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ZEITGEIST IS A BITCH: AN AUTHOR’S LAMENT

zeitgeist
noun, often capitalized ˈtsīt-ˌgīst, ˈzīt-
Definition: the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era

Zeitgeist is a bitch.

I wrote this book called Mad Skills, which is a thriller about a brain-damaged teenage girl whose mind is accelerated by an experimental treatment, making her not only the smartest person in the room, but the ultimate killing machine.   

Mad Skills has it all: action, adventure, lesbian meth gangs, bowling, but the real story is how becoming a super-genius is as much a curse as a blessing.

Nobody likes a smartypants.


Now I see there’s not only a movie out about a guy who takes some kind of “smart pill” and becomes a playboy Einstein (Limitless), but also a soon-to-be-released movie about a teenage girl imbued with super-assassin capabilities (Hanna) who goes on the road to discover her deleted identity.  In both films there are nefarious creeps trying to exploit the heroes, resulting in lots of brains-versus-brawn mayhem.

To quote the immortal Ian Fleming, is this happenstance, coincidence…or enemy action?

I don’t want to be paranoid, but I know my manuscript was farmed around Hollywood for quite awhile before the book came out last December.

I worried about that at the time—letting some agent expose my tender, naked ideas to every hungry sleazeball in Tinseltown—but my faith in the essential goodness of mankind overrode my fears.

What the hell was I thinking?

Now, I’m not suggesting that either of these movies stole from my book.

For one thing, I haven’t even seen them yet, and anyway Limitless has a good alibi, being based on some other guy’s novel from 2001.  Hanna…well, I’ll have to reserve judgment until I see it.

But this is some crazy zeitgeist shit!

Of course, things could be worse—the movies might have come out before Mad Skills was even published, killing it in utero.

At least from the movie trailer, Hanna looks enough like Mad Skills that I had a horrible anxiety attack all through The Adjustment Bureau, which was the movie I was there to see.  There’s nothing worse than trying to watch a movie when you’ve just been kneed in the groin.

Am I just being crazy?

Judge for yourself and let me know:

Hanna’s memories and identity have been tampered with, just like Maddy in my book, and the lead villain is a woman in charge of some evil secret agency that has mysterious ties to the girl—also like my book.  Hanna kicks commando butt and goes on the run—my book again.

Pretty basic thriller stuff so far, but here’s where it gets weird: both Mad Skills and the Hanna trailer have motorcycle sequences AND a carnival funhouse with a big gargoyle head at the entrance.  Now come on—that’s pretty specific, a doorway that looks like a giant gargoyle head!

If the movie also has lesbian bikers, bloodthirsty firemen, or a talking raccoon, it’s gonna be a problem.

Alas, this is not the first time this has happened to me.

Back in 2001, I wrote a book called Xombies.

It was later reissued as Xombies: Apocalypse Blues, and followed by two more books, the latest of which is Xombies: Apocalypso.

Xombies tells the story of a girl fleeing a pandemic of murderous Maenads, who escapes aboard a nuclear submarine that’s been commandeered as a refugee vessel.  Many curious adventures ensue.

In 2001 I thought I was the only guy in the world writing a zombie story, and maybe I was, but by the time my book came out in ‘04, it was swamped by the first wave of the ridiculous zombie craze that continues even today.

Here was my problem:  Xombies was my love letter to all the books and movies that thrilled me as a kid—not just zombie movies, but everything from Ice Station Zebra to Candide to True Grit.  I thought I was writing a goddamn literary masterpiece.

Yes, laugh.

Laugh until you can’t breathe and the tears stream down your face, but I couldn’t have been intending to write a “zombie novel,” because there were no zombie novels—the only remotely zombie-like book I knew about was I Am Legend, and that was fifty years old.  There hadn’t even been a decent zombie movie since 1985.

I liked the zombie idea precisely because it was so old it was new again, yet even at that I thought it was my responsibility as an artist to create my own brand, re-imagine the zombie concept for savvy modern readers. After all, that was what George Romero did.  It was his Night of the Living Dead that first introduced the concept of rotting cannibal ghouls—before Romero, zombies were hypnotized victims of either a voodoo curse or alien mind-control.

Since I didn’t want to be accused of being a copycat, I ditched the Romero trademarks: all the flesh-eating, shambling, and bullets to the brain.  My creatures would be fast, nimble and virtually indestructible.  They would be vividly blue from lack of oxygen.  They would kill with a kiss.  And my
zombie plague would strike women first, due to an affinity for the X chromosome.

Hence:  Xombies.

But look what happened.

While I was fussing over my daring literary opus, challenging hidebound notions of what a genre novel could or should be, other people were having the same thought.  Well, not quite the same thought—most of them were thinking, “Wow, I miss those old George Romero zombie movies.  I bet I could make a million bucks off that idea.”

And they were right.

Curse you, zeitgeist!

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