s were exploitative with, I want to say a seventeen naked breast minimum mandated by the  MPAA.  But how did Romero manage to slip that nudie zombie by in a black and white film in the late ‘60s?  Bad for puritanical society, I guess, but an auspicious start for this blog post.

Of course, no actual zombie sex took place in that picture.  (Nor was the word “zombie” ever used.  Seriously.  Go back and watch it.)  The first contemporary example of actual hot dead-on-dead loving that springs to my mind comes in the classic 1992 New Zealand import Dead Alive.  Haven’t seen it?  Go.  Right now.  Shoo shoo.  I’ll wait.

Back?  Seriously, how awesome was that?  Anyone who says The Lord of the Rings were Peter Jackson’s greatest films simply haven’t seen Dead Alive yet.  What you probably forgot about in light of the whirling lawn mower blade of death that concluded the movie is that early on the zombie priest and the zombie nurse, urm, well, got it on.  (Yes, I said zombie priest and zombie nurse.)

And here’s where we get into an intriguing bit of erotica esoterica.  THEY HAD A BABY BECAUSE OF IT.  That’s right, apparently even zombies need to worry about the consequences of not using proper birth control.  Er, well, I guess they didn’t have to worry about it, per se, since they were zombies, but somebody sure had to take care of that baby.