I’m 34,000 words into my first fantasy book, Sorcerer’s Apprentice World.
Note that even that title is a draft. It may change.
Possible cover idea for Sorcerers Apprentice World
Here’s my draft of a book blurb:
Welcome to the new Earth: eight billion sorcerer’s apprentices. Everyone is magical. Everyone gets their wishes granted.
Does that sound frightening? It’s worse. No one knows how the magic works.
Nuclear scientist Katie Garcia is doing her best to figure it out, using all the resources of Oakridge National Labs. Will she learn the rules of magic before humanity destroys itself—or her?
Find out inside Sorcerer’s Apprentist World
From the first draft of Sorcerer’s Apprentice World
Now it’s personal. I want to write a memoir. But not about my personal life–rather about the life of my birth family.
You see, I was adopted in 1956, 5 months after I was born. Ohio hid the birth parents of adopted children. Then in the 90s, they changed the law to allow adopted children to find their birth parents.
I just looked up my original birth certificate. My birth mother was Roberta Fouts. My adoptive mother was still alive and I knew she wouldn’t want me to seek my birth mother, so I didn’t. I did look her up on the internet, where I found she had died in 1997 in California.
My adoptive mother died in 2012 and on Christmas of 2018 my wife gave me an Ancestry.com DNA testing kit. I used it and put out the word for my relatives.
They found me and we had a reunion in 2019. I’ll tell the whole story in this memoir.
Greetings fans and anonymous internet readers! I’m author Andy Zach. I’ve decided to create one blog post to link to all my free short stories I’ve ever published. If you like them, you can get my collection of short stories below.
Accidents happen. Especially around zombie turkeys. Then you add zombie humans, and problems proliferate. Mix in some ill-planned genetic engineering, and things get crazy.
The insanity continues, from the story where zombies are merged with cucumbers to the one where two basement-dwelling nerds gain access to all video content from the past two hundred years—from aliens.
Andy Zach pulls out all the stops on his imagination as he serves up this smorgasbord of silliness. Try it. Laughter is good for your soul.
I left the air-conditioned comfort of the taxi, and the sights, sounds, and smells of the old bazaar in Jeddah assailed me: a robe-clad man on camel plodded by, an adjacent fishmonger added his smell to the fresh dung in the street, and the hawkers yelled their wares.
I could only speak Arabic at a middle school level, but as I strolled through the bazaar, I heard “Fresh dates!”…”Highest quality rugs!”…”Finest gold jewelry!”… “Ancient books! The rarest in Saudi Arabia!”
My head snapped around. A bald, stumpy man in a white caftan saw me look and said, “Books? You want ancient books?”
“Yes.” I spoke carefully, knowing my poor accent. “Can you speak English?” I didn’t have much hope.
Now, what was he going to do? His boss just told him to double the productivity of Vegan Inc’s pickle strain they used for their Kilwowski Pickle brand. That was completely impossible. But keeping his job required it. He was the low man on the genetic engineering totem pole at Vegan Inc., the last one hired and the first one to be fired if another recession hit.
He couldn’t think. He couldn’t face this. So he cruised the internet.
“The origin of Zombie turkeys? I didn’t know they’d found that. Hmm, a Midley Beacon exclusive, the foremost zombie news source,” he read to himself.
Zombie turkeys had ravaged Illinois and the US at Thanksgiving. Thankfully they hadn’t hit near Terre Haute where he lived. He skimmed the article rapidly. Corn All, one of their agribusiness rivals, had genetically modified their corn to fight off corn disease. The genetic modification would adapt to the disease at a cellular level, and neutralize it by copying the DNA from the disease organism, whether fungal or bacteria.
When wild turkeys ate the corn, it modified the E Coli in their gut, creating the zombie turkey bacteria, e coli gallopavo. That got into the turkeys’ bloodstream and made them zombies, able to regenerate any lost or damaged body part, even bringing turkeys back from the dead.
What caught his eye was the reproduction rate: zombie cells reproduced every twenty minutes. Could that work for pickles? Why not try?
This was one of my favorite short stories to write. It is set soon after my novels Zombie Turkeysand Zombie Detective. The story icon is from my book Oops!.
Get Your Free Short Stories – The Third is the Best Yet
He was dead. At least, his business was. And without his business, his wife would leave him and take their new baby. Then he might as well be dead.
His dad had run the Elysium Fields Mortuary for thirty years and had made a killing at it.
The first and only mortuary in their small town of Hillvale, everyone got buried there. He charged normal prices, he was friendly, and he helped their community. His dad said to him when he was a teen, “Irving, after you get your college degree, go to mortuary school, and when you come out, I’ll hire you and then turn the business over to you. You’ll be set for life.”
Irv had no other plans. He liked this cute blonde Shelley in high school, and she liked him. So he learned the business, got his degree in psychological counseling, and came back and married her. Just as he promised, his dad turned Elysium Fields over to him after a few years and retired to Florida with his mom.
The first years had been great. People were dying to be his customers. He and Shelley remodeled his parents’ old house, went on vacations around the world, had his and her luxury cars. Shelley had their son, Nathan. Then the bottom dropped out of his business.
