Friday Five – Five Laugh About it Later Moments by Zach Richardson

On Friday’s we ask our visiting authors to tell us about the fun or laugh about it later type moments that they have endured while writing their book. Zach Richardson, author of Chronicles of the Apocalypse, Revenge, Everything is Nothing shares with us his Friday Five Moments.

About Chronicles of the Apocalypse

When you sacrifice the lives of your wife and children to prevent the world's most powerful clan of assassins from unleashing the Apocalypse, what does that make you? And what do you do when you learn that it was all in vain? For Jin Sakai, that sacrifice turned him into a mere shell of a man, filled only with guilt and hatred. When he learns that it was a sacrifice made in vain, he instantly sets out on a violent one-man war to tear the assassins' clan down around their ears. After all, who better to destroy them than the man who brought them together?

Things soon turn down a darker path as Jin uncovers the disturbing truth behind his family's sacrifice; a truth he was never meant to learn. Undone by the revelation, Jin is consumed by doubt and confusion and very nearly loses his life. It is only later when he meets Leah Lawson, a woman with a past almost as dark as his own, that his doubt and confusion vanish and he begins to see a path that will not only lead him to his revenge, but to his redemption.

Unfortunately, there is far more going on behind the scenes than Jin realizes. Forces are at play that have been manipulating the course of his life ever since he was born. By setting out on his quest for vengeance, Jin unknowingly cements his destiny as one of the key warriors in the apocalyptic war that’s brewing just beneath the surface.

Purchase the book at Amazon

Friday Five 

5. Attack of the Relentless Writer’s Block: Before Chronicles of the Apocalypse even existed, the title of my first book was simply Revenge, Everything is Nothing. I was working on it as a standalone novel, along with two other books that featured demons. I wrote up to Chapter 4 on REIN before I was struck with the worst writer’s block I’d ever had. Nothing I did would make it go away. So I moved on to the second book. After completing Chapter 7, that same writer’s block came up and bashed me over the head again with a baseball bat. Irritated, I moved on to Book 3 only for Writer’s Block to come up and beat me into submission with a sledgehammer. Frustrated at this, I took a step back from these books and almost gave up on them when I realized that if all three of them featured demons, I could tie all three of them together. So that’s just what I did, and that was the moment when Chronicles of the Apocalypse was born.

4. Wrong ISBN! – After five years of work, I’d finally gotten Chronicles of the Apocalypse: Revenge, Everything is Nothing complete and ready to publish. I ordered an initial print run of 250 copies. And when I finally got them, I was overjoyed to see my book finally in print form! There was just one problem. I’d entered the wrong ISBN on the back with the barcode! So even though I went back and fixed it, I didn’t know what I was going to do with the ones I’d just ordered. But then I thought “Hey, that’ll just be how people know they got a first edition!”

3. College Conflicts: Back when I was first writing COTA: REIN, I was also going to school full time. At the time, I wanted to eventually write and direct the Hollywood adaptations of COTA myself. So I enrolled at the Art Institute of Portland, majoring in Digital Film & Video. But very quickly, I realized that I simply could not go to school full time and write my books. My Attention Deficit Disorder simply wouldn’t allow it. So finally, at the end of my winter term, I asked myself which of the two was more important to me. In the end, I chose my writing and dropped out of the Art Institute.

2. Revisions, Revisions: So after spending about a year working on the second draft of COTA: REIN, I spent at least another 8 months revising it with the third draft. That drove my best friend crazy! She was so looking forward to reading the final product that my taking so long to finally get it done was epically frustrating for her. I ran into a couple speed bumps to where I wound up contradicting certain old events with new ideas, so I had to do a lot more content smoothing than I’d planned on.

1. COMPUTER CRASH!!!: The single most aggravating thing that happened to me during this process however, occurred not long after I’d completed the first draft of the novel. I’d printed out two copies of it, and then a week later, my computer crashed. And it didn’t just crash. It died. Heart stopped beating, brain stopped working died, and I lost everything! Every word I’d ever written since realizing how much fun writing was disappeared in less than a second. I lost easily 1,000 pages of material. That was a heart breaking, and nearly spirit breaking, experience. It proved to be a blessing in disguise though, because COTA: REIN now is ten times better than it was back then and had I not lost it all, I never would’ve turned it in to what it is today.

About Zachery Richardson

Zachery Richardson, casually Zach, was born in Seattle WA on August 8th, 1989, and was raised in Lake Oswego, OR. It is perhaps the greatest irony of all that his chosen career is that of an author when as a child, his second least favorite subject in school was writing. Math was number one, and their relationship remains strained to this day.

However, the switch was flipped in middle school when his teacher assigned a creative writing project. Having finally been given a productive outlet for his wildly active imagination, Zach dove headfirst into the world of author-dom and never looked back. By his freshman year of high school, he'd completed his first "book"; a 300 page fanfiction set in the Mobile Suit Gundam universe. Afterwards, he turned his attention to a series of wholly original works that would become Chronicles of the Apocalypse in the subsequent year.

While Chronicles of the Apocalypse (or COTA as he likes to call it) remains his central focus, Zach has also begun work on several other projects in the Young Adult and High Fantasy genres.

He currently lives in Wilsonville, OR.

You can visit Zach's website at www.theauthorphoenix.com