About

Hello!

My name is Anthony and my writing handle is Zombiepaper. My primary intentions with writing, and with this website Better Zombie, are to improve myself, my readers, and the world around us.

I love the immediacy of writing. Through my usual 500-word essays or short stories, we can start with a certain idea or concept in the thesis sentence and during the exploratory process of writing either random ideas or character interactions, we both can arrive at some sort of greater truth. I write fast and loose. I come up with a concept and barrel through the material. I don’t hold my writing to be sacred, perhaps because of the speed at which I write. My first drafts are about laying down the foundations of some sort of idea, and if it feels done enough, I won’t dwell. I’ll publish and move on. If I like what I wrote, some drafts will sit for weeks or months at a time for when I find that time to go back through and edit my material.

Here’s a little more about me.

When I was very young, I was fascinated with this writing program called Echo Lake, I wrote some sort of short story about Bear Claw Caves. The two main characters were Dwight and Bridget. My mom was impressed, my dad liked it, but that was about all wrote until high school, when I wrote a review for Finding Forrester. I found a review online to use as a source and cited it thoroughly, but my mom thought it was so good that she accused me of plagiarism. Oh well. That was about all I wrote until late high school when I wrote these series of essays I called f/duck. These are all locked away in obscure hard drives.

What isn’t is References.

“References” was my first attempt at writing any sort of series fiction. I spent a majority of my summer between high school and college writing it and eventually found the structure too unyieldly to continue. I went to college, became a salaryman, and nearly forgot about any ambitions in life besides getting money and spending money until that sort of lingering ennui settles when you’ve reached a point in life where the only thing to do is keep on doing what you’re doing. I was unhappy, depressed, and disliked many aspects of my life.

I chose to change that.

That’s where I began to realize Better Zombie. I couldn’t buy Zombiepaper.com. My handle Zombiepaper has an element of my old username, ie or Insignificant Entity, which was my username for a good many years and though it had a depressive element to it was essentially there to say that the message is more important than the messenger. I then began cycling through ideas, landed on Better Zombie, and went with it. It’s not the easiest thing to market, and when I tell people about my website, I can see right away if they’re offended by the word Zombie. My quip is “they’re not offended by the Zombie part, they’re offended by the Better part.”

I won’t rebrand just to be more appealing.

My content is niche. Although my home life was rather nice, I grew up as the black sheep in my elementary school, ostracized in my middle school, and ignored through high school. My college years and professional career have helped me significantly in overcoming those terrible conditions. I want to, therefore, help others. When I read about how people have killed themselves or others over seemingly minor things, it saddens me, because we live in a society that values perfection above all else. We simply cannot make mistakes. Mistakes are where the magic happens, we can forgive others for minor transgressions, people can redeem themselves after committing major transgressions, and we can live good lives.

That’s me. If you like what you read, reach out, let’s collaborate on something: