I didn’t watch zombie movies as a kid. We lived in a small town with limited TV reception, and the nearest cinema was hundreds of kilometres away. Movies were hard to find, and horror movies were always way down the list of things to see. Particularly after a series of school camps, where my 4th grade teacher scared the bejesus out of us by describing the horror of Halloween and Friday the 13th as campfire tales. Not terribly scary for the kids who’d seen the films, but terrifying for a weird nine-year-old with an overactive imagination. I avoided horror movies for years, despite loving horror fiction. My first zombie movie was Paul W. S. Anderson Resident Evil, which a friend pitched to me as “Aliens, but with zombies”, in late 2002. I was twenty-five years old, and damn near crawled over the back of the couch as I imagined what could happen.   Still, I loved it. I wanted more. And so, my zombie education began. I’ve watched a metric

I recently posted my 40th weekly Saturday Morning Story to Patreon, which is a patently absurd sentence to write given I started this project under the belief I could no longer finish anything. I honestly believed I’d have a burst of enthusiasm, produce stories for six weeks, then I’d curl up in a ball and whimper for mercy. Maybe pack this whole writing thing in for a lark and start a new career in a fromagerie (not that I’m qualified to do that, but knee-jerk reactions to hard things are never entirely rational). Today’s a considerable milestone, though. See, I’ve actually posted 41stories to Patreon—one story in Eclectic Projects 001 went straight to the magazine, so patrons had to download it instead. Today is the point where there’s original short fiction on my Patreon than in all three of my short story collections combined. I’ll admit that I haven’t put a lot of thought into this project—again, I expected it

Today’s my forty-sixth birthday, so I’m kicking off today’s post with the traditional unflattering birthday selfie. I gather these have long been robbed of their power to horrify my mother, but I kinda dig having an ongoing archive of my rarely-photographed face to reflect on as the years go by. This year, my birthday falls on a Saturday, which is also when I post an original story to the Eclectic Projects Patreon every week. I honestly thought this week would be the first time in thirty-eight weeks I skipped a day because I didn’t have a story done—the week before my birthday is always rough for me, and rougher still now the 19th of March is the anniversary of my father’s death—but the weekly short story project has changed my relationship with writing. First, because I don’t actually want to skip a week after thirty-eight weeks of showing up without fail. Second, because writing a story a week will change