Would you like to buy my book? Would you like an extra reason?

This is a long-winded plea to get you to buy my book, set for re-release Nov. 5. It’s a good plea, and one I would like you to read. But maybe you don’t need to! Maybe you just want a link to where you need to go to order the book. If that’s the case, cool! Here you go.

The process from “I want to write a book” to “I’m a published author” is a strange one (and, to be fair, one that is extremely different for essentially every person who travels on it). For me, it’s a road that, in some form or another, started in second grade.

My dad was a veterinarian. But in the late ‘80s, he started doing a little bit of writing. He wrote a piece on Gary Carter cards for Sports Collectors Digest. He picked up some other gigs here and there. His first book, 100 Greatest Pitchers, was released in 1988, and from there he ended up writing close to 30 books (all nonfiction) on a variety of topics — baseball, animals, even a few historical biographies for kids.

So that was cool. But my main impetus came when we went to the Kentucky State Book Fair in second grade. Books were cool. I liked books. But one of the authors there doing a signing was a kid — I want to say a fifth-grader, but I literally remember nothing more about him now but “kid” — autographing the book he had written.

Kids could write books? This was a new idea to me, and it was one that intrigued me. On the way home, in the backseat of the car, I started writing a story. When we were home, I got my dad’s hand-me-down typewriter and went to work. The story ended up being (if I recall correctly), about 40 pages. It was a kids mystery story about three boys who go to a baseball game, get some stuff autographed, get that stuff stolen, and then track it down.

It was really, really bad. I have no idea where it is these days — if it even still exists — but it was at just about the quality you’d expect from a second-grader trying to write a book.

But that was the seed. It manifested in different ways over the years — in annoyingly long short stories that I’m sure had my teachers hating me in middle school and high school, in fiction seminars in college, in more Dr. Grip gel pens and yellow Legal Pads than anybody who didn’t qualify for social security had any write in owning.

And ultimately, in a manuscript.

The first “book” I ever finished was about 77,000 words — short for a novel, but not very short, ultimately a fair length — about a group of high schoolers. There was Rick, one of the main characters, a kid on the fringe of the popular group who struggled mightily with honesty in a way that left him feeling like more of an outcast than he actually was. And there was Amie, the other main character, one of the popular girls, who had a tough time even figuring out what it meant to be popular. (No, it doesn’t end how you think.) There were something like 20 meaningful characters — some in their group of friends, some out of it, some even teachers — who all played a role over what was basically a real-time telling of a day at the high school, interspersed with flashbacks to a crazy party most of them had been to the weekend before. It was a different style of storytelling, one where the climax to the story actually happened two days before the heart of the story. But it works, if I do say so myself.

And if that paragraph wasn’t clear, I think it was a good story. Redefining the Great American Novel? Probably not. But I remain proud of it to this day, even if the lack of interest it has gotten from … well, just about anyone with any professional standing tells me that my opinion is not the predominant one. Nonetheless, the story (Or Consequences, I’ve called it) remains something I like.

After that, I decided I wanted to write a TV show. At the time, there had never been a good zombie TV show (there arguably still hasn’t been, but that’s neither fair nor relevant), so I thought I could conceive of one and make it work. And I came up with a plotline I liked, and I wrote what I envisioned as the first couple of episodes.

The problem? I was a 20-something in central Kentucky. I knew nobody who could help me make a TV show and knew nothing about what it would take to make it happen. It was a silly plan.

I adapted! Turned it into a narrative story. Worked on it intermittently over the next few years (I have, to some degree or another, about a dozen different manuscripts/ideas floating around, so it wasn’t like I was only writing about zombies), I finally finished a draft on June 14, 2011. It was 123,548 words, it was not polished, but it was a story I liked and one I thought worked. I started calling it After Life. After some polish, some editing (a lot of editing), some time, I started submitting it a few places.

No one bit.

For a while, I thought I’d self-publish, and started working on self-promotional material that I hoped would entice buyers. Ultimately, of course, I found a publisher, lost that publisher, found another publisher, published the book, saw that publisher go under, found another publisher, and now we are just over two weeks away from the re-release of After Life with a new cover, a new edit, and one (well, two, if I can get the damn thing written) sequels coming in 2021.

That’s cool! I had a book published once, and now it’ll be published again! People can buy it now! (People should buy it now. (Buy it now.))

