Featured Interview With JZ Murdock
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
Author of the macabre JZ Murdock is a writer of horror, speculative and science fiction from his home in bucolic Bremerton, Washington. He is also a blogger and non-fiction writer on psychology, life, the process of writing and politics. As a filmmaker he is a screenwriter involved with his local indie filmmaking community as both filmmaker and occasional actor. He is the owner of LGN Productions (IMDB) since 1993.
All from the great and mysteriously beautiful Pacific Northwest.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I learned to read young because I was tired of waiting for everyone in the family to finish the Sunday newspapers before anyone would read me the comics. My grandmother used to read me sci fi and that was my first genre. Then I discovered horror and eventually fantasy. I would cycle through bouts of reading those genres, then science fact and back around to science fiction beginning anew the cycle.
After reading Dune in 1970 while home sick from school, I wrote my first sci fi story. It wasn’t under the end of my university degree in psychology that I got a minor in creative writing and screenwriting that I started writing short horror fiction. I sold my first story to a horror quarterly in 1990. My first books were published in 2012.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I started with the golden age of sci fi writers, Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury and so on. My first published story (soon to be an audiobook) was In Memory, Yet Crystal Clear, an homage to Asimov’s first autobiography In Memory Yet Green. I got inspiration from them as well as Harlan Ellison, early Stephen King, Clive Barker (whom I used to correspond in the late 80s early 90s) was a big influence. Too many to mention. Robert E Howard when I was young. HP Lovecraft, HG Wells, EA Poe… I was a voracious reader as a child. I was addicted to Scientific American for some years as a young adult.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My first book was a collection of my first short horror and sci fi in ANTHOLOGY OF EVIL. Immediately after that (same year, re released in 2014 2nd edition) was DEATH OF HEAVEN. I am now looking for a new publisher for my sequel book of newer sci fi and horror in ANTHOLOGY OF EVIL II, with unpublished stories including a novella as well as stories published in recent years in magazines and anthologies with other authors.
I am also looking to see several screenplays sold including a true crime story, The Teenage Bodyguard, and a horror comedy, Gray and Lover The Hearth Tales Incident which could make a good Netflix anthology series.
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