Armand is one cool dude and a very talented horror writer. He has been here before and I still get hits on his blog post almost every week. This time he is part of the Haunted Halloween Blog Tour 2012. I am one just one stop of many…hope you visit every blog on the hop! The link is at the end of his blog.
Crack a beer and read on:
I Have Ideas… Trust Me!
Armand Rosamilia
I was at Sea World last Friday with my daughter, who turned twelve that day. I’m sitting at the buffet place (gotta get my money’s worth!) and talking to another guy next to me about stupid crap like being too old to go on rides, it’s too damn hot in Florida, my legs hurt, wah wah wah…
Then he asked what I did for a living and I proudly told him I was a horror author. When I mentioned quite a few of my stories were about zombies, he was all smiles.
And then it happened…
”Man, I have such an original zombie story for you to write! If I give you the idea, can we go partners on it?”
If you are a writer you’ve heard this, from friends and family and complete strangers on the bus. They always have such a wonderful idea and figure that getting the idea is the hardest part of writing, so the rest will be easy for you to simply get their brilliance on the paper and everyone wins!
Then he lit up and started rolling on his idea about survivors trapped not in a city, but on a farm. I asked if he ever saw The Walking Dead. He said yes, but this idea was better than their entire season on the farm.
I cut him off, because he was annoying me and because I noticed they had just put out fresh pizza and I wanted a slice. Or three. “An original idea is one that hasn’t been done before. Adding onto an idea that millions of people watched on TV for months is not going to get you far. Just sayin’.”
Then I walked away rudely and got four slices of pizza (hey, money’s worth!) and sat as far away from him as I could.
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It is quite a misnomer that writers sit around, staring at a blank page, waiting for the Muse to slap them across the face and plant ideas in their noggin. Whenever someone asks where I get my ideas from, I tell them my head. There is an imaginary filing system I have and I’ve been collecting ideas since I could put a thought together.
I imagine if I pulled every cohesive story idea out and listed them, I could write full flash fiction, short stories, novellas and novels for the next three lifetimes and still have ideas left.
Damn you, people! It isn’t the ideas that are the problem; it is the time to write them! I do this for a living (knock on wood) and write an average of five hours a day, hitting around 2,000 – 3,000 words on average. Sometimes more and sometimes less, but I never run out of things to write. I just run out of time to write them.
If I could spend less time promoting, sleeping, eating, bathing and having to deal with actual people, imagine what I could accomplish!
But I’d still have too many stories to write.
And the zombie story about the survivors trapped on the farm? When I saw The Walking Dead I smiled. That was one less idea I needed to explore, so I wiped it from the memory banks.
Now, if I could just figure out where all the time goes each day…
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Armand Rosamilia is a New Jersey boy currently living in sunny Florida, where he writes when he’s not watching zombie movies, the Boston Red Sox and listening to Heavy Metal music…
“Highway To Hell” and “Dying Days” extreme zombie novellas are part of the growing Extreme Undead series of books/stories created by Armand…
He is also an editor for Rymfire Books, helping with several horror anthologies, including “Vermin” and the “State of Horror” series, as well as the creator and energy behind Carnifex Metal Books, putting out the “Metal Queens Monthly” series of non-fiction books about females into Metal…
You can find him at http://armandrosamilia.com
and e-mail him to talk about zombies, baseball and Metal: armandrosamilia@gmail.com
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All five of us – Tonia Brown, James N Cook, John O’ Brien, Armand Rosamilia and Mark Tufo – hope you have been following along on the Haunted Halloween Blog Tour 2012. We love to see comments after the posts, and we also love to pick a random commenter and give away a free eBook or even a signed print book, so maybe you’ll get lucky!
We have centralized all the upcoming dates and blog posts on a Facebook event page. Feel free to join us there and see what is coming up next!
https://www.facebook.com/events/211796112284317/