For the uninitiated here: After Life tells the story of the second zombie outbreak. In 2010, the zombies came and wiped out the majority of the population. The survivors then had to live their lives in a largely destroyed world, always afraid that the zombies wouldn’t be gone forever, but knowing that they would have to get the world back to something resembling normal or else there wouldn’t be a world anymore. So 20 years later, in 2030, the first generation of post-2010 children are ready to head off to the newly reopened universities. And of course, that’s when … well, it’s a zombie story, you knew they’d be back at some point. The main characters are Andy and Celia Ehrens, a father-and-daughter pair at Morgan College in Massachusetts, and Michelle Rivers and Donnie Neyer, coworkers in Connecticut who make it their mission to get to the college kids (for reasons you’ll understand!). Along the way, the story dives into religion, technology, family, love, and … well, killing a lot of zombies. You know how that has to work.

Like I said, I think it’s good, and I think you should buy it. There is, however, one tiny problem there that you might have picked up on. See, one of the ways to have built-in sales for a book you write is to get family, friends, preexisting fans to buy a copy. Only in this instance, many of my family, friends, and preexisting fans already bought a copy of the book, back when it was first released in 2016. Yes, my mom is going to buy a copy of the new one. I could find a hundred different publishers to publish the book a hundred different times, and my mom would buy a hundred different copies. She’s a good mom in that way. (In other ways too, but that’s the one I’m currently highlighting). But can I really expect tertiary friends or people who just wanted to buy a book to buy another (slightly, but not materially) different version of that same book just because they want to be nice — though anyone who wants to use niceness as a reason to buy After Life version 2, don’t let me stop you.

So … enticement! Some of that self-publishing promotional material from so many years ago turned into other stuff. For example, a five-part story about a healthcare worker named Howard McKinney showed up on this site a few months ago. Some vignettes about people became plot points in the sequel (out in May!). But one thing I worked on for a while that turned into a fairly lengthy story of its own is not going to be my somewhat-shameless attempt to get people who bought the book once to buy it again!

The story: In the 2010 outbreak, T.J. Kintzler, his brother, his girlfriend, and their married neighbors hole up in their apartment when everything starts. For a while, it’s just a boring life of trying to kill time while the apocalypse goes on. But dwindling food supplies, cabin fever, all sorts of things combine to mean they eventually have to venture out into the world of zombies and try to make a go of it. I can almost guarantee you won’t guess how it will go.

It’s told through a journal T.J. starts partway into the outbreak and follows the crew (or what survives of it) from the apartment to a convenience store to a house to a grocery store to … I mean, there are a lot of locations.

I’m calling this one Zombie Diary: An After Life Story. It’s not novel-length. It’s novella-length, I guess. It’s a fun story, but not one that would work as a part of the 2030 series, if for no other reason than it’s set in 2010. Think of it like the online episodes a lot of TV shows liked to do in the last decade, or the Frozen and Toy Story shorts Disney makes — not necessary to understanding the story, but fun in its own right and a worthwhile addition.

If you bought After Life when it was first published in 2016, thank you! And if you buy it in 2020, that’s great too … and if you email (JustWriteDK@hotmail.com) or message (@danieltkelley) me your proof of purchase, I will email you a fun little novella that you can read at your pleasure and have even more great After Life goodness that will tide you over until the sequel comes out in about six months.

If you didn’t buy After Life when it was first published in 2016 … well, that’s fine, for any number of reasons. Same deal applies. You can get Zombie Diary: An After Life Story along withy our purchase of After Life. That goes for pre-ordering, buying on release … heck, buy it in five years and I’ll still send you file of Zombie Diary. Basically, it’s two books in one.

There is one (fairly significant?) caveat here: Zombie Diary isn’t quite finished. It’s getting close, and I’m working on it every chance I get, but at the same time, I have twin 2-(almost 3-!)year-olds, a full-time job, and a wife who works a lot of nights. Writing time is scarce. Will Zombie Diary be finished in the next two-plus weeks so I can start sending it out on publish day? Maybe! But also maybe not. I can’t promise I’ll have it ready to send to you on Nov. 5. I can promise, though, that I will have it ready to send to you as soon as I can have it ready to send to you, and if you buy After Life, you’ll get Zombie Diary as well.

Two books in one. Come on, you want that. Buy my book!