Interview with a Zombie Lawmen

A couple weeks ago in my post, Zombie Lawmen? Where the heck did this come from!?, I wrote about a weird ad that brought me to the site zombielawmen.com. With a only a little effort and a kind webmaster I was able to get in contact with the creative director of Zombie Lawmen. His name was David Gregory and was gracious enough to take some time and answer some questions about the project:

What was the idea behind Zombie Lawmen?
Gregory David: Zombie Lawmen was first conceived of in 1997 by John Lucas and myself. At the time we were both working at Media Station, a company that developed CD-ROM games for children. The theme of Zombie Lawmen was decidedly more adult. The original concept came from a drawing John Lucas did of famous gun-slingers from the old west brought back to life as zombies. I developed the first back-story.

The project stayed on the back-burner for nearly ten years when I came up with the idea of using the story to create a blog fiction. The idea was that there would be three separate bloggers each telling the same story but from a different perspective. Readers would need to read each of the blogs to get all of the details. Each blog was to have a drawing that depicted the dramatic action of each entry. The goal was to create a serial story like Jules Verne's or graphic novels.

Who was your target audience?
GD: The target audience was adults who were interested in horror/fantasy/scifi.

How would you summarize the story?
GD: The story is about a fictional future where lawlessness rivals that of the old west. It is an alternate reality where Tombstone has become a major metropolis that is run by the Clanton gang with high tech weapons and designer drugs. Scenes revolve around the zombies who have been brought back to life by a relation of Doc Holliday, and their conflicts with being alive, remembering the past, having zombie characteristics (like eating brains), yet being cast as the good guys against the evil Clanton empire.

How many people worked on the project?
GD: Three writers, one artist, one web master, and one project manager.

Who came up with the idea?
GD: I did.

On the site I saw links to 3 different blogs. How was the work divided? Did one person work on each blog? Or did everyone work on each blog?
GD: Each writer assumed the role of one of the characters doing the blogging. They all lived in Tombstone and had varying levels of interaction with the zombies.

In what ways do you think was writing online different from writing in a book or magazine?
GD: The writing was geared towards being on-line as blog entries were kept relatively short so as not to be too tiring on the eyes. Writing a book would have been very different because that would require much more descriptive writing and detail. Zombie Lawmen was very action oriented.

How long did the project last?
GD: The project was about 4 months in production and ran for six weeks on-line with new blog entries from each character Monday through Friday.

Are there any plans to bring the story to a different medium, such as a comic book?
GD: That is under consideration. There is also the possibility of doing it as a podcast drama. We recorded character actors reading the blogs and I added foley effects and scored musical themes.

Why was the project abandoned?
GD: The readership did not develop as we had hoped. This could be for a variety of reasons but we have no data to indicate exactly why it didn't take off. It could be the sheer volume of stuff on the internet that makes it hard to find. It could be that people who like horror/fantasy/scifi are more into games and movies than reading. It may be that people just didn't find it that compelling but judging by the small number of hits we got, it seems more likely that it just didn't get seen. It could be and probably was a combination of many things.

I found out about your site through an online ad. Were you aware that google adsense was still running ads for your site?
GD: No.

Besides online ads, how else did you promote the site?
GD: We ran targeted ads on Facebook at select Universities around the country and one or two overseas. Those didn't net us many viewers.

Do you, or GMobileMedia have any plans for future blog fiction?
GD: Probably not. Zombie Lawmen was a tremendous effort that we paid for out of our own pockets. We did all of the work in the evenings when we weren't doing our day jobs. It was exhausting.

What's next for you and\or GMobileMedia?
GD: Not sure. There is still a lot of work to do to create the podcasts. That would be the next step.

Do you have any advice for someone trying to start their own blog fiction or online story?
GD: Think small. Zombie Lawmen was probably over ambitious. If I were to continue, I would stick with one writer and one artist. Better yet, be a writer who can also draw. Another idea is instead of original content, use something familiar to people that would draw them in. It is too expensive to license content so use the Disney trick of stories in the public domain.

That's a real shame about the project not doing well. Hearing more about it I wish I could've seen it in it's prime. Let's all hope those podcasts get finished.