Well, that's the half-joke. During most of 2014, I was working on a novel entitled Kung Fu Zombies, which threw a lampshade on every zombie trope and every kung fu trope I could make fit. And possibly a bunch of American survivalist tropes as well.
For all the fun I had writing the bloody thing - my life went sideways in a big way. Disasters big and small plagued my life. Culminating in the death of my father barely a week before Christmas.
I had started by joking that the book was cursed. It... stopped really being a joke before I was done with writing it.
When I put it to bed before I got the editing suggestions back, the curse seemed to stop. Alas, all my usually reliable beta readers had their lives turn sideways and it took me ten months (the span of time it took to write my next book) to get anything back.
Getting this book out of my hands has been a pain in the arse.
And now that I've been working on a synopsis for the agent - I've edited a few minor mistakes in the bloody thing that skipped everyone else's eye. So of course my mother's house is threatened and Chaos catches something that blows out her throat.
It might be co-incidence? But if they ever want my help in writing the script, I will politely decline. Besides, I suck at scripts.
And that's the brief version of what I call the KFZ curse. May it land on nobody else, ever.
Since I seriously began working on getting this thing paper-published, I have had back-to-back sleepless nights with added asthma. There has been sickness in the house and a general veil of executive dysfunction thrown over my fuzzy little brain. About the only bright point I have is that very soon, I shall have an e-copy of SPG's Quintessential to annoy the house with. So once again, my favourite band is the bright point in the darkness.
That, and the fact that once it's finally shipped off, it's someone else's problem.