There is a viral outbreak across the United States causing people to literally eat their selves, followed by uncontrollable seizures; spasms, and Tourette’s. Your heart will race like crazy until it finally explodes, but your body won’t die as you’ll become one of the undead or more commonly known as a zombie. 

The infected are sent to White Hall, where doctors and nurses attend to the victims. Eventually, they turn into zombies and chaos occurs, but not just inside White Hall. Planes drop nuclear bombs upon the United States. Is this our own government or an enemy country? They may never know exactly how it happens, but for one doctor, Lucy, all she cares about is finding her family. With the help of Knock-Out, a non-violent man, Lucy makes it to her home where she finds that her husband has turned. She finds her ten-year-old son, Gus, has survived.

It’s not safe staying at Lucy's home, so they leave, mostly on foot due to the nuclear bomb knocked out most electrical devices. They come upon a small band of military men, whose crooked leaders has just fallen. There’s no hope for survival or a future, until the young Gus comes up with the idea to build their own city, or more like a fortress around a bridge in Arkansas.

Developing a well-rounded, believable character is just one challenge writers face. But you aren’t limited to just writing about human characters. Animals can play an important role in your story. Having lived and loved many cats during my life, I found developing cats as characters in my novels to be extremely easy.

Of course one of the first things you must decide when using a cat as your character is will they be able to communicate or “speak” to other animals as the animals do in Rita Mae Brown’s Mrs. Murphy mysteries or are they going to be restricted to just cat-like behavior such as the cats Koko and Yum Yum from Lillian Jackson Braun’s Cat Who series.

In my novel, Summoned, one of my main characters, Tosh, is a small grey cat. Since this is a fantasy novel, I had the liberty to have the cats actually communicate telepathically. Cats with this ability are actually called STACS. (Yes, that is just CATS spelled backwards. ) However, telepathy is not the only method of communication used. A lot of what a cat says is through non-verbal behavior which provides another outlet for telling the story.

GRIMM FAIRY TALES: V0LUME 11
Publisher: Zenescope 
Pub Date: May 15, 2012 
ISBN: 9781937068332 
Author: Joe Brusha 
Pages: 172

In this twisted, sometimes erotic, graphic novel series, Sela Mathers (a modern day Snow White) is dealing with the aftermath of The Dream Eater Saga. She overhears an elder telling the story of Jack the Giant Killer to a group of kids. In this tale, Jack’s family is killed by a ruthless king, resulting in Jack giving up his soul to the Dark Hords in exchange for the power to destroy giants. What is shocking about this tale is that it is true.

Sela’s love‘s, Erik, soul has been captured and is now in Limbo. With the help of Druanna, she travels to the Limbo to save Eirk’s soul, but she comes face to face with the realms’ wicked leader Alicia and her deadly assassin, Jack the Giant Killer. Alicia, along with her undead army, has plans for Sela.

THE PIGEON PIE MYSTERY
Written by: JULIA STUART
Published by:  DOUBLEDAY
ISBN: 978-0-385-53556-4
Pages: 335
Pub Date: AUGUST 7, 2012

    After the scandalous death of her father, Maharaja of Brindor, which involved him in a private situation with a maid in his bedchambers, the Indian Princess Alexandrina, nicknamed Mink, is left with nothing as her father left her with several debts. Within a year everything she owned was repossessed, leaving her with only her lady’s maid, Pooki. Queen Victoria hears about Mink’s situation and gives her permission to stay at the Hampton Court Palace.

CYNTHIA’S ATTIC: THE MAGIC MEDALLION
Written by: MARY CUNNINGHAM
Published by:  Echelon Press Publishing
ISBN: 978-1590804605
Pages: 160
Pub Date: 2006

    Picking up shortly after first book in the series (set in 1964), Augusta Lee, or as everyone calls her - Gus, and her best-friend Cynthia (both twelve-year-old) are eager to return to Cynthia’s magical attic that took them back in time, where they resembled and was mistaken for their grandmothers. Once again they climb up to the cobweb invested attic and open the mysterious trunk that throws them back to the year 1914, where they hope to go to the circus with Gus’s great-grandfather, Charles, but their plans drastically change as their grandmothers, Clara and Bess, hide inside a crate that is in the back of the wagon. They might be able to fool Gus’s great-grandfather in believing they are their grandmothers, but their grandmothers will probably hear their voices from the crate causing an awkward situation that they would probably want to avoid.

    Gus and Cynthia return to the attic where they find two clown costumes left there. They slip the costumes on and are magical transported to the circus, where they are mistaken to be new clowns by Blackie, the evil hobo clown and circus leader. They befriend a girl about their age named Annie. She was left as a baby at the circus and was raised the by an acrobat named Lilly.