Dale Eldon's Bio
Dale works fast food to pay the pays as he tirelessly slings ink writing stories. He takes care of his sick mother, and has a small dog, part Terrier and Yorkshire. He is also the proud father of a hyper three-year-old, Reagan.
Heevie Jeevie's: What compelled you to write your first book?
Dale Eldon: I have so many projects that I am either working on, or are in a file called: The Backburner, but I will go with my zombie novella, SMELL OF THE DEAD. It will be coming out early 2013 from Crowded Quarantine Publications.
A few years ago, before The Walking Dead was a hit TV series (and at this point I didn't know it was comic book series), I came up with an idea for a few zombie stories. From the very get go, it was based on one character who was trapped on a mountain with a psychotic, during a zombie apocalypse. It was a cool concept that I really liked as I fleshed it out. The story started out with the main character bitten, and he had to survive zombies, the man whom he believed to be responsible for the outbreak, and get to safety in hopes of getting cured before it's too late.
I shelved the idea and moved on. But then my Uncle John who has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, said it would be awesome if I were to write a zombie story about zombies on a mountain. But this time around I had been reading up on how for the past fifteen years scientists have ended up dead, missing, in strange ways. And it has been getting worse in recent years. The scientists ranged form all types of fields, microbiology, nuclear physics, DNA resequencer, you name it. And all of the scientists were from around the world, and had ties with each other. So, I asked the question, what if a lot these scientists were turning up dead or missing because they were working on some kind of super-bug? Something that could give the control of the Earth to the conquering army? And as they started to catch on that their life was hanging in the balance, especially the more they learned about the project, what if they went on the run? And what if this time around the mountain I had from before was the biggest mountain in the world?
Heevie Jeevie's: Have you always wanted to be a writer?
Dale Eldon: Yes. As a child I wanted to write stories. At this point mostly Sci-Fi. I wanted to write Star Trek fan fiction, super-hero stories, and the occasional monster tale. As I got older I didn't pursue it much until 2000, when I watched the first episode of Mutant X. Though it was kind of cheesy, I wanted to do my own story in the same vein. Off and on over the years I have went back to writing, but as of 2008, I started to get more serious about it. Each year that has went by, I have made significant headway, and now as of this year, I am published.
Heevie Jeevie's: How did you come up with your title?
Dale Eldon: For my novella, I always wondered in the midst of zombies, how people dealt with the smell. And how would they describe it? I mean anyone who has worked in Homicide, or the morgue knows the different kinds of smells of dead people, but a zombie which is reanimated might have a different odor. It's a small detail, but it spurred the idea for the title.
Heevie Jeevie's: Tell us briefly about your latest book.
Dale Eldon: It's about a team of scientists who worked on a top secret project that leave the field of science for their own safety once some of their colleagues come up dead.
The plan is, to enjoy the one adventure all of them have wanted to go while they were still young enough to do it, and to begin a new life by faking their own deaths. However, the adventure is to climb the deadly mountain, Everest.
But instead of trekking up the North side, and back down the South, and leaving their identities on the mountain, something goes wrong-terribly wrong.
Imagine being on the deadliest mountain of the world where one out of four people die every year, and to be trapped on that mountain with the living dead!
These zombies are not your run of the mill undeads either, they have some kind of fiber much like a cactus spine, protruding from their skin all over their bodies. The fibers are mostly green and black, they come out very easy into the skin of the living, and carry the disease with them. Being bitten is no longer the only spreading of the disease. Seriously, imagine zombie movies where the living are struggling with the zombies, kill those zombies, and live to tell the tale. Well, in this story you run a good chance of doing the same thing, and without getting bit, still becoming one of them. The fibers are based on a real disease called, Morgellons Disease, and when I heard of it, I just had to use it.
Heevie Jeevie's: What are you working on at the moment?
Dale Eldon: Right now I'm putting the finishing touches on SMELL OF THE DEAD, but after that I will be writing the sequel, OASIS OF THE DEAD, for consideration for Crowded Quarantine Publications. Then I have two novels I am outling for CQ, also still for consideration, a vampire novel called, BY INVITATION ONLY, which is about a vampire who is shunned from his clan tries get back in but ends up at war with the new leader, who use to be his best friend. There's so much more to this one, but I'm still fleshing it out, and I will be updating fans on my Facebook Page on projects.
The second novel, ESCAPE FROM LIMBO, is about a man, Aaron Linwood, who died and his ghost is stuck at a nursing home, as he is forced to watch his ex-wife, Dianna, die. Throughout this experience he gets to watch his daughter, Marie, reveal to Dianna about the pain he had put her through, and her mother shares her side. But when his Dianna dies, he is shot back forty years into the past, and is now alive again, in his younger body. Before going back, he wanted to make things right, but now he has his second chance, he going back to old habits. However, his path will not let him, and he must do what it takes to fix the damage he caused, even at risk of his own life. This one is written as a short story, but I am working on expanding it into a novel.
Heevie Jeevie's: Do you have a favorite character? Why is s/he your favorite?
Dale Eldon: With every story I write, I always try to come up with an interesting character, I work to find ways of making that character different from the others. So it's hard to have a real favorite.
Heevie Jeevie's: How did you feel the day you held the copy of your first book in your hands?
Dale Eldon: Well at this point I don't have SMELL OF THE DEAD TO HOLD, but I do have an anthology with a short story by me called, POTATO MAN, and when I held the book it felt grrrrreat!
Heevie Jeevie's: The main characters of your stories – do you find that you put a little of yourself into each of them or do you create them to be completely different from you?
Dale Eldon: Both. Though my best writing comes when I put some of myself into them. It makes the writing fly by so smooth. But like I said before, I love to create a variety of characters, and make them different from each other.
Heevie Jeevie's: When growing up, did you have a favorite author, book series, or book?
Dale Eldon: I really enjoyed R.L. Stein. Both his Goosebumps series, and the Fear Street novels. Believe it or not, except for very few books, I wasn't a big Stephen King fan until I was an adult.
Dale Eldon's short story, POTATO MAN, now out in the anthology, Grindhouse!
Here's an excerpt of POTATO MAN:
“There's nothing like waking up naked, paralyzed from the neck down, on a cold steel slab to make you think about your life.” Trevor said with a cigarette pinched between his fingers. “Well usually people think about their life when they're about to lose it.” A pause. “At that point, I was thinking how the hell am I gonna to get the #*@& out of there?”
“So, how did you get out?” Geoff asked.
“I was unable to move anything below my chin. I tried to see around the room. It was barely lit, there weren't any windows, metal tables everywhere. There must have been at least a dozen people down there. I was in some kind of basement.
“I saw blood spray onto the walls... The sound of a chainsaw blade... I-I heard it slice into the others.” Trevor inhaled hard on the cigarette, taking the cherry down by a third. “Bones cracked, and the only other sound that drowned out the buzzing... were the screams.
“The man with the chainsaw came for me.
“He came into my peripheral, the first thought that popped into my head, was that he looked like a walking baked potato. He had a plastic face mask, smothered in blood, with a silver apron. I don't know why I thought that, I think it was the apron. I wasn't exactly in right mind at that point.
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Thank you so much for having me, Vicky! It's a very lovely blog!
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