Rather than dying normally, people were taking zombie blood. Lung cancer? Gone. Heart disease? Cleared up. Severe accidents? Limbs grew back. Most people then took the vaccine to remove the zombie disease, because who wants to be a zombie with glowing red eyes? But they were still alive and healthy.
“Whatcha doing, Brice?” my boss Wilma O’Reilly asked, after sneaking up behind me.
I jumped. As usual, I was cruising the internet, bored with my job. Wendy was my boss. How awkward.
We worked at Vegan Inc, an agricultural conglomerate. I was their lead geneticist in charge of enhancing the qualities of the corporation’s vegetable products through genetic modification. Thinking fast, I said, “Uh, researching. I’m reading about the ‘Butterfly Effect’. It shows how small changes lead to great changes far away. Like a butterfly’s wing causes a cyclone on the other side of the earth.” That should work since that was what I was reading.
“How is this related to your current assignment of increasing the yield of our zucchini varieties?”
“I’m trying to relate my past success with cucumbers to zucchinis.”
“I’d think you’d just do what you did last time when I promoted you.”
“Well, I did and it didn’t work for zucchinis. I tried zombie hummingbird DNA, zombie turkey DNA, and twenty other zombie animals as well. But nothing worked. So I’m stretching my mind to the farthest reaches of what might be possible.”
“That might work. Try this scenario for a possibility: if you don’t make progress in another month, you’ll lose your position. You got promoted for great success. You’ll get demoted for failure.” Then she smiled sunnily and said, “Have a nice day!” as she left me.
The Taser hit me in the back. I convulsed uncontrollably, shocked out of sleep.
“Okay, wakey, wakey. Time to go model for your mistress,” squeaked a high tenor.
The bearded hulk who guarded us held his Taser ready, in case Lulu and I weren’t fast enough. He was so hairy, I couldn’t tell where his beard ended and his chest began. We donned the haute couture apparel set before us. He nodded his approval and gestured toward the door. He always followed us with his Taser.
“We’ve been here weeks and we don’t know your name. What shall we call you?” I ventured. I had some vague hope of putting him at his ease so we could escape.
He laughed. “Call me Gronk.” He wheezed when he laughed.
So I got him to laugh. Maybe that was progress. Maybe not. He also laughed when he tortured us with the Taser.
“That’s your problem isn’t it? Try the local apartments. Look for rooms to rent on the internet.”
I could tell by his grim expression he was serious this time. He’d been nagging me for nearly a year to move out and ‘set up housekeeping’ on my own, ever since I’d graduated from the state university with my BA in Video Game art and my minor in computer science. I’d managed to wheedle him out of it and delay the date. Until now.
I’d been saving money from my Game Stop job to move out, but I kept dipping into it to add to my video game equipment. I had a sweet system, the fastest I could afford using the latest alien technology. Oh. I needed to find some place to keep all my equipment too. And I needed internet access–high speed. I had to have at least gigabit per second speed or I couldn’t keep competing.
This might affect my standing in the Fortnight league. My stomach clenched in worry. I texted my best friend Nick.
How fascinating! Dancer thought. This book says there are libraries where hundreds of books live. It also says the fiction books are in order by author name.
Dancer scurried off Your Sixth Year Reader to look at Jeremy Gentle’s bookshelf again. Jeremy was his owner and unknowing educator. Ever since he’d taught himself to read by studying the newspapers lining the bottom of his cage, he’d craved reading.
He hadn’t figured out why he started reading. One day he’d noticed patterns in the markings. He saw they repeated themselves in clumps. He saw the clumps formed patterns. He also listened to his owners differently. They also spoke in patterns. “Jeremy” was always called “Jeremy” or “Jeremy Gentle” by the his mother, and sometimes by his father.
Dancer had learned to understand Jeremy and his parents, and then he’d put the terms they spoke with the clumps on the paper. Each letter had a sound, and together they formed clumps his master called “words.”
The idea was brilliant. No wonder they were his owners and he was only a hamster
Jeremy Gentle fell flat on his face at therapy. That was normal since he had cerebral palsy. But his new superpower wasn’t normal.
Then things got weirder when his best friend, Dan Elanga, got a different superpower. But Dan was still blind.
Kayla Verdera and Aubrey Wilcosky, two girls in their middle-school special ed class, discovered they too had new superpowers. Kayla was mute and needed a walker. Aubrey lost two legs and used crutches. But they were as powerful as the boys.
What should the four friends do? Jeremy knew if the word got out, it’d be a media circus. Then they started fighting crime, as the Secret Supers. Who knew a disability could be a perfect disguise? No one would ever think of disabled kids as superheroes. Then they ran into problems they never expected.
Villain’s Vacation
Jeremy Gentle fell flat on his face at therapy. That was normal since he had cerebral palsy. But his new superpower wasn’t normal.
Then things got weirder when his best friend, Dan Elanga, got a different superpower. But Dan was still blind.
Kayla Verdera and Aubrey Wilcosky, two girls in their middle-school special ed class, discovered they too had new superpowers. Kayla was mute and needed a walker. Aubrey lost two legs and used crutches. But they were as powerful as the boys.
What should the four friends do? Jeremy knew if the word got out, it’d be a media circus. Then they started fighting crime, as the Secret Supers. Who knew a disability could be a perfect disguise? No one would ever think of disabled kids as superheroes. Then they ran into problems they never expected.
