Just a few quick words about point of view in fiction. I decided to put Razed in the third person because I wanted a broad story with many characters in various countries, in order to show the true scale of the infection, but I've noticed that a lot of the new wave Zombie Apocalypse stories are in the first person. I have written in the first person in other genres (and they are published on Amazon with pen names), but I was never all that comfortable with putting an apocalypse book in the first person viewpoint.
The argument for it is that it brings an immediacy to the work, and it's certainly a hell of a lot easier to write than juggling the thoughts and emotions and activities of 25 characters in the third person, for sure. The argument against is that the story of the apocalypse - a global event, naturally - is confined to one person's world-view, so there is an inherent prejudice. Also, the new post-apocalypse world is revealed to us only through the filter of our narrator's subjective eyes, and of course his or her knowledge is terribly limited.
To me, third person allows for a greater description of the new world, and a wider range of emotions as we drop into the thoughts of various characters from different viewpoints, however, I have noticed, on my travels in internetland, that the first person apocalypse stories generally seem to be much more popular than the third person ones. I attribute this to the hypothesis that first-person is easier to write and read and is much more popular in general at the moment.
I have been considering writing a zombie apocalypse novel in the first person for some time now - not a sprawling saga which is what Razed seems to be turning into, but a compact fast-paced novel set over a relatively short time period. Not sure when I'll get the time to do this as I have two writing projects at the moment (Razed 3 and another unnamed sci-fi horror novel proving that you really should let sleeping dogs lie), but hopefully this year.
On the subject of violence in apocalypse fiction, I have noticed that the more violent the better, at least as far as sales are concerned. With Razed, my aim was to write a longish story about a group of survivors handling the deconstruction of their world. I wanted violence (and there is much more violence in the third and final part) but to couch it in a broader context so it wasn't just a mindless gore-fest. My (limited) research indicates, however, that the bigger the mindless gore-fest, the bigger the sales. As I say, in the final part of Razed, which I am writing now, the violence increases, but I am determined that it is not just going to be there for its own sake, but as part of a broader context dealing with the issues of social collapse, self-determination and morality.
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