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.
So what do readers say? Here’s a review coming up for you.
Editorial Reviews
“You’d think after three oddball novels, Zombie Turkeys (How an Unknown Blogger Fought Unkillable Turkeys), My Undead Mother-In-Law (The Family Zombie with Anger Management Issues), and Paranormal Privateers, that Andy Zach would have exhausted all the comic possibilities in his world of killer zombie turkeys and superhero zombie humans.
You’d be wrong. How about flying zombie pickles? Zombie zucchini? Zombie caterpillars? (How can you tell a zombie caterpillar from a normal one? Andy Zach can tell you.)
How about being injected with zombie blood which can cure any ill, regrow any lost limb, and be quickly cured with a widely available antidote? Who needs insurance with that sort of help? How about organizing a zombie worker union at Amazon when zombies can outperform robots? And suggest the story is based on two real people, Anthony and Ravan Jones who contribute the foreword to the book? Or zombie residents of a nursing home taking over the place?
–Dr. Wesley Britton at BookPleasures.com on Sept. 15, 2020:
Review continued
But all this silliness is just part of what Andy Zach has collected in Oops. He has included other short stories by other authors like “The Story of Sound” by Olivia Smith and his own “A Phoenix Tale” before diving into his zombie world. Then he offers a batch of stories based on his other book series featuring disabled middle-schoolers who become superheroes, the Secret Supers. Oh yea, there are the aliens who first appeared in Paranormal Privateers who are defeated by zombies working for the U.S. Government. The aliens can provide you legal assistance in the form of a sexy avatar who looks exactly like Marilyn Monroe.
If you’re getting the impression that one Mr. Andy Zach has a wide and wild imagination, you are on the right track. One obvious audience for his quirky tales is the YA readership, especially for all the contemporary references like video gaming and computer lingo. But even grumpy old sixty-somethings like me can have a lot of fun with Andy’s characters, scenarios, and plots. I’m still laughing at the image of migrating flying zombie pickles. Hard to get more original, unique, or surprising than Zach’s “Life After Life” series. Have some fun with Andy Zach in 2020!”
–Dr. Wesley Britton at BookPleasures.com on Sept. 15, 2020:
As I expected, story time at Andy’s house must include a recorder to grasp the many directions and characters he delevolopes in each book. This set of several stories are exciting in a novel manner of disbelief overlaid with a tinge of possibility.
How many people have tasted a hummingbird zombie zuccini, a superpowered set of disabled kids with a intelligent hamster as co-partner, a phoenix genetic research specialist, all these under one cover? Well, step right up and open page one!
Each story includes an ideas from his zombie turkey series and as always a hint of something new to come!This was a free book and I am not connected to anyone involved. I laughed and soaked up the words wanting more.
Oops! Tales of the Zombie Turkey Apocalypse by Andy Zach is a collection of short stories and as the clue is in the title, the theme is zombies. And boy do they come in a variety of different shapes and sizes.
The book starts with three stories that are a starter and not in the zombie genre. Firstly, you are introduced to a world where nothing is heard. Then we move on to finding an elusive phoenix and trying to use its DNA for breeding. Lastly, we have a story about a time-travelling wheelchair.
Then we jump straight into zombies. From zombie pickles, to zombie service dog corgis, to zombie models and even zombies in a nursing home. There is a timeline thread running through the stories where characters that create something or meet someone bring them into a later story. And all of this in a world where becoming a zombie is as easy as ordering blood online!
After each story, the author explains where he got his ideas from, and since in his bio he claims both his parents were zombies, he must be an expert on all things undead. The author has a very quick mind and some of the quips and plays on words were very clever.
In some of the stories, however, I would have preferred a definite ending—one where the story doesn’t just finish and you think there is more coming. It was almost as though they were ideas taken from diary extracts with sporadic glimpses into a world of zombies.
After the zombie stories came tales from some of his other books about teenage superheroes. I think the one I enjoyed the most was of the hamster that one of the kids had experimented on and had developed some superpowers. He taught himself to read and was eventually able to communicate with others by typing on a computer. The author very cleverly integrated himself into that story by being the author in the story and the one that the hamster contacted. And of course, we had to have a story about aliens to end it off.
This is a great book to start with if you haven’t tried any Andy Zach book before. It contains stories from both his Life After Life zombie comedy series and his superhero story Super Secrets. It also shows you Zach’s sense of humor (plus there’s one little horror story that isn’t overly gruesome). This book is great for both kids and adults and works just fine on it’s own.
I loved the silly story of the flying zombie cucumbers. Ha! Very fanciful. And they have migratory routes, like butterflies! Very silly and had me chuckling. I also loved the story with the hamster (who does play a role in Secret Supers). Perhaps rodents will truly save the world some day.
The stories also help fill in some of the blanks of the zombie comedy series, including one about Diane (the beloved zombie mother-in-law). But what I really liked was the stuff about genetic engineering and the aliens. Book 3 of the Life After Life Chronicles had a lot of stuff tossed into the story and some of these short stories really help fill those parts out.
All around, it’s a fun collection of tales. 5/5 stars.
The Narration: Michael Stafford was a good pick for narrating this anthology. While the Life After Life series and the Secret Supers use different narrators, Stafford was a good inbetween voice. He had unique voices for all the characters and his female voices sounded feminine. I also liked his kid voices for the Secret Supers kids. The pacing was good and there were no tech issues with the recording. 5/5 stars.
I received this audiobook as part of my participation in a blog tour with Audiobookworm Promotions. The tour is being sponsored by Andy Zach. The gifting of this audiobook did not affect my opinion of it.
“It’s my favorite short story I’ve ever written: In A Pickle.”
“Can I listen to it and read along?”
“You bet. Here’s the link to the short story. It’ll open in a new tab. The dramatization is below. Be sure to be sitting down and don’t operate heavy machinery while you listen to it. Note that this short story and many others are in my book, Oops! Tales of the Zombie Turkey Apocalypse.
Now, what was he going to do? Brice Butterworth’s 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.
Brice 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 out loud